Saying Goodbye to 2019 - Erin Zarro

This year was a really rough year for me. I struggled with my health, and then finding time and energy to write, and honestly, I am happy that this year is almost over.

I think the worst part of it was all my health stuff in rapid succession: foot surgery in March to repair my Achilles' tendon and a torn ligament, the long recovery where I was non-weight bearing for almost a month, suffering horrible headaches and scalp pain that I found out was due to a pinched nerve in my neck, the failed root canal scare that turned out to be part of my facial nerve pain disease (trigeminal neuralgia), and finally, abdominal pain that sent me to the ER thinking I was going to die. Spoiler alert: I didn't, and it turned out to be pretty mundane, but it was scary.

With all of this crap going on, plus my freelance work, writing had to be set aside. It hurt, sometimes horribly, as I am the type of writer that writes every day, but I knew it would just add more stress to an already stressful situation. I wrote a grand total of 751 words on Wednesday, and I anticipate that that is probably it for the month. My total wordcount for 2019 is around 53,000 words. Probably the lowest since I got serious about it in 2003. Last year was slightly better at 75,000 words, four hundred of which were written on New Year's Eve to make that goal.

But my life has changed so much from those days. For one, I'm working from home now. And I have been struggling to find a sleep schedule/work schedule that works. I am a night person, so I don't perk up until around eleven or noon. I've tried to start work sooner and more often that not, I'm asleep at my desk in minutes. However, starting work this late requires that I work into the evening, sometimes late at night, to get my work finished. And I'm not really fond of this way, and want to change it, but it's been so overwhelming with everything else. And it doesn't leave much time for writing. Back when I worked a traditional job, I wrote after dinner. That was my routine. I could count on it. Now, I'm usually working after dinner. So clearly something needs to change. I'm not even sure what at this point, just that it has to.

Gift ideas: Cooperative board games

If you're looking for last minute gift ideas for the holidays, might I suggest a cooperative board game? Cooperative games are a great way to play a game that encourages conversation, lets everyone work together, and helps avoid some of the conflict that comes with the holiday season (some, not all, sorry).

Thanos Rising

Theme: Thanos is trying to collect the infinity stones he'll use to complete his gauntlet. He and his minions try to destroy heroes and collect stones. Players start with a team captain and try to recruit heroes and defeat villains all while trying to keep Thanos from getting the stones.

Difficulty: Low. This is a great game for beginners, and younger players. That said, my experienced adult gaming group loves this one too.

Mechanics: Dice rolling

My thoughts: This is the game that finally convinced my ten year old to play board games with me. It's very easy to learn, quick to set up, and basically involves rolling a bunch of dice. If you are new to coop games, if you have younger players you want to get involved, or if you want a game that can generally be enjoyed in 45 minutes, this is the one for you. The images on the cards are taken from the Marvel movies, so that adds a fun familiarity that appeals to everyone who plays this game.

Psst... There's also a Harry Potter version called "Death Eaters Rising."

Here's a five minute how to play video to get you started: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4cGib2lG9A

Horrified

Theme: Hollywood movie monsters are terrorizing a village and you are monster hunters trying to subdue them and save the town.

Difficulty: Low, but adjustable. You can fight one monster or up to four, depending on how confident you are.

Mechanics: RPG-ish. You each choose a character with a different ability and use that ability and your moves to chase down the monsters or save villagers.

My thoughts: This was an impulse buy from Target, and it's now one of the group favorites. Again, this is a simple game to learn, and it doesn't take long to set up. The monsters have different requirement to defeat, so the different combinations make this game a lot of fun. And the colors are beautiful.

Here's a short seven minute how to play video to get you started: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhP2n9QQ8Hg

Sentinels of the Multiverse

Here's one for the pros.

Theme: Superheros fighting super villains. It's a lot of fun to guess what superhero each character is based off of... (i.e. Guise is definitely not Deadpool, cough, cough)

Difficulty: High-ish. It's not so much that it's difficult, so much as there is a LOT to keep track of. Seriously, between keeping track of damage bumps and reductions, start and end of turn effects, and interruption mechanics, this one is rough. Not hard to understand, just a challenge to track. BUT you can get it on Steam, and the computer will track it for you! Yea!

Mechanics: RPG-ish. Each character has its own deck, and you can play equipments and ongoings in addition to the one-shots you can play. You'll notice a difference someone who favors healing vs someone who concentrates on damage and looks at health as just another resource to be spent.

My thoughts: This is my sister's FAVORITE game. If you see me at a con near Ohio, my sister is with me, and you are welcome to join us in a game. Replayability is super high because of the thousands of combinations between heroes and villains. It's somewhat of an investment because of all the expansions, but it's worth it. Especially if you get it on Steam (although if you do get the electronic version, you can't get the fan-made expansion The Cauldron).

Here's a five minute how to play video to get you started: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA2kZVzUpGE


There you have it. Now grab yourself a game and go have some fun!

JB

Returning to Whisper Hollow--Yasmine Galenorn

When I left Berkley, I thought I had lost my Whisper Hollow world for a long, long time. I cried over that, I mourned the world, and the characters, because this is one of my series of the heart. To understand that, first you have to understand what a book or series of the heart means to a writer.

It's one of those worlds that creeps out from your gut, that gets under your skin, that digs in and won't let go. It's a world that — when you're writing it — takes your breath away, where the characters are so vibrant in your subconscious that they talk to you. It’s a world that you can't imagine not writing.

So, when I left Berkley, and they still owned the rights to the first two books in the series, I was devastated. Oh, I could have written more, but it makes no economic sense as an indie to write in a world where a traditional publisher owns the first books—you can’t promote the series the way you need to, you can’t put out boxed sets, you can’t do a lot of things. The only reason I finished the Otherworld Series was because I was so far into the series and I knew it would be years before I got the rights back.

When I walked away, leaving Whisper Hollow behind me, I tried to put the world out of my mind. And I began to write new series that I loved writing, including yet a new series of the heart — my Wild Hunt series, to be specific — but the fact is Whisper Hollow has haunted me.

I’m not surprised—the world of Whisper Hollow is a romantic and dark world, filled with ghosts and shades, where six types of dead exist, along with a spirit shaman who tries to drive the dead back to the Veil when they wander. It's a world of spirits that exist between the living and the dead, some are helpful and terrifying like Penelope, the Gatekeeper, others are terrifying and malicious like Diago, the Scuffler Under the Bed. But all of them can be deadly.

Then, earlier this year, I decided to make a stab at requesting my rights back to Whisper Hollow. I honestly didn’t expect a snowball’s chance in hell of getting the reversion. But, I did a little magick on the side for it — after all, I'm shamanic witch and I've been so for almost 40 years—and I said a prayer to the gods. And I waited. And I crossed my fingers. And shock up on shocks, they gave me the rights back. Whisper Hollow belongs to me again.

So, I have now dived back into the world. I’ll be rereleasing the first two books in January, along with a new, third book. Returning to Whisper Hollow has made me incredibly happy, and now I can make the series what I truly wanted it to be.

I am drastically tightening the first two books. When I wrote those books, I was in a period of major stress. I was shifting over to indie and I was terrified. I feel the books reflect my stress and uncertainty—not in the plot or characters—but in the writing.

So I'm making them stronger and tighter. I’m cutting out deadwood and scenes that I didn't want to write. Toward the end of my stint in trad publishing, I was pushed to add more and more sex to the books. I don’t mind writing a good sex scene at all, but there were a number of them (across the board in all my work) that I was asked to add, that didn’t feel right but I had no choice. So now I can axe them. The plot remains basically the same, but the books are tighter and flow better.

But more than just taking the books to where I want them to be, I’m rejoicing in being able to revisit the characters and write more in their world. I was thrilled to find the entire cast waiting for me in the back of my mind, excited and ready to pick up where we left off. And now I hope to take the world to a whole new level.

And best of all, this means I'm writing two series that hold my heart now — the Wild Hunt, and Whisper Hollow. And I couldn't be happier.

Yasmine Galenorn

Villains, love, & faeries (as muttered by Melissa)

I'm not the sort of person to obsess. I don't fall in love with fictional people. I don't fall in love with places. *counts* Three of those things are a lie.

Okay, so I think I ended up a writer because it's really just another way to research, lie, and play make-believe. As a child, I was the kid who read by flashlight so I could stay longer with a character or in a place, could explain random tidbits, and had a book in my purse just in case there was a bit of free time in my day.  As a teen, I was still those things, but I had accepted my preference for villains, too.

I played the "what-if" game . . . a hobby I still have, except over the last 14 years, I write it down not just think it. What if there was poison in the salt shaker? What if the car breaks down here? What if you wake up in a new city with an unfamiliar purse and a stranger? It's great as a writer, and it's a little less great as a mother. What if my daughter falls from that cliff into the North Atlantic? What if my son tries that BMX trick and breaks both legs?  I'm working on the anxiety in the mom part.

But writing . . . helps.

So, the research & "what if" part of writing are the things I do because my brain just works that way. Falling in love is the hard part.  In 2007, I fell in love with a character called Irial in my debut series. He's not a good guy. In that, he's drawn from real life. My taste in villains wasn't just in books. My first "boyfriend" (in high school) was the son of a hitman.  My second had just gotten out of juvie. I had a type in books and life--breaks rules, impulsive, passionate.

Irial was not the good guy in the story, but he was still--in the way--of Real People--sometimes a good guy.  I studied narrative theory in grad school, and the part of that I couldn't resist is basically "who tells the story defines the story." Were the guys & girls I fell for good if someone different told the story? Boyfriend A's murdering father loved his family. Was he good in their story?

So in my Wicked Lovely series, I was still pondering the same things I pondered in real life.

In Leslie's story (Ink Exchange), Keenan is the bad guy. Of course, he's still a bit of a "bad guy" in Wicked Lovely. He stole Ash's humanity. He gets to share his side in Fragile Eternity...where he is a good guy with a curse.

I thought that by the end of the series I had settled it. 

But . . . a decade later, I was still pondering Irial, a "bad guy" who would die for love in the first 5 books, who loved his friend's kids in the way of honorary uncles, who still loved Niall centuries after their separation, who loved his court enough to cope with willingly giving himself to pain. I wrote a few short stories. . . including one I shelved because it was setting up a prequel.

I released that short story ("Love Hurts") in a collection (Dark Court Tales) in the summer. It was Irial coping with being in love in the 1800s.

I started writing that prequel (Cold Iron Heart) in 2018, set it aside bc of a stroke I needed to heal from, and picked it back up in 2019.

It's up for pre-order now on Amazon & B&N.   (More spots to come!)

Of course, the other thing that made me fall in love with writing the story was my time in New Orleans.  Between 2015 and 2018, I was in New Orleans over a dozen times. A week here. A conference there. Spring, fall, winter. A trip to the bayou, where a gator swam (floated?) by the house, and becoming a member of a krewe during carnival season . . . and one slightly ill-planned excursion where I stayed in a house with holes in the wall, and a door so dry-rotted it made no sense to close it.  I walked, danced with strangers in the street, and learned to recognize local bands that busked, and ultimately was there so often that I was recognized as a "local" in various shops, by various folks who begged, by a shop owner who invited me to a party that was "totally nude or a costume."  I could give walking tours with the history, and I made friends with historians to fill in my gaps.

So . . . I have both a historical  (Cold Iron Heart) and a contemporary psychological thriller (Pretty Broken Things) book coming out in 2020, and both are set in the city I fell for. Maybe the falling in love part of writing isn't as hard as it felt. I fell for Irial, and I fell for New Orleans, so I put them together.

When I've tried to write without that love, that need to be with a character, that urge to research, that obsession with knowing a place or person . . . it's about as appealing as dental surgery. So, to the writers reading this & trying to find your way in, my advice is to let yourself fall in love with a place, person, or idea.

And to the readers like me, I hope you are falling in love, too.  Next month, I'll talk a bit about love. . . but for now, here's a blink of the bayou where I realized that if I stayed still, I was sure I could hear someone singing.

And the absurdly posh house where I stayed . . . right before I stayed in one with holes in the walls & a balcony that swayed & was only partly attached . . . so when I walked to my room, I had to wonder if I was going to plummet to the lovely, overgrown courtyard below me.  Both had their charms, although it might seem impossible to believe. The house in this picture was decadently beautiful, but the one that was a shade away from being condemned meant I met the most interesting people, and shared a drink with them in a courtyard under the moonlight.

End-of-the-Year Musings from Kasey Mackenzie

Ah, December has rolled back around once again. The close of another year. The precipice of beginning a new one. This can be an overwhelming and exhausting time of year for many people, but it can also be a exciting one. Especially for those of us who anticipate cracking open a new planner to start knocking out task list items and reaching our goals like the amazing rock stars we are!

What about you? Do you like to use planners and calendars to organize your chaotic life? I find them invaluable. I have both anxiety and OCD, and possibly ADHD, so regularly using a good planner helps me keep on target and feel a huge sense of accomplishment.

Another thing I did this weekend in anticipation of preparing for the new year was to move my office out of our living room and back into the spare room. Why did I move out to begin with? Allow me a moment of vulnerability. The office that I just returned to was one that I prepared in great excitement after I scored my book deal with Penguin under their Ace Books imprint back in 2008. My husband and I painted the room my two favorite colors and decorated it with trim and all the fixings. I set up my new desk and posed for pictures of my hard-won book contract. I was really on cloud nine then.

Fast forward a few years, with the cancellation of my traditionally published Shades of Fury series and my grief over the loss of five close family members in five years, and that room became more of a painful reminder. So in order to improve my mental health, I moved out into the living room where I could focus on digging myself out of the hole of grief and depression.

But even the deepest of darkness doesn’t last forever. I did the right thing by focusing on my mental health for the next few years. I got myself back into a good headspace, slowly started writing again, and fell in with this awesome collection of writers here in the Urban Fantasy Fiends group. Slowly my confidence returned, and I got my publishing career back on track. Although I do still have a great literary agent and hope to traditionally publish more things in the future, for now I am focused on my indie career.

This brings me full circle back to loving this time of year. I set myself some lofty goals for 2019. I re-released my first indie-published book, Reborn in Fire from my Untamed Elements series, and indie-published two more books in that series. I published the first two books in my Eternal Academy series, and I’m hoping to publish the fourth and final book in that first Untamed Elements quartet this month. When I stop to think about that, I’m so proud of myself. After a few years of publishing nothing, I will have put out six books by the end of this year!

Next year I have even higher goals that I hope to accomplish. Whether I actually attain them all doesn’t even matter. It’s amazing just to be feeling productive and hopeful again. When you’re in a good headspace, it’s better to reach for the stars and fall short then to underestimate yourself and play it too safe. 

And if you’re not in such a great space? It is perfectly okay to take time for yourself. So whichever camp you fall into this December, I wish you nothing but the best. Enjoy the rest of this year and hopefully you will be reaching for the stars with me come January!

Hogmany

We're getting to that time of year when festivities are kicking in. As much as I love twinkly lights and trees and yummy Christmas food, my absolute favourite time of year is Hogmany - or New Year's Eve as you probably call it if you're not Scottish! I don't keep resolutions but I still always feel like it's the one time when you can wipe slate the clean and start afresh - and the traditions surrounding it, which date back to pagan times, couldn't be more fabulous. I've always found it hard living abroad (even in England!) when often other countries don't place as much importance on it and I've been hauled back into work on January 2nd, which is still a holiday in the tartan climes of Scotland!

Stonehaven, the wee town where I grew up as a kid is particularly proud of its Hogmany traditions. Before the clock strikes midnight, people line the streets to watch the fireballs - an old ceremony where volunteers swing actual fireballs round their heads to ward off evil spirits for the year ahead. Check out the video above for an idea of what it's like! It's no wonder that I love urban fantasy when I grew up with that sort of thing...

Of course, fireballs aren't the only Hogmany tradition that I love. My gran used to tell me that if you look into an open fire at the exact moment that that the new year strikes, then you'll see the face of the man (or woman) you're supposed to be with. Unfortunately we didn't have a fireplace at the time so it wasn't a theory I ever managed to test!

Then there's first footing. After midnight, strangers bearing gifts of coal or (preferably) shortbread are welcomed into your house and given whiskey in return. It's supposed to be particularly lucky if you receive a tall dark stranger on your doorstep - although that's probably lucky at any time of year ;)

New Year's Day is for sitting down with family and tucking into the traditional meal of steak pie, neeps and tatties (turnips and potatoes!), which is exactly what you need when it's so cold outside and you have hangovers to banish. Yum.

So now it's over to you - what New Year's traditions do you celebrate? And what's your favourite day of the year?

JUST BEING....

December is one of those months where time stretches, folds, and sometimes holds so very, very still, it makes me ache.

I love winter. For one, it’s great for writing. It rains a lot here in Oregon, and when it’s not raining, our skies are usually slate, pewter, gray. There’s something about all that gray that keeps me inside, exploring the bright spikes of magic and wonder in stories.

The words flow, and I dive deep, lost and happy. I love that.

But December, in particular, has another thing going for it: the holidays.

I live in the same town as most of my brothers and sisters. We have traditions. Some have been passed down generation after generation and some we have discovered ourselves, starting new traditions for the next generation to keep if they wish.

But one tradition we all hold dear is celebrating the holidays together. We do movies, gather for the great Xmas tree hunt and chop, visit over dinners, drop in on house gatherings, make handmade gifts, and always, always, shove everyone into one room to open gifts on Christmas morning.

Christmas morning is a madhouse. There’s breakfast cooking in the kitchen, huge pots of coffee, cocoa with marshmallows, the oven going full out, toasters popping. There’s music playing softly in the background but it’s drown out by the thank-yous, I-love-its, and I-love-yous. It always happens way too early (adults) and way too late (kiddos) but either way, it always happens.

After gift giving, the youngest escape into the yard with wild whoops, careening around in the cold, darting between apple trees, or flying wide circles on the tree swing.

The adults sit back, tired, but smiling. Content. There is more coffee and quieter conversations. A few lost packages emerge from under the drifts of wrapping paper. Something goes missing, maybe a shoe, maybe an earring, maybe a coat. It’s found.

Then furniture is replaced, having been relegated to the front porch in the attempt to squeeze every last inch of space out of the room for gifts and people. Maybe a movie is queued up. Maybe the soft holiday songs finally get their chance.

Some people linger. Others jet off to another gathering with more family or friends. But that morning, for those few hours when we are all together, is something special. A tradition that reminds us the best gift we can give and receive isn’t in the wrapping paper. It’s in sharing time, reconnecting, being present, being a part of someone else’s life.

Dear readers, I want to thank you for letting my stories be a part of your life. Until next time, I wish you a very happy December and hope your traditions, (old, or just thought up today) are the merriest of all!