three YA trends. and my Fury cover!

we talk a lot about trends within
the young adult genre. whether its
as a writer, wondering what the next
"hot" new thing is or as a reader. vampires
seem to remain strong (i admit anne
rice had me at lestat on this one) as
well as dystopian novels thanks to
The Hunger Games success.

below are three young adult trends.
what would you like to read more about
within paranormal books? be it young adult
or adult? what paranormals have you read
lately that seems trendy and you enjoyed?

mermaids :




fallen angels :




faeries :




and last but not least, i'm thrilled to reveal my Fury of the Phoenix cover with a small blurb from the harpercollins catalog!


Cindy Pon’s debut novel Silver Phoenix was called “fluid and exhilarating” in a starred review from Booklist, and Meg Cabot called it “an addictive gem.” In this companion novel, seventeen-year-old Ai Ling—her powers stronger than ever—stows away aboard a cargo ship in order to protect devastatingly handsome Chen Yong during his quest to locate his father. Masquerading as brother and sister, Ai Ling and Chen Yong face demonic predators on the ocean voyage, but their biggest threat comes from the kingdom of the dead. Part supernatural page-turner, part love story, and altogether stirring, Fury of the Phoenix further heralds the arrival of Cindy Pon as a stellar author of paranormal romance and fantasy.

Fury is out 3/29/2011 and i'm working hard
on revisions now. i'm very excited!

Guardians of My Lair

Many writers have a lair in which they write. A Fortress of Solitude. A Bat Cave. A secret (maybe they just wish it was secret) place where they can hunker down and get lost in the world of their creation. The crafting of the secret lair usually takes years of collecting the most critical of items so that your writing mojo is not only protected but enhanced by the space in which you work.

Today, I've decided to grant readers a special tour of my secret lair in which I work. But be forewarned: there are things here that may frighten you into turning back before the tour is over. Don't worry. I will protect you ... this time.

First off, to greet any visitors that enter my lair is a white ceramic mask of a shrieking Jack Skellington. This was a Christmas gift from my younger brother several years ago and has always resided by the door to my office. This mask is used to immediately scare away any negative vibes that might be trying to enter the office and attack me from behind as I work. The mask has done an excellent job so far.

Next, we come to my work space itself. I love my large desk, which is a hand-me-down from my parents when they decided they no longer needed such a large area to work at. I was more than happy to take it off their hands as it now houses a large collection of my most important research materials AND can hold two computers comfortably. Yes, there are days when I will find myself working at two different computers at the same time. Those are usually not good days. Directly beside my large monitor are my essential reference guides: dictionary, thesaurus, quotation book, Chicago Manual of Style, and my Character Naming Sourcebook. Despite having two computers at my disposal, I also keep at least one legal pad and pen handy. Sometime, I just need the feel of paper beneath my hand or something easy to capture that quick, random thought before it flutters away.

Directly above my monitor is my second layer of guardians: my gargoyles. This is the gang, with Fred as they leader in the center. They watch over me as I work, protecting me against self-doubt and occasionally writer's block. They also keep the positive mojo flowing as they work in tandem with Jack at the door. As a way of saying "thank you," I am working on a way to fit them into a book as a biker gang of gargoyles, but don't tell them. It's still a surprise.

My third and final guardian is my loving cat Demona, who spends most of her time prowling or just laying on a corner of my desk. She just patrols the are to make sure that everything is proceeding as it should. She is also my keeper, making sure that I am staying on task and not goofing off on the Internet too often. I have a second cat named Harley, who will occasionally patrol the floor and curl up beside the desk, checking for anything that might attack from below.

And finally, one of my favorite little spots is in the far corner of my lair is a picture that I picked up at Disney World a few years ago. The saying below is by Walt Disney and states: "It's kind of fun to do the impossible." Accurate statement.

So, what's necessary for your work space? Do you have any guardians of your realm protecting you as you work? Is there anything that you can't live without when you sit at your desk or in your private spot to work?

“What if?” Folklore as a Source

“What if?” Folklore as Source

By Melissa Marr

One of the questions every writer hears regularly is “where do you get your ideas?” Answers to this one range from quips to “everything” to very specific “this story came from ___.” All of these are true answers (or, they can be. . . writers being writers, there are inevitably truth-bendings going on sometime. Frex, a friend & I concocted a “how did you meet story” that involved broken hearts & an octopus, but that’s another topic).

Every story I have started begins with a “what if” or a “what next.” Moreover, every one of those is connected to folklore or/and fairy tales in some way.

Lore & life in my texts

My first novel, Wicked Lovely, utilizes a few fairy tale tropes--in part for the purpose of defying them. There's a curse that can only be broken by finding the "fated love" . . . of course, the fated love doesn't quite want to be found, and the cursed faery is already in love with someone he hoped was his fated love, but wasn't . . . sorta, maybe. I had good fun playing with questions of volition and power here, the idea of what happily-ever-after means, and other fairy tale tidbits like a "woken with a kiss" scene wherein being "woken" is an awakening (i.e. epiphany rather than literally awakening). That novel is also very rooted in a folklore, specifically tales of Cailleach Bheur and of the King of Summer.

I used some of the same lore and fairy tale tropes in a short story in Cricket in 2007. It derives, in part, from my on-going love of Cailleach Bheur, but in it the protag is a girl who carries "Winter's Kiss" and feels it a burden rather than a joy. I added this to a world in which global warming is a problem, and threw in my childhood dream of traveling with an ice-bear (polar bear) that is a result of a fairy tale, & well, it became a story about a girl who carries winter and boy who is also a bear.

The second novel (Ink Exchange) was playing with the Unseelie Court, my fondness for tattoos (I have a lot of ink tucked away under my clothes), & my own experience of being a rape survivor.

. . . and so forth and so on.

Fragile Eternity plays with the “don’t eat the food of Faerie” (which is also in the Hades/Persephone tale). Radiant Shadows is a result of my interest in the Wild Hunt. Similarly, my short stories have played with drug dealing and Haitian zombie powder (“Two Lines” in Unbound) inversion of the selchies entrapping men trope (“Love Struck” in Love is Hell), vampires and the power of crossroads (“Transitions” in Teeth).

My forthcoming adult novel (Graveminder ) sparked from a bit of lore on “minding the dead” and a family tradition of visiting cemeteries a lot.

Why write from folklore?

I didn’t intend to write these things. In many ways, writing is a bit of an accident for me. I grew up with these sorts of stories, the supernatural wasn’t just the stuff in my books, it was/is real in my family. I’ve been told not to go places because of the various creatures lurking out there; I’ve also been sent out to “catch” a faery that was lurking around the woodpile. I’m passing that tradition on to my children as best I can.

When my son was a preschooler, we read about trolls. (Spouse is of Scandinavian descent, so I had to incorporate that body of lore and myth into my Irish & Scottish.) Son developed a fixation on “catching” trolls, so he explained the problem to my mother—who promptly went to her neighbor and asked to build a troll trap. We ran into only one snag:

Mum: Suze can build a trap, but she needs to know how big the trolls you have are. We might have a different species here than you do in California.

Me: Hmm. I’ll ask.

Son: Cat sized, maybe rabbit sized.

It didn’t occur to any of us that there was much odd about the question. Trolls do come in various sizes. Faeries do too. Wales has Ellylon, tiny little fey things, but Scotland has some mortal and some monstrous sized fey. Scandinavia has skogsra (women with hollow backs). Luckily, we had the answer we needed, so Suze built a sturdy wooden troll trap (with a good leather hinge) and shipped it to California.

How do I learn this stuff?

It’s really a case of write what I know. After a folklore saturated childhood, I grew up and became a lit major and after that a lit teacher at university. My focus areas were Romantic, Victorians, & the American South. Mmmm. Ghosts, Byronic heroes, Frankenstein, Dracula, the “Mortal Immortal,” Southern Gothic! Oh yes, literature is riddled with some weird stuff. Delicious, macabre, and addictive. Stir the lit into the lore, and I was on my way to being where I am now.

Somewhere in there, I also discovered scholarly journals . . . FOLKLORE and THE LION AND THE UNICORN and MARVELS AND TALES (among others). I still curl up with these. In my stack as I write are, "The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing: Vision, Ideology, and Genre in the Victorian Ghost Story” (Smijac), “Bedding the Nightmare” (Blecourt), and “Purity and Danger: Dracula, the Urban Gothic, and the Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis” (Spencer) . . and get this—all of this fun reading is justified because it’s work.

*pauses*

Yeah, I get to read what interests me, drown in it, and I know that somewhere along the line, I’ll get that moment where I say, “oooooh, what if . . .”

What about you? What interests do YOU have that you can tap for stories . . . or just because they're fun? Tell me something interesting--about anything at all--and one reader/responder to this blog wins a copy of UNBOUND (the adult anthology I did with some of my co-bloggers here: Jeaniene Frost, Vicki Patterrson, & Joce Drake) OR LOVE IS HELL (the YA Antho).*

Winner announced next month (on August 4th by Jeaniene bc I'll be leaving for Scotland August 2nd).

WINNERS FROM LAST MONTH

signed copy of RADIANT SHADOWS to a US resident: PROJECTANIME
signed copy of RADIANT SHADOWS to an international reader: MOUNTIE9
signed copy of WICKED LOVELY to a US resident: NYMFAUX
signed copy of WICKED LOVELY to an international reader: RENATA
signed copy of any of my books to a library collection (must be requested by a librarian!)*: SUSIE SHARP LIBRARIAN
second signed copy of any of my books to a library collection (must be requested by a librarian!)* BRELEMON

Winners, please email donna@melissa-marr.com with your user name, address, & to whom you want/if you want the book personalized.

Faith and Fantasy

Happy 4th of July to all my fellow American peeps! I’m guessing very few of you will be reading this post today due to the usual outdoor festivities, but this is my day to blog, even if I will end up mostly talking to myself, lol. I was going to do a post talking about holidays and the choice to include them in novels, but I just didn’t have too many thoughts about that, as it turned out. So, if you don’t happen to be outside at a barbeque like most of the US today, consider yourself invited to pull up a chair and weigh in on your thoughts about faith in fantasy.

As a paranormal writer, I’ve often been asked how my supernatural creatures differ from others. Take my vampires. One of the things they can do that many others in fiction can’t is walk around in the daylight. Yes, just like in the original Dracula by Bram Stoker, my vampires have no lethal aversion to sunlight. Something else that repels many vampires in modern fiction, but also has no effect on mine, is crosses. I originally decided on that because I couldn't come up with an answer to the question of how a vampire who pre-dated Christianity would cringe away from a cross, and I have some vampires in my novel who are much older than two thousand years.* Therefore, religious objects in my books don’t have any effect on vampires.

That doesn’t mean faith is absent in my stories. In fact, my idea for the origin of vampires came from the Biblical story of Cain. In my retelling of it, God’s “mark” was making Cain into the first vampire, cursed to forever drink blood as punishment for spilling his brother Abel’s (or so the vampires claim. Ghouls in my books have a different version of what Cain was turned into, heh). So right from the beginning, I knew I’d have to deal with the element of faith in my supernatural world.

Still, the idea than an entire species would agree about spiritual beliefs seemed an impossible notion even for a work of supernatural fiction. Therefore, even though I made up a fictitious creationist history for the undead based on the biblical character of Cain, this doesn't make the vampires or ghouls in my book automatically Judeo-Christian. Instead, they represent a wide range of beliefs, including atheists, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, agnostics, pagans, voodoo, and more. Mencheres, the hero in my upcoming novel, Eternal Kiss of Darkness, still believes in the ancient Egyptian gods (which gave me an excuse to indulge my love of Egyptology with more research about them!)

Paranormal writers, in the process of selecting a species, plotting, and otherwise breathing life into your book, did the question of faith play into your world building? Or did you have to remove all beliefs to make your particular world work, and was that easier or harder to do?

Readers, what’s your take on books that add the element of faith into a supernatural world? Do you prefer paranormal novels to have no belief system in place? Or prefer novels where beliefs are based on dieties the author has made up (like a god named Rawr for shapeshifters, for example ;-) instead of beliefs from any actual faiths?

Friendly reminder: I’m only asking for comments on the presence/absence of faith in paranormal novels because I’m curious how readers and writers think it impacts a story (or doesn’t). Please refrain from any comments espousing the presence/absence of faith in the real world. This isn’t the place for a debate on anyone’s personal spiritual beliefs or lack thereof.

* Note: I've seen authors come up with a perfectly reasonable explanation for this in their novels, even with vampires who predated Christianity. The great thing about paranormal fiction is you can make up your own rules, so there is no one "right way" to write a particular creature.

-Jeaniene Frost

What's Your Sign?

***WINNER ALERT!***  Congratulations to justinbarnes, who is a Pisces!  Justin has won the full set of Vicki Pettersson's Zodiac series!  In addition, because we had so many enthusiastic entries, we're going to give away two more of Vicki's books as extras:  You Said What Again gets a copy of SCENT OF SHADOWS, and Kaelie gets a copy of CITY OF SOULS.  Justin, Kaelie and You Said, send an email to booksthatgobump@gmail with your mailing info, and we'll get your books in the mail.  Thanks so much for everyone who played along - peace, love and kisses to all, whatever your sign!***

There was a time when the phrase, "Hey, baby, what's your sign?" was a universally acknowledged "pick-up phrase" of men everywhere. The modern day "Age of Aquarius" brings to mind the sixties and seventies, a period of spiritualism and open-mindededness where peace, love, cosmic forces (and evidently a few magic mushrooms!) reigned supreme.

In reality, astrology is believed to have begun with the ancient Babylonians sometime in the 3rd century B.C., and was used as a method to determine the will of the gods.  Man looked to the heavens for answers, because it was the heavens who ruled their lives: the rain that made the crops grow, the breeze that cooled their brow, the sun that beat down on their heads, the damage from storms and floods.  The movement of the sun, moon and stars began to be seen as the activity of the gods themselves, and it was believed that if these movements could be interpreted properly, man could use these patterns to his advantage.

It took several centuries before the art of horoscopic astrology came into existence, led largely by the Greek astronomist Ptolemy, whose teachings on the movements of the planets and their influence over a person's physical birth laid the foundation of astrological teachings for thousands of years afterward.  So today, in the 21st century, there are many, many people who believe that the sign you're born under has a direct influence on who you are as a person (c'mon, admit it... how many of you read your horoscope every day, even if you don't really believe it?) Many prominent rulers through the centuries were said never to make a move without consulting their personal astrologers (as recently as Ronald Reagan!), as the heavens continue to be looked to for answers, even now. 

Most of us take some kind of pride in the sign we were born under, although the actual casting of horoscopes is much more complicated than just what constellation was in the sky at the time of our birth - the place, time and position of the planets all come into play, as do the elements those planets represent.  Details aside, we seem to like the idea that some of our personal traits are given to us at birth - the good traits make us feel good about ourselves, and the bad traits are the perfect excuse for when we're less than perfect, right?  :)

So, as a proud Scorpio (loyal, passionate, independent, resourceful) my question for you today is the good, old-fashioned "What's your sign?".  One person (who if astrology is to be believed, will have been born under a lucky star), will win the ENTIRE set of Vicki Pettersson's Zodiac series!

(Two books, The Touch of Twilight and Cheat the Grave, have been signed by Vicki herself!)

Up your chances of winning by:

+1 Posting in the comments section

+1 Linking to this post on Twitter
+1 Linking to this post on Facebook
+1 Linking to the Supernatural Underground blog on your own blog/website

Post what you did in the comments section.  So c'mon, baby... what's your sign?

A Mish Mash of Sorts.....

Hey everyone! It is Friday and for me, being Canadian, the long weekend has already started. (Happy Canada Day to all my fellow Canunks) So far it hasn't turned out the way I'd expected...I was supposed to go up north to spend some time with the family at a friends cottage. On a lake. With a boat. A jet ski. Beer. BUT...I had edits arrive for another publisher and according to my editor, revisions are coming today for my third book in the Jaguar Warriors series, HIS DARKEST SALVATION. So I decided to let the hubby go and have fun with the kids and leave me all alone...by myself in this house. FOR THREE WHOLE DAYS.....

So, Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Okay, I do love my family, for reals and I had to try really hard to appear sad at the prospect of missing out on the cottage, but um, I am so happy to have some time alone.

I've already finished my edits on Black Destiny, which is a time travel short story. I loved re-visiting this world. I hope to get my revisions started on Salvation, because I am hard at work on my fourth book which is due in September.

I shall organize my new office, get my covers up on the wall, do some cleaning, take the dog on long walks....and float in the pool! What is everyone else up to? I know my American friends are celebrating July 4th!

Tell me your plans, I'd love to hear. In the mean time, I'm starting to organize promo etc for my fall release, the second book in the Jaguar Warrior series, HIS DARKEST EMBRACE...here is a teaser of the cover...

What do you think? Ya'll like? I will admit at first when I saw this I thought, oh my, Jagger is nekkid...butt, (pun intended) it's a beautiful cover and Tom the cover god has outdone himself.

So, I will be holding a contest for ARC's for this book in the next little while. In the meantime have a wonderful weekend whatever you are doing!

Making My Bow—& Why I Love Fantasy!

Contest Results: The sorting hat has now duly sorted and the results are:

The Heir of Night ARE (US/Canada Posters Only):

Barbara E.
Stacey

Thornspell (Signed Copies) (International)

Sweet Rachel
Stella (Ex Libris)

Please contact me on contact@helenlowe.info with your postal address so I can get the books to you.

Thank you again to everyone, for participating.

---

Contest Closed: It's officially July 2 everywhere in the USA/Canada now (yup, even Anchorage) so time to close the contest. I'll post the winners of the 2 x The Heir of Night AREs (US/Canada only) and the 2 x signed copies of Thornspell here sometime tomorrow when the "sorting hat" gives me its result. (You can't rush the sorting hat, not if you don't want everyone to be in Slytherin!:-))

But remember, there's still another 4 hours before the companion contest on my own Anything, Really blog, for 2 x further signed editions of Thornspell closes off, so you can still comment there and be in with a chance to win.

But thank you so much everyone for participating—it's been great fun, and I've loved meeting you and finding out why you share my love of Fantasy. I'm really looking forward to spending time with you again on 1 August. meanwhile, don't be a stranger, come visit me at Helen Lowe on Anything, Really any time you like.

HelenL :-)

---


When Pamela Palmer approached me to blog right here on the Supernatural Underground, my first reaction was what a tremendous privilege—to be given the opportunity to work collaboratively with so many great writers. And secondly, to have the opportunity to share my writing with such an enthusiastic and knowledgeable audience—both reactions that have only been underlined by reading the posts and comments over the past month.

So I’m very excited to be making my debut on the Underground today, exactly 1 month on from the Grand Welcome to “Books That Go Bump In the Night.” :-)

So—down to business! Who am I, anyway? And what stripe of speculative fiction do I write?

Making My Bow
Well, (waves, smiles) my name is Helen Lowe, I hail from Middle Earth—I mean, New Zealand—and I write Fantasy.
My first novel, Thornspell (Knopf 2008), has just come out in paperback and is a fairytale retelling: in this case of Sleeping Beauty, but from the perspective of the prince destined to break the spell—with a dark little backstory around the motivation of the wicked faery who has not at all given up her vile plots and machinations. Described variously as “darkly imaginative” (Canvas), and a “full blooded tale of ambition and romance” (Booklist) Thornspell was my first foray into the kind of Fantasy I love to both read and tell: swashbuckling, adventurous, and romantic, with overlapping layers of mystery and magic.

On 1 October, Eos will be releasing my second novel, The Heir of Night, which is a darker and more epic tale aimed at older and “crossover” readers—and the first of the 4-book, WALL OF NIGHT series. Heir is a story of darkness and peril, mystery, friendship and love, which unfolds in a broken world of shadow and conflict where nothing is precisely as it seems …

OK, Why I Love Fantasy:
Introductions complete, I thought maybe the best starting place for my very first Supernatural Underground blog is why I love Fantasy—reading it, writing it, and when you have something like The Lord of the Rings on offer, watching it at the movies as well. There are so many places to start: from loving fairytales, myths and legends as a young child, and graduating from there to Lewis and Tolkien, McKillip and McKinley and Cherryh, Gaiman and Hobb—to name just a few. But that’s “what”, not “why.”

Why is definitely tougher and leads more into why I love writing Fantasy as well. So many words spring to mind: color and imagination for starters, but I think the key word for me is possibility. Fantasy offers the possibility of something “other” to be explored, whether it is an historical world that is almost—but just not quite—our own, as in Thornspell, or a completely alternate world like the WALL OF NIGHT. Or worlds, as with Urban Fantasy, that are definitely ours but with the possibility of the “other” overlapped or entwined with them.

Together with possibility comes wonder—what if a world could be like this, or this, or this? Why would a boy growing up in a castle beside a great forest care about some story of a sleeping chick and a 100-year old spell, let alone “get involved?” Why would a people fight an eons-old war? What would keep them going? What effect would it have on them? How would that play out on a world where their very arrival had brought cataclysm and ruin? (This is Heir, btw.)

So a big part of the fascination and also the fun of Fantasy for me has always been the excitement of new ways of looking at the world, and the flexibility to play with those possibilities. As a reader, I enjoy exploring other writers’ visions; as a writer, I love asking those why and what if questions and having the freedom to answer them without being bound by what we know has happened in history, or constrained too much by the laws of physics.

How about you? What draws you to Fantastic fiction? What kind of speculative fiction spins your wheels, and why?

Another thing I love about Fantasy is the whole experience of world building—to look through another writer’s eyes into a world that has texture, color and history; that is real and believable when you walk its streets. As an author, writing Fantasy allows you to unfold new worlds to share with readers . . . I use the word “unfold” advisedly, because sometimes it does feel as though the world is already there and my role is simply to reveal it through the characters’ eyes; a mystery, perhaps—but also one of the great fascinations of writing Fantastic fiction.

I could never exhaustively list all the Fantasy worlds that I have fallen in love with, but here’s just a few of my favorites: CS Lewis’s wardrobe opening onto the lantern burning in a snowy wood; Tolkien’s Middle Earth, from Bilbo Baggins’ round hobbit hole to the golden woods of Lothlorien, and the older, darker secrets of Fangorn; Patricia McKillip’s rich, fantastical, and mysterious world of the Riddle-Master series, and Robin Hobb’s Rain Wilds; Terry Pratchett’s Discworld (definitely flat, circular, and on the back of four elephants standing on a giant turtle . . .) and China Mieville’s darkly realized city of Bas-Lag.

So what are your favorite Fantastic worlds? Which writer’s world building has stayed in your imagination?

And Yes: there’s give-aways! My editor, the lovely Kate Nintzel of Eos, has put up two AREs of The Heir of Night to go to readers resident in the USA or Canada, and I’m also adding in two signed copies of Thornspell for readers anyway in the world.

You can earn points by:

+1 Posting in the comments section
+1 Linking to this post on Twitter
+1 Linking to this post on Facebook
+1 Linking to the Supernatural Underground blog on your own blog/website

Just post the total number of points that you’ve earned in your comment (and say whether you’re from the USA/Canada for the Heir AREs.) Your name will be entered in the draw again for every point you earn. Eligibility will close at midnight today, July 1.

And if you visit me on my blog: Helen Lowe on Anything, Really you can also go in the draw to win one of two further copies of Thornspell, once again for anywhere in the world. I look forward to meeting you, both here on the Supernatural Underground, & at home on Anything, Really.