 Today's usual episode of Hidden Face is postponed until next Friday in favor of a celebration for my new novella, Wings Beneath Water, which releases today!
If you aren't part of my email list, you want to be, because you'll be getting some goodies in your inbox today. What's WINGS BENEATH WATER? Dragons. Legends. An ancient power. And two brothers who refuse to give up on one another. Click here to check out the description, book trailer, and reviews, and to buy your own copy! In the spirit of celebration, here are some special treats:
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 This past week, my main character took matters into her own hands and decided for me how The Seeing Queen (Book 3 of the Firewing Chronicles) was supposed to end. Being the spaghetti-brained gal that I am, that experience made me think more deeply about life.
 “Pereleth,” Edric said. “The City of Water. The Old City, at the center of the Pereleth, was built on an actual island in the center of the lake. The latter portions of the city were built directly over the water.”
“An island on an island?” Katryl smiled at the irony. “A little like the Septeru themselves,” Edric answered. “Isolation within isolation.” Last week, I introduced you to Katryl through excerpts from my work in progress, The Seeing Queen (Book 3 of the Firewing Chronicles). This week, meet Edric, the man who has acted as her guide, protector, and guardian since Book 1.  “I thought I had masked my accent," Katryl said.
“When you are taken off-guard, you sound far too Dashani.” “Dragon’s teeth!” “And the swearing makes you more Dashani than ever.” Because I'm up to my eyeballs in my NaNoWriMo work-in-progress, The Seeing Queen, Book 3 of the Firewing Chronicles, I figured it'd be fun to present five juicy excerpts from the book (in addition to the one above). What inferences do you make about Katryl's character from these excerpts? I'd love to know! Some of my favorite quotes are funny, but a number of them fall in line with my #TruthInFiction philosophy, which posits that sometimes it takes a story to tell us some deep truth in a way that is more powerful and more memorable than simply saying, "This is true."
And yes, you'll notice that the Lord of the Rings and Doctor Who show up more than once. That should tell you something about them.  This week in The Dying Prince, I wrote an important scene in which one of the characters is able to get closer to their mysterious enemy--the Forbidden--than any one else has gotten so far. I needed to reveal enough to give the story a little more momentum--more questions, more chills--but not enough to blow all the secrets in Book Two that should be discovered throughout Books Three, Four, and Five.
I began to write the scene with the appearance of a nebulous figure:  Okay, since it's the day after Christmas, we have gifts on our mind--gifts that we are psyched to have gotten and gifts that perhaps weren't so enthusiastic about. (Personally, I've never had one of those.) So today I am giving you a peek at gifts: the Gifts of the nations in The Moonstone, the unwanted gift that Katryl received--her mother's Moonstone, and the awesome gift I have for YOU!
 This week I ran into an interesting snag as I wrote The Moonstone: How do you keep track of time while you are underground?
Here's the background: Katryl and her companions accidentally wind up in Undercountry, a vast kingdom under the earth whose inhabitants have not seen the sun for a thousand years. There are no days and no nights, no natural wake and sleep cycles, no seasons, no celestial bodies to mark the passage of time--nothing by which we would normally keep time.  This week, I made it past 50,000 words in my novel The Moonstone. This is a HUGE milestone, because it means that I am a NaNoWriMo winner. Cue the next question: "So what does that entitle you to?" Bragging rights, mostly, but also the right to wear a cool winner's T-shirt and to get a few free goodies, including a certificate validating my accomplishment. Since this is my first NaNoWriMo, and I joined last-minute on a whim, I am pretty excited that I have made it this far.
So, in celebration, here are some of my favorite excerpts from the story and a behind-the-scenes peek at how I designed the cover.  Katryl, the main character of my NaNoWriMo 2015 project entitled The Moonstone, excels at archery. But the techniques that I describe her using in my book are not the sort of techniques you'll hear about in Hollywood, because, as it turns out, Hollywood has got it wrong. When ancient peoples used bows and arrows, they developed techniques that work while you are moving, riding a horse, and in the heat of an actual battle. Here is the video that helped me discover some of these techniques:
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