Davin’s Quest - Character Inspiration

For some odd reason, this photo of Hugh Jackman is one of my favorites. When I first saw it, I thought that was a sword in his hands. Later - much later - I realized it’s a golf club. Duh.  

Anyway, this photo actually inspired the addition of Rick St. John - a main character in Davin’s Quest - though I’m not usually one of those writers who keeps photos of hunks around for inspiration. Honestly, I usually prefer to imagine my characters in a very nebulous sort of way. Attaching a famous person’s face to them kind of ruins it for me. Especially when said famous person turns out to be a jerk in real life.

But for whatever reason, every time I think of Rick, this photo comes to mind. I think it’s the grumpy look on his face, the definition of those muscles - like he’s lived a hard life (which my charater, Rick, definitely has) - and the devil-may-care attitude of appearing in public in a canary yellow towel. The whole thing just says, “I’m gonna do what I want and wear what I want. What’s it to you? Now get out of the way.”

So for those of you who are interested in such things, this is where the character Rick comes from in the second book of my Resonance Mates series. The first book (Hara’s Legacy) is due out in print any minute now, and Book 2 (Davin’s Quest) is now available in ebook and will be in print in late December/early January.

Davin’s Quest - Available Now!

Which man will Callie choose, the alien or the warrior? Or can she have both?

Resonance Mates Book 2

For each Alvian, there is one perfect match—a Resonance Mate whose soul blends in perfect harmony. Unlike the rest of his race, Davin has emotions and suffers for it. Without a mate, he is doomed to go mad. Searching for answers and understanding, he seeks out Callie O’Hara, a human woman with strong empathic gifts. Could this fragile human be his Resonance Mate?

Rick St. John is a tough-as-nails survivor of the Alvian occupation of Earth. He doesn’t believe in much, but when he sees Callie for the first time, he starts to believe in love at first sight.

The Governing Council is gunning for Davin, the upstart who dares to defy them. And they’ll kill anyone who gets in their way. Davin and Rick must come to terms with their feelings for Callie in order to keep her safe, while she has to find a way to save them both…with her love.

Warning: Warning, this title contains hot alien love, explicit sex, graphic language, and ménage a trois.

Read An Excerpt Online

ARe Awards!

I won two awards last night! Wow! ARe hosted a great ceremony in their chat room with videos made by ScrapFairy Designs just for the occasion. You can see my winning vids on YouTube at:

Best Author: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2PVvh041Ww

Best Book: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9lh7FnZdrs

Sorry, I have yet to learn how to embed a video on this blog (any WordPress fans out there willing to coach me through it?). If I can figure out how to post them to my website - which will undoubtedly be easier - I will.

Thanks to ARe for the honor!

Sneak Peek: Davin’s Quest Prologue

As promised, here’s a sneak peek at one half of the prologue from my upcoming release, Davin’s Quest. This section introduces one of our heroes and the way humans live in this future, post-apocalyptic world. This book is the second in the Resonance Mates series. Book One, Hara’s Legacy, will be out in print this March and is already available in ebooks formats.

Human 

Richard St. John was a hard case. Raised in the Waste since his early teens, he had only scattered memories of the way the world had been before the aliens came—before the attack from orbit tore apart the fabric of the world.

He’d wanted to be a doctor in the old days, but the crystal bombardment destroyed everything long before he was old enough to go to medical school. His mother died in the first wave, leaving his father heartbroken. But Rick’s father, Zach, was a survivor. He’d packed Rick up and they’d headed for the mountains in his pickup truck. They’d just barely made it before the next orbit when the attacks began anew.

Zachariah St. John had been both a doctor and an Army Ranger in the old United States and he taught his son everything he knew about living off the land and surviving in the wild. Rick’s old man had a sixth sense about nature and was able to keep them both safe through the waves of attacks that followed, each time the Earth rotated fully on its axis. They’d moved farther into the mountains, working their way north, into the deepest recesses of the Rocky Mountains. They kept up with radio reports about the decimated coastlines as tsunamis spawned by the massive crystal shards hitting the Earth’s oceans killed by the millions.

One day, their small transistor radio stopped working entirely. Only static met repeated attempts to tune in a station — any station at all. Civilization, as they’d known it, was over.

“Guess that’s it,” Zach said, stowing the antenna and switching off the radio. “We’re on our own now.”

The last broadcast had listed details of nearly unimaginable devastation. Coastlines all over the world under water from giant tsunamis. California separated down the line of the San Andreas fault. Massive earthquakes brought on by the crystal bombardment from space had finally clipped the golden state nearly in half. The ring of fire was more active than ever with two or three volcanoes erupting violently in the Pacific and Pacific Northwest.

The sky was dark with soot covering the sun, and autumn came early that year, but by the following summer, temperatures started drifting back to normal. The sun shone brightly in the sky—but so did alien craft.

Zach St. John took in the news spreading through the wastelands of the Rockies—now called simply the Waste—with his typical calm. They’d run into a trader one morning who told of tall, fair-haired aliens building a silver city on the plains. Rick asked his dad about it that night at dinner.

“I figured it was something like this, son,” Zach said as he dressed the rabbit they’d snared for dinner. “The attack came from orbit. First thing to go down was my sat phone and GPS. Not many world powers who could do that, and none that could launch an attack on the entire planet. Had to be something from outer space.”

“Aliens?” Rick wasn’t entirely surprised. They’d talked about various possibilities often during the early days. “So they’re not little and green like in the old movies.”

“According to the trader, they look a lot like us, but with elf ears.” Zach finished with the rabbit and looked at his son. “This changes things. Now that they’re on the surface, they might just start hunting. Up ’til now, all we had to worry about was other men. The stakes are higher now, because any race that can do what they did to our planet has got to have superior weaponry. You’re going to have to learn to defend yourself, and we’ll make plans for when they come.” 

Rick thought it significant that his father said “when” and not “if”. 

He spent the next ten years learning from his dad and growing to adulthood. They’d met a few fellow survivors along the way, but not many, and not often. They grew close in those years. 

Zach shared an amazing secret that helped keep them both alive. He had a strong gift of empathy with animals, and could sometimes pick up their thought images and see through their eyes, sensing when the animals of the forest were scared or felt threatened. He could also read people, but only when he touched them. 

Rick had his own secrets. He finally let his father in on the biggest of them. He could heal most wounds by simply laying his hand over them and thinking real hard. That was why he’d wanted to study medicine—to find out how he did what he did, but also to help people with his gift. 

Through their infrequent interactions with other survivors, they realized they weren’t the only ones with psychic abilities. It seemed like every single soul they met had something different about them. Many had small amounts of precognitive ability that had led them out of harm’s way before the attack began. Some were telepaths, some could move things with their minds. Others had combinations of skills that were often benign, but some were downright deadly.

All in all, Rick preferred to be on his own—just him and his dad. They didn’t need the society of others, except for one thing, but hetero sex was hard to come by since there were so few women among the survivors of humanity. Still, Rick grew into a good looking young man and the few women he was able to charm were as eager for him as he was for them. But dalliances were few and far between as the lack of females turned many of the male survivors into beasts. Women went into hiding for their own protection, though few towns existed with even fewer inhabitants.

“I pity women today,” Zach would often comment after contact with others. “They’re traded like commodities, forced into whoring or multi-partner families. That’s not the way it was, son. You should always remember that. You were old enough to know the way it should be. The way our family was. God knows, I miss your mother more every day, but I wouldn’t have wanted her to see the level of depravity to which we have sunk.”

Rick took all his father’s teachings to heart, but especially that one. He’d just been starting to date when the cataclysm happened and felt strongly that girls should be protected, not exploited. Every time he saw some poor, frightened creature creeping about a settlement under guard by one of her protectors, the lesson was driven home again. He’d never sink that low.

The likelihood he’d ever have a woman of his own was close to nil, but Rick didn’t curse fate—at least not too often. He had his dad. That was more family than most people could claim nowadays. So the St. John men lived off the land in their own small cabin out in the middle of nowhere.

Until the Alvians came. 

They heard the ships fly by in the night and then the miniscule sounds of one landing not far away. Silently Zach signaled his grown son to head for the woods behind the cabin. They’d planned for this kind of thing. Each man would fend for himself, since two together were more likely to be captured or killed. They had a rendezvous and backup plan already in place. 

Zach grabbed his son for one last hug before they headed out the doors—Zach out the front, and Rick out the back.

That was the last time Rick St. John saw his father. 

The Craft: Prologues & Davin’s Quest

I adding a new category to this blog for posts relating to the craft of writing. Not that I’m any mighty sage of the English language, but as I discover or wrestle with new things, I think others in my position - either aspiring or published authors - might be interested in some of what I’ve been through. I know that’s how I learn - by listening to the comments of other writers. Hopefully some of my observations will help someone else. Plus, I find this stuff interesting and I *hope* readers of this blog will too. So here goes… My first “The Craft” post - a little something about writing my upcoming ebook release (Davin’s Quest - February 19th) and what it taught me.

I struggled with the beginning of Davin’s Quest for several reasons. First, there was a prior book in the series - Hara’s Legacy - in which a lot of information about the futuristic world had been laid out, but what if the reader hadn’t read that book yet? I had to make the beginning of this book make sense to a new reader, while not insulting the old readers too much. Always a challenge - to remind folks of the “rules” of the world without huge chunks of exposition or the dreaded ”telling rather than showing.” *Yawn*

Another challenge was the fact that there are two heroes in this book. One is quite different from the other and until about halfway into the book, they don’t even know each other. So how do I introduce them both and keep the readers interested in BOTH of them throughout the first part of the book?

After much indecision, I decided to go with a prologue to set the stage for the story, since this book takes place over a few years of the characters’ lives. In the first iteration of the prologue, only Davin was featured - a hot section that introduced him and his position within Alvian society during an encounter with one of his underlings. Rick - Stud Number Two - didn’t show up until a few chapters into the manuscript. I knew that was a potential problem. How could the reader come to know and love Rick if he suddenly appeared in Chapter 3? It just wasn’t working.

So I wrote more pre-story for Rick and moved a key piece of interraction between him and his father to the prologue section, expanding the prologue in a way I’ve never done before. I decided to separate it using the main differences between Rick and Davin. Rick is human. Davin’s an alien. So by expanding the Prologe into something a bit longer than I’ve ever done before, I think I’ve managed to introduce both the alien way of life, illustrate the human existence in this post-apocalyptic world and the relationship between Rick and his fellow man and Davin and his alien race. That’s a lot to tackle in just a few short pages, but by doing it this way, I think I’ve made it interesting. At least I hope you’ll all agree.

Tomorrow, I’ll post the “Human” part of the Prologue as a Sneak Peek. You’ll get to meet Rick and then you can let me know if I’ve succeeded in laying out some of the history of the world and introducing Stud Number Two in an interesting way. Stay tuned…

RT Reviews

I’m proud to say that both Prince of Spies and Hara’s Legacy were given 4 Stars in the new issue of Romantic Times magazine. So far, RT has given every paperback of mine they’ve reviewed 4 Stars and I’m so thankful!

The reviewer was especially complimentary about Hara’s Legacy - she said, in part: “This riveting read delivers a solid plot with emotional and physical intensity… The characters’ strong feelings and sacrifices will have you believing in the power of love.”

I think that’s the nicest review I’ve ever gotten from them, so I’m a very happy camper today!

New Cover for Sons of Amber in Print!

Is that not a beautiful cover? The lovely and talented Stella Price created this fantastic cover for the print version of my first two Sons of Amber stories, due out in March from Phaze. Ain’t it great?

New Cover for Davin’s Quest!

Isn’t this a great cover?

For more information, check out my website. This book will be out in ebook formats on February 19th from Samhain.

Great News! 2008 EPPIE Finalist!

I’m thrilled announce that Hara’s Legacy is a Finalist in the 2008 EPPIE Awards in the category of Best Erotic Romance Science Fiction/Futuristic. I got an email this morning with the news and I assume the official announcement will be up on the EPIC website sometime soon. In the meantime, I’d like to congratulate all the entrants and finalists. Well done! And thanks to the judges who voted for Hara’s Legacy to this point. I’m truly honored.

Sweat 70 - Day 3

I managed to write a bit more than 2000 words yesterday, which was great, but I also played a little with graphics. I’ll post some of the results here once in a while to help keep me motivated.   For example…

Now that’s what I call motivation! *sigh* Guess I’d better get to the writing for today, but before I leave you, a little further tidbit from Mr. St. John (who looks a lot like the guy above)   Here’s a tiny bit of his first meeting with Callie, as it stands now. It might change as I edit this manuscript, but this is how I wrote it yesterday…

“You’re an empath?”

She nodded, making an amused yet curious expression as she no doubt tried to feel what he was feeling. Rick redoubled his shielding. He’d be damned if he’d let her read him so easily.

“Believe it or not, I’m a very strong empath, but you’re a tough nut to crack, Rick. Why such strong shields?”

“It’s pretty miserable where we live. It’s become second nature to block.” Rick grabbed at the most likely excuse he could find.

“You have some empathy?” Callie stopped concentrating and looked up at him with an open, friendly expression.

“Some, but not strong.”

“Telepathy?” she asked in his mind.

He liked the feel of her thoughts in the intimacy of his mind all too much. “Some. But not over great distances.”

“Me either. My range is limited to two or three miles.”

“Yeah, that’s about my limit too.”

“So what has you so conflicted about joining Davin’s program? I can assure you he’s not like the other Alvians.”

“Yeah, I get that, though it’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen. I never thought an Alvian could have emtion.”

“It’s rare. But it gives him a unique understanding of what our people are going through. He chose to come here first to test because he knew of all the Alvian settlements, this one treated humans worst.”

Rick was surprised by the statement, but oddly he felt a flare of hope kindle inside him. He looked around the room, glad to see Sadie among those chosen for the program.

Watching the dear older lady, Rick spoke more candidly than he otherwise would have. “I’ve been doing my best to help them. That’s why I don’t know if I should leave. Who will take care of the rest?”

A soft hand covered Rick’s and shocked his gaze back to the beautiful young woman standing in front of him. “You’ve done all you can here, Rick, and you can continue to work toward better conditions for humans even more effectively if you come with us. That’s what Davin wants. It’s what he’s working toward—freedom for us all to live in peace.”

“How do you know we can trust him?”

Callie’s smile lit the universe as she turned back to Davin and took his hand. “That’s easy, Rick. Davin is my husband.”