Rhys Ford is an award-winning author with several long-running LGBT+ mystery, thriller, paranormal, and urban fantasy series, including Murder and Mayhem, a 2016 LAMBDA finalist. She is published by Dreamspinner Press and DSP Publications.
It is Sunday morning and I’ve been woken because of cat shenanigans and the dog needing to go to the bathroom. Today is Veterans Day as well as Remembrance Day, time when set aside a few thoughts those who were in the service and who gave all while in the service.
So wherever you are, please take a moment to stop and send a bit of positive wishes to the souls (both living and dead) who wore their uniform and protected our freedoms.
I was going to make a long post today, just rambling about this and that but I realize there’s kind of so much to say and I don’t really have a good game plan on where to start.
So, right now, I’ll leave you with my wishes that you have or had a good Sunday and that your week is a wondeful one.
Narrated by Greg Tremblay, the anthology will now be fully realized in its most vibrant form! Well, okay… now I’m getting a little bit crazy there with the wording BUT I do know Greg probably had as much fun voicing this book as we had writing it. Can’t wait to hear everyone’s tales of horror, machinations, comedy and love.
There’s a certain point in exhaustion when the air in your lungs feels musty and tired. Like you’re exhaling the dust collected on a bookshelf from a library no one remembers existing. The possibility of life and knowledge hover there, trapped in the specs and bits floating in the thin sunbeam butting through the building’s boarded up windows but there is no one there to drink them in, so they exist… in that fetid hot still space.
I’ve reached that tired.
A lot of it is from GRL. Not that GRL isn’t the time of the year but mostly because there’s little time to rest and breathe, even when I make promises not to do so much, to take some time. I never do. I lie to myself all the time.
GRL is an odd balance of personality as well. Not just dealing with other people but also myself. I feel uncomfortable at times with crowds but these are my people. Or at least most are. You are never going to be everyone’s friend and in a crowd of gathered like-minded people, that is still the case. All you can do is minimize any internal damage you might do to your psyche and manage all of that.
And be sure to reach out and enjoy the people you do rub well up against. Because no matter how much of on the run you are, those are the people who energize you.
Sadly, one of the Five is leaving us today to go back home. TA Moore’s been on this side of the world for nearly two months now and well, it is time to say goodbye and return her back home to Belfast and all things Christmas. Because well, the adorable delightful girl loves Christmas and also since it’s almost Halloween, she needs to get back home to decorate the walk.
I’ll miss her. BUT I won’t miss her flimsy attempts to kill me. You’d think whomever sent her as an assassin would have trained her up first.
I will be heading over there to that side of the pond in March. Looking forward to seeing everyone in London on March 14th for our every-so-often reader meetup near St. Pancras and then off to Paris to see everyone else there. I can’t wait to get to the Salon du Livre 2019 and of course once there it’s back again to the UK for a visit with the Five.
But first! Napping! And well, writing.
I’ve got a new book I’m working on which came about after staring at the top of Tamm’s head in Florida. It’s about a former covert government operative who was retired out after a HUGE burn of his identity and well, he took a few bullets and the former child star who dumps a hell of a lot of trouble in his lap. It’s set in Koreatown, Los Angeles and really, all Kuro Jackson wants is to run his ramen shop and have a nice, quiet life. Pity Trey Bishop is what Fate delivers him instead.
I’ve got stuff coming out soon… Like Cops and Comix so I’ll be talking a bit about that and my Half Moon Bay Christmas story, Tutus and Tinsel. *grins*
Let’s have a great Halloween and off to those other holidays who really need more bats, moonlight and things that go bump in the night.
Actually nothing funny happened. Mostly I’m dead fucking tired, trying to play catch up and man Halloween is staring me down.
I’ve got full-size candy bars and toys coming for the kids who knock on our door. We live in a rapidly changing neighbourhood. What was once the bastion of old suburbia is now becoming a multi-cultural community. It’s fantastic to see kids of different backgrounds (both social and cultural) coming to the door together, usually dressed as superheroes or princesses or sometimes, some odd combination of something I can’t quite figure out.
But regardless, they do come up the walk and knock on the door, shouting trick or treat.
I’m going to say this very clearly… your kid wants to dress up as Moana, that’s awesome and I applaud them. Because Moana is a fantastic character who happens to be POC. If they want to dress up as Stitch, gonna applaud that too because well, he’s an awesome character who happens to be an Alien of Blue.
The celebration of an individual is a fantastic thing. Celebrating what they represent is great. Celebrating a culture and exploring what it has to offer is beautiful. We need to celebrate cultures not exploit them and that’s where we need to be careful.
Know the difference. We cannot throw everything into the bin of racism if it is not racism. We need to think about what we’re doing and saying. We cannot accept the knee-jerk reaction of… well, I don’t know so I’m saying no to everything and I shall police that among other people. That’s how we got dogmatic religion. Don’t parrot. Don’t accept. Challenge and think. And search. Explore. Make good decisions. And if you have questions, ask.
You should never be told by someone you reach out to that it’s “Not their job to educate you.” It IS our jobs. It’s everyone’s obligation as a person of colour, regardless of the colour, to educate and share what we know. To show what to celebrate and to also share what we find offensive. Go out and teach. Go out and learn.
But most of all, go out and share… and celebrate both our differences and our commonalities.
I love writing complex characters. At first, they might seem pretty simple, even tropey. My heroine is “feisty” which in itself is a trope of the genre, but is she just an ordinary person who steps up to the plate…or is there more to her and her history?
My heroine Kylie Strange moves from California to Maine to start a new life and open Strange Herbs & Teas. But when doing some renovations, she accidentally breaks through a wall and finds an ancient book called “Booke of the Hidden.” When she opens it she unwittingly releases deadly creatures into the world that she is tasked with hunting down and returning to the booke. But along with the creatures of supernatural lore, the Guardian of the Booke is awakened, a demon called Erasmus Dark.
What happens when a four-thousand-year-old demon who is only awakened for a few days every several hundred years, finds himself confronted with someone like Kylie for the first time in his life, a woman of the 21st century who befriends a misfit coven of Wiccans to help her, and refuses to go down fighting? And what happens when this demon, who has a deadly relationship with all those in the past who opened the booke, finds himself falling for a human?
When I devise my characters, I like to give them full backstories, some of which the reader will never know about. It flavors their reactions to stress and gives them reasons for doing what they do. And an important part of that is their name, or the meaning behind the name. Character names are important to me. The names have to sound and look right on the page, and they have to mean something. Sometimes that’s just my little secret, but at other times, they can get downright Dickensian. Kylie Strange has a surname that might seem a little over the top at first, but having done the research, I found the “Strange” surname has been in New England since it was New England.
As for Erasmus Dark, well, the “Dark” name is self-explanatory. But the “Erasmus” part I chose for two reasons. One, it’s old and sounds out of date, much like he is himself. He’s a fish out of water. The last time he was awake, it was 1720. Now there are cars, computers, and women who aren’t afraid to go toe to toe with him. He certainly was no virgin for four thousand years but there were never any emotions involved. And now there is. Kylie seems to be his match and the big and bad demon must come to terms with what he has been required to do to the ones who opened the booke, but now there are feelings of protectiveness for this human. Being a deadly demon, he has walked alone and now he finds he no longer wants that. So his name was perfect. It means “worthy to be loved.” Is he? Does his past get in the way of that? Can he be worthy to be loved?
Kylie isn’t so sure she wants to get involved with Erasmus, but his broodiness and exoticism is very alluring. But so is the handsome sheriff in town. Kylie is a woman of her time and can’t decide, and does she have to? I guess readers will find out.
Award-winning author Jeri Westerson likes to make the fur fly in her new paranormal series Booke of the Hidden. The second book in the series, DEADLY RISING, will release October 23rd. See her “booke” trailer, friend her on Facebook, and sign up for her quarterly newsletter on her website BOOKEoftheHIDDEN.com.
Because I’m just recovering from the flight back from GRL 2018… I thought I’d drop a bit of Kai Gracen’s THIRD book for the morning cup of coffee….
This is from Jacked Cat Jive. Out in March 2019 AND in mass market. I’ll be sharing those ISBNs soon so you can order from your local bookstore and bring LGBTQ fantasy to your area!
Excerpt from Jacked Cat Jive….
“Kai, I’m going to try to get the transport open,” Ryder yelled at me as he sprinted across the cave floor toward our trusty centipede, where, by the brief glance I got, Kerrick was fighting to open the door and Mink was screaming his head off inside. Brief glance. For all I knew, they were in a rap battle and Kerrick was winning. “I saw a flamethrower.”
Not what I wanted to hear while clinging to an overgrown mutant white land lobster, but it was the least of my worries, especially when Cari opened fire at its underbelly. All that did was piss the worm off, and I was off on another round of trying to hold on while attempting to get my other knife loose.
The worm’s head was slick—too slick for me to grab—and when Cari’s shotgun blasts to its belly angered it, the worm reared up, nearly knocking me free. My hands were damp with sweat, and my fingers fumbled to unlatch the strap that held my knife in its sheath. Up close the worm smelled worse than an ainmhi dubh, but at that point, so did I. Ryder’s shouting joined Kerrick’s, and I heard the unmistakable hiss of the transport’s hydraulic doors opening.
“Great,” I ground out. “Now I’ve got to worry about a flamethrower. Let’s kill you quick before they make me a marshmallow.”
Join me and the other authors in the Devil Take Me anthology as we embarked on a week-ish blog tour leading up to the book’s release! AND TODAY IS RELEASE DAY!
Devil Take Me Temptation lurks around every corner in worlds sometimes dark, sometimes lurid. Giving in is both dangerous and satisfying, though never in the ways one expects. While these enticements offer a vast range of benefits and boons, the cost is a soul and the devil expects his due. Sometimes suave and charming or calculating and cruel, these devils have schemes and desires of their own. They can be creatures to run away from… or toward.
Join the most unique and celebrated authors of LGBT urban fantasy and paranormal fiction for a fast-paced and unpredictable ride, from a city on the other side of reality, to a world suspended in dusk, to a twisted version of the 1960s and 70s.
Meet devils in top hats and waistcoats, a defrocked motorcycle-riding priest, and a genderfluid antihero—among many more. Full of humor, romance, horror, action, intrigue, and magic, these stories have one common element….They’re one hell of a good time.
