Magus Gambit Cover Reveal

Release news and more as we get closer to the release date, which is currently September. If you haven’t had a chance to read book 1, Witchslayer’s Scion is available at Champagne Books or your choice of online retailer. The third book, Titan’s Ascent, it under contract and I have started book 4 but, I am planning on doing another project for Champagne before I launch ahead with that and make it more than a trilogy.

I will talk covers and other things later. I have been working on a few blog posts and I hit 35k on Book 2 of the Puppet Master Duology – and the supplemental novella is over 13k – two more night shifts then I am off for another tour of vacation. No travel plans, other than kayaking in the province even though it is so tempting to bomb down to North Dakota for a Ren Faire. Now that I have access to my laptop, I’m hoping to get half of Ballad edited (I need feedback from my betas, harumph harumph).

Thoughts on Julie Kagawa’s Iron Fey (1-4)

I met Kagawa at C4’s Lit Fest in 2014 and she’s generally awesome; we had a lot of fun on our panels together. She probably won’t remember me and when I say “I met Blah blah blah” assume unless I refer to them a lot they probably won’t remember me.

I try to read people I know, and had her work on my radar, but she’s more successful than most so reading her books was not a priority. Fast Forward to COVID and I can’t even really go to a bookstore so I start picking off my Goodreads To-Read List (which, for the record, if I read 60 books a year only from that list, will take me 11 years to accomplish). They had her books at both the physical and ebook library, so I figured cool let’s do it.  

I assumed The Iron Fey was going to be a lot like the Urban Fantasy Romance Trend, although she had other works this was the one I snagged ‘to-read’ it just took me (*glances* 7 or 8 years to get to it). Hey, I work a lot and have my own projects.

The story follows Meghan Chase, half-fey daughter of Oberon on the even of her sweet sixteenth birthday from our world who gets sucked into the Never Never to rescue her brother, where she discovers her true lineage and falls for a prince of the Unseelie/Winter court, in attempts to rescue her stolen brother from The Iron King, who wants the Half-Breed Daughter of Summer for his own devices. Summer and Winter Courts have been at each other’s throats for millennia; The Iron Fae is a new development, iron corrupts and often destroys the fae, and for the immortal but soulless sidhe death is to be forgotten and oblivion.

I’ll be honest the story isn’t my normal favourite set up, although when Kagawa does her own thing with traditional story items, I really enjoyed it. She weaves in multiple mythologies but it’s done in such a way that you don’t have to be super familiar with everything in order to enjoy the story. Many characters come into existence because of belief, so many characters want to be involved in story in our realm so that they can keep on existing.

The first three books are told from Meghan’s perspective and her defeating the Iron King, taking his power, and ultimately her reconciling her Summer and Iron heritage and becoming their Queen, keeping her subjects and Kingdom away from the other Fae Realms because of the dangerous reality of when Iron touches Summer and Winter courts or their subjects. Her Winter Prince Ash swears to become her knight, and in the third book, she commands him to leave her and sheds that bond, sacrificing their love so she can save the Iron Fae and give them a place in the Never Never, as well as force Summer and Winter into a bit of a better truce as Iron rivals them if they act up.

That would have been a decent enough ending, but Kagawa takes it up a notch with Ash deciding to forsake his immortality for her, earning a soul so he can be with her even though she will be forever young and he starts to age, despite already being millennia-old.

To me the stand-out of the final book was having Ash really come into his agency. He finds out that the girl he loved and lost isn’t completely gone, and he has a potential out – he can go back to being who he was, with her. Only, of course we know he doesn’t, and he then has to reconcile himself with what he had done as a fae. He has to get a conscience, which apparently Robin Goodfellow developed somewhere a few centuries back.

To me, the story threatens darkness but keeps it relatively PG13, making it suitable for younger readers and although other characters tease Meghan and Ash about being lovebirds, we never devolve into smut. You have characters who are dreadful, like the Big Bad Wolf, do heroic things, as well as characters who are amoral but generally very suiting for the story, such as the Caith Sith Grimalkin, who is probably one of the across the board fan favorites by nature of him at least taking the form of a snarky cat. Meghan joining both the Summer and Winter Courts isn’t treated as something good – she invokes the ire of Oberon’s wife Titiania, although personally I preferred the characterization of Queen Mab, ruler of Winter who must be cold, calculating, but dealing with the loss of her princes in one form or another.

I’m not the target audience, and apparently the story continues on following Meghan’s little brother once he’s grown up, but I say if you’re looking for a YA read, check it out.

I was chatting with my niece concerning how sometimes I think authors are constrained by publishers in order for it to still stay in that YA category, while still wanting to touch on serious and more adult topics. I think different folks are ready for different ideas at different times, but let’s talk about that on another blog post.

End of Round 1 of Vacation; Thoughts on Sound of Freedom

Not so much a review on the film, so much as the drama around it. It’s a solid film, terrible subject matter but I heard about it a few years ago and wanted to see it. Tried to see it a few days ago and the theatre was sold out; waltzed in last-minute post-swim and the theatre was almost sold out again at a 115 matinee on a Wednesday, so I guess lots of people are interested in seeing it at the one of two screens having showings in Winnipeg.

What I don’t understand are all the people decrying it as Right-Wing Propaganda; my world as a first responder gives me glimpses as to some of the underbelly most of us don’t like to talk about; I think it’s better to talk about the issues as opposed to letting them become taboo.

Slavery, in particular children trafficking, should never be a partisan issue. This effects everyone regardless of politics. On my Facebook, I regularly see people posting about dangers in around certain areas in Winnipeg, and that’s just the MMIWG centric concerns. I don’t care what your politics are; shoot I could argue if your issue is with the American coming in he couldn’t have done it alone; I could go on about the character of Jorge (I think I work with a guy like him…) but the issue isn’t just about central America and the US, it’s a global issue and many of my liberal-leaning and secular friends introduced me to documentaries about the subject.

The thing that got me thinking is often times, people look at me and my job and act like I’m some sort of hero, when in reality it’s in my nature to do a job like I’m doing. I don’t think about it too much, and when I see movies about guys like Jorge, Ballard and the guy from The Dropbox, everything I’ve done pretty much feels like a dirty rag compared to them and other unsung heroes really doing good in the world.

But, I’m reminded that when things seem bleak and like the problem is bigger than any one of us, that “What can I do? I can’t do much to solve the problem” no – no one is asking anyone to save the world and stop all the evils therein. To Quote Gandalf from The Hobbit,

“Saruman believes it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. I found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay… small acts of kindness and love.”

Talking to one of my younger cousin, who definitely has some sheepdog in him, I think many people want to do the big, splashy, heroic things. Once again, as a first responder, we train and train so when SHTF we don’t have to think, and we can improvise because when it rains, it pours. There’s a lot to be said for quiet acts of kindness that go unnoticed. I’m often frustrated – I think many times my kindness has been misinterpreted as weakness, but ultimately that’s on the other person not me.

That’s all I got to say about that, I guess. I kind of say something very similar in Ballad, but I’ll talk about my break and writing next.

My laptop died just before I went on vacation and I got it back almost two weeks later as it was a charger issue. I gave myself a list of goals which involved editing and writing more, as well as training and getting ready for the Police/Fire Games.

I pinched my shoulder and right now I think picking cherries or strawberries fixed it, because this is the best it’s been in a month, and it wasn’t kayaking, so the vacation came at a great time. I went to register for the games, and all my racquet sports are full. I was tempted to do archery, swimming, cycling, but I haven’t been training for them, so as of right now, I’m just going to hold off.

Writing-wise, I’m plugging along on Book 2 of the Puppetmaster Duology and another smaller project, my goal was to have the first half of the book edited this break, but so far my beta and my niece haven’t finished it (both have been busy; whatever I always have something else to work on) so I will hold off until I get feedback. I don’t need them to check my grammar, I want content suggestions so if I need to make swooping changes it’ll be easy. So it is possible I’ll be ready to find an editor for the winter, I would like to say 2024 but it depends on life, because it often has other plans. Right now, I am dealing with the two books with Champagne and not even thinking about Derelict Knights or fixing anything else up that’s sitting on the hard drive and either sending it off or self-pubbing.

But yeah – there’s no room for me at the tables any more so I have no plans for like Shelmerdines or whatever. Niece is saying we need to do shows, I’m working on it peeps but honestly summer is when I get to bike and play tennis so I probably am the least prolific in writing.  I got another tour off in early August, in which time I’ll probably be a lot more solid on the writing side as opposed to the drawing/painting side but, the weather’s been fabulous so I might just go kayaking and mountain biking.