So this happened...

Can you guess where I was this weekend? Here's a hint:


If you guessed NY Comic Con then you win the prize! What is the prize you ask? Well, it's technically a surprise, but since you were all good enough to stop by I'll let you in on the secret. I think I told you I'm doing an article on the con for Fantasy-Faction. What you don't know is I got some amazing footage at one of the panels!

The Del Rey panel I went to on Friday was a lot of fun. We got to hear about all the cool new books coming out in the near future and heard from some of their authors.


One of the authors, Peter Brett (@PVBrett on Twitter), whom I had the pleasure of meeting the day before, decided last minute that he was going to do a reading from his yet to be completed novel Daylight War. And I got the reading on video! :D

I'll be posting it, along with a ton of pics when my article goes live later this week. I suppose that means I should probably get to work writing it. Right! To work with me!

Keep your eyes open, the article should go up later this week!

Happy Writing and Happy Reading! :)

Happiness is a New Book

I got two books in the mail over the last week! Two books that happened to be MUCH bigger than I expected! The first is Progeny: The Children of the White Lions, whose author, R.T. Kaelin (@AuthorRTkaelin on Twitter), was nice enough to send me a review copy and a cool bookmark to go with it.


The second is a signed copy of Tome of the Undergates I won in a Twitter contest from Sam Sykes (@SamSykesSwears on Twitter).


I'm kind of hoping Tome ends up being the next Fantasy-Faction book club read so I get a chance to read it sooner. It's currently winning by one vote, so I guess there's still hope!

In receiving these books I also made two important discoveries: A) I need to step up my reading quota quite a bit and B) I need a bigger book shelf! My current bookshelf is full, and I have boxes of books in the attic and under my bed. But none of them are as big as these. I may have to add a shelf over my computer in the near future, and this is a problem I am very happy to have.

Look for the reviews for both books in the (hopefully) near future!

Happy Reading! :)

Catching Up

Well a bunch of stuff happened recently and of course I didn't post about it. But as part of my new plan to organize my life better, I'm going to start blogging once a week. I'm even writing it on my calender!

So what did you miss?

Well first of all, I finished reading and reviewing the ARC of Hard Spell that I won from Angry Robot Books. Good, fun read!

Stan Markowski is a detective in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Like many normal detectives he has a partner, drives an unmarked car, and carries a gun. A gun loaded with silver bullets blessed by a priest. Okay maybe that’s where the similarities end. You see, Detective Markowski works in the Occult Crime Unit. Not that such a thing is unusual these days. After all, the undead are people too. And werewolves and witches have the same rights as everyone else, it’s just their cases sometimes need to be handled a bit…differently.

When an ancient magical tome is stolen, different is just what the town of Scranton gets. A serial killer is on the loose! A serial killer who just happens to be offing vampires. Are the two crimes related? Could the thief possibly be trying to revive some great evil and end the world as we know it using the missing book?

The facts point to probably, but the supernatural community is scared, and the answers to Stan’s questions seem harder to find than a witch at Christmas mass. And while tracking vampire killers, demon summoners, possessed women, and radical cult members is in the job description, generally Stan isn’t called on to do all of them at once. But with the help of his new partner Karl and a shady-looking gentleman named Vollman, Stan attempts to unwind the mystery and stop the killer before he (or she) can accomplish their evil task. Hopefully without getting himself killed in the process.

* * * * * * * * * *
Hard Spell by Justin Gustainis is the first book in the Occult Crimes Unit Investigation series. Its first person narrative follows Detective Stan Markowski as he and his partner Karl Renfer try to solve a series of gruesome murders.

I wasn’t sure what to expect with this book as I knew nothing about it until I received it in the mail (I won it in a contest done by the publisher, Angry Robot Books). The back blurb reminded me of the old cop series my sister and I used to watch on TV growing up and the story itself did not disappoint.

The setting for the story is an alternate version of present day. In the book’s altered history, supernatural elements from Europe (i.e. werewolves, vampires, and ghouls) were brought back to the States after World War II. While initially despised, supernaturals, or supes, were eventually granted equal rights with humans during the American Civil Rights movement. Now supes are everywhere, and just like humans some are law-abiding citizens and some are, well, less law-abiding.

Stan Markowski is the typical hard-boiled detective whose job is working on cases where either the suspect or the victim is a supe. He’s good at his job and bad at dealing with his family. He has skeletons in his closet, but is trying to do the right things in life. He’s not a super-genius but he is very streetwise and always knows when he’s in over his head, even if it’s too late to do anything about it. And in this world were goblins do meth and True Blood is a documentary, Stan is just trying to keep his town safe and do his best to keep his partner and himself alive one more night.

This was a really fun story to read. It wasn’t very deep and if you ever seriously watched cop shows on TV there won’t be a lot of surprises. But the whole concept of a world where you call 911 in case of emergency and 666 in case of a supernatural emergency is just cool in my mind. My favorite thing about this story is its flavor. Unlike some of the other urban fantasy I’ve read, this is a place where otherworldly things are no longer mystical and seeing a werewolf at the grocery store is something that most people take for granted. Overall it was an interesting take on the genre and fun read if you like cop/detective serials. And for myself, I will definitely be picking up book two!

Hard Spell is due out in the US on July 26th and is available now in the UK and in ebook format. The sequel, Evil Dark, will be available in April 2012.

For disclosure purposes, I won an ARC copy of Hard Spell from the publisher in a giveaway contest, but chose to review it on my own. Winning the book did not influence my opinion in this review.

What else? Oh!

I did a guest post on Amy Saunders' (@amy_saunders on Twitter) blog Amy & The Pen, about how writing changes the way you read. It was the first time I ever guest blogged for someone, and it was a lot of fun! You can see the blog post here. :)

Also there's a lot of stuff going on at Fantasy-Faction! There's a new writing challenge for July, which I may or may not have posted about already. This month's theme is freedom.


We have a bunch of entries so far. I'm still trying to decided what I want to write. I will probably end up rushing around on the last day trying to get something together again. I'm not very good at planning ahead (see the needing to get organized bit above).

There is also a new writing group on the forums called the 500 Word Club. Basically you pledge to write 500 words a day of your novel starting on August 1st. If you can keep it up for the whole year, then next summer you will have a completed your first draft! Here's the article our esteemed Overlord wrote up about it. And here is the thread where we will be egging each other on!

And last but not least, the site owner Marc Aplin (Overlord on Fantasy-Faction and @FantasyFaction on Twitter) has finally announced the soon to be implemented site overhaul! Lots of cool things coming including a podcast, YouTube site, and a Fantasy-Faction anthology! There are also two new members of the Fantasy-Faction staff: Paul Wiseall (@PaulWiseall on Twitter) who will be helping Marc run the site and create new content (such as the podcast) and myself (Autumn2May almost everywhere) who will be the new assistant-editor! We are all very excited about the new things to come and are very happy with how the website has grown in only the last 8 months. Hopefully it will continue to grow and we will be able to bring you even more awesome fantasy content!

Hmm...I thought there was one more thing...

Oh yeah! I won another book in a Twitter contest! I will soon be receiving Sam Sykes' (@SamSykesSwears on Twitter) Tome of the Undergates in the mail, which has been getting rave reviews on Fantasy-Faction! I can't wait to read it!

That's it for now. Promise I'll have another post up next week, which hopefully will include a review of Shadow Fox by Ashley Barnard (@wckdwriter on Twitter)!

Happy Writing! :)

Fine Art Print by irenesuchocki

New Books! :D

This has been a good book month! I have so far won three contests for free books! :D I won two ebooks from Lindsay Buroker (@GoblinWriter on Twitter): The Emperor’s Edge & Dark Currents! I won an ebook of Soul Born by Kevin James Breaux (@KevinBreaux on Twitter) in the Fantasy-Faction forums!

And also I won an ARC of Hard Spell by Justin Gustainis in an Angry Robot Books contest! Which is great because my husband stole my Kindle to read the Dresden Files.

My new shiny book!

On top of that, Ashley Barnard (@wckdwriter on Twitter) was kind enough to send me an ecopy of her book Shadow Fox to review!

I am a happy book monkey! Now I just have to find time to read and review them all. Looks like I'm going to have a very busy July! :)

My First Review!

Once again I have come to this input screen without re-reading my previous posts. Apparently I have no long or short term memory to speak of. Anyway, if I mentioned this before, just pretend you didn't hear it yet.

I belong to a fantasy website called Fantasy-Faction. They have an awesome forum and do article and book reviews on all things fantasy. At the beginning of February the man in charge put out a call for people to write up reviews and articles for the site, so he didn't have to do all of it himself. I was one of the people lucky enough to get picked! So now, once a month or so, I'll be writing a book review for the site. And my first review just went live today! I reviewed Furies of Calderon by Jim Butcher.

A single grain of sand can tip the scale. A single beat of a butterfly’s wings can add just enough wind to create a tempest. And the single action of one boy can change the fate of his homeland forever. Of course, that’s not what Tavi was thinking about when he shirked off his responsibilities for the evening to collect flowers at the request of the most beautiful girl in Bernardholt. But even as the ‘yes’ left his lips, the wheels of fate were already turning, propelling him forward towards a greater adventure then he could ever have imagined.

Tavi’s grandest hope for his future was simply to attend The Academy and make something of himself using his brains and wits. No one in Calderon Valley thought he would ever amount to anything. He was fifteen years old and still had no furies of his own. His aunt had a water fury and his uncle had both a wood and an earth fury. Even their simpleton slave Fade had a metal fury and some capacity to use it. But he would show them he could do great things even without an elemental fury helping him, if only he was given the chance.

However, there are consequences for every action, and his uncle’s anger for this one irresponsible act could ruin Tavi’s chances of ever leaving the valley. But how could Tavi have known the trouble that finding the sheep the next day would cause? How could he have known the great plans he was about to disrupt and the powerful eyes that would soon be focusing in on only him?

No one was supposed to be that deep in the pine hallows that day. No one was supposed to see the single Marat warrior that had crossed through the pass into the valley. And no one should have been able to escape him even if they had. However, as Tavi was about to learn, the simplest choices can have far reaching effects, and even a simple ‘yes’ can change history.

* * * * *
This was an interesting book. The plot, while not complicated, was good and the world was typical high fantasy, with just enough uniqueness to make it interesting. But the thing that made this story so hard to put down was the characters. Each person, no matter how small their roll seemed at first, had a greater purpose and their own unique challenges to overcome. They struggled through their normal lives, then when trouble came they faced danger and hardship as best they could, striving to rise above the everyday and reach their goals no matter the odds. And while most stories focus on some highly talented or gifted person destined to bring about great change in their world, the main character in this story was just the opposite.

Not only was Tavi young and inexperienced, he was also the only person in remembered history to not have an elemental fury companion. He was, as far as everyone around him was concerned, completely helpless, someone to be pitied and protected. Definitely not the type of person who normally sets off on a quest to save his homeland, or at least not the type that does so and returns to tell the tale. But it’s always more fun to root for the underdog. While he doesn’t possess the same gifts as everyone else, he still shows time and time again how a little courage and some thinking on your feet can make up for a lot in life. And unlike other books where the main character starts off magicless then awakens during story, Tavi stays furyless for the whole book. That somehow makes him even more appealing as a main character, because it’s easier to relate to him and makes his triumphs that much more triumphant!

The magic system in the story is also very interesting. It consists of spirits called furies, elemental beings of earth, fire, water, air, wood, and metal. They can affect objects of their specific element, giving the owners of air furies the ability of flight or the owners of earth furies the abilities to shape and move stone. Everyone at some point in their early teens or younger becomes bonded with at least one of these other-worldly creatures. Well, every human does anyway. The warrior tribes of the Marat that live just outside the Calderon valley do not have furies. They instead have animal totems, great beasts that they commune and speak with as brothers and sisters. They are not really human, and as such are treated like wild savages by the people of the valley, who drove them out just over fifteen years before the story begins. It is this tension between the Marat and the humans that threatens to erupt the entire valley into war.

I gave this book 4 out of 5 stars, mostly because of the wonderful characters and how easy it was to keep reading about them. They could grab you enough to keep reading in just a few short sentences and not let you go again for chapters and chapters. But by the end of the story it still had not reached 5 star status, simply because not a lot happened in this book. Sure it was 500+ pages long and I would have kept reading past that if it had been longer. And there was plenty going on, lots of danger and intrigue, but the plot portion of the book was very short and you get to the end of the book with a lot of, well, loose ends left. Now granted, this is the first in a series and I am definitely going to read the rest of it, but as a stand-alone book it’s just a little light on plot. But I think if you like character-driven stories and high fantasy; this would be a good book to try. I also have it on good authority that the next few books in the series are just as good, if not better then the first, but that’s a story for another day.

I'm not sure what I'm going to review next, but I'll let you know when I've decided. You can see my review on Fantasy-Faction here. There are also a bunch of other amazingly cool articles on the site, and I suggest you check them out!

In other news, I didn't make it to the second round in the Amazon contest. I was bummed at first, but I'm cool with it now. There were so many other amazing entries with ridiculously good pitches that I'm not really surprised I didn't make it. And since all they looked at was my pitch it didn't really upset me as much as if they had rejected my actual story.

Since I'm now on my own again as it were, I've started re-editing my first book. I just can't seem to leave well enough alone. I have ulterior motives this time though. I wanted to re-read it to get back into the flow of writing and even out my prose a bit (still too many adverbs).

And I still don't know how the whole story ends, but I have decided to keep the two books separate for the moment. I only split them originally because of the word limit in the contest, but I really do like the way the first book ends and the way the second book begins. So unless the story ends much sooner then I think it will, I'm going to keep them separate. The way it's looking at the moment I'm going to be running this story into a third book anyway.

That's my life at present. I have to make a decision in the near future as to what exactly I'm doing with these books when they're done. Self-publish? Submit some queries? I have no idea. Any of my readers out there have any experience and/or suggestions on the matter? All help would by much appreciated!

Have a great day! :)