Primrose To Me

I’m glad to know your name now.

I call this “the primrose bush”; Boxnoggin and I see it quite often on walkies. A kind soul on Instagram informed me that it’s a potentilla, which is a lovely name and makes him a cinquefoil. I’ll probably still call him Primrose, though.

It’s a habit by now.

The weather forecast says next week will be “excessive heat”, and I’m not looking forward to it. Naturally we wouldn’t escape the summer completely unscathed, but I was hoping the trend of cool nights would continue. Looks like we won’t get that grace, though. All the more reason to be up early, get Lord van der Sploot through his paces, and run my own corpse before it becomes gasping-hot.

That’s a problem for next week, not today. I woke up with the Civil Wars in my head and the new washer might be delivered before dinner, so it’s going to be busy. I may or may not have a chance to livestream, but there’s still plenty on the channel if that’s your jam. Priority has to go to wordcount, then everything else needing to be done today, then perhaps getting on-stream and nerding out about books.

Boxnoggin has just begun his early morning nap, which means I have a few moments to myself. Time to look over the day’s work and make a few decisions, then I can gulp the rest of my coffee and think about breakfast after it’s sunk in a bit. Food without caffeine just isn’t gonna happen.

Have a lovely weekend, my dears. Sirius is ascendant; I won’t be soaking my lungs in wine to beat the heat, but I’m sure having a functional washing machine will somehow help.

See you next week!

RELEASE DAY: The Salt-Black Tree

It’s official–the second and last book of The Dead God’s Heart is now out in the world!


The Salt-Black Tree

Nat Drozdova has crossed half the continent in search of the stolen Dead God’s Heart, the only thing powerful enough to trade for her beautiful, voracious, dying mother’s life. Yet now she knows the secret of her own birth―and that she’s been lied to all her young life.

The road to the Heart ends at the Salt-Black Tree, but to find it Nat must pay a deadly price. Pursued by mouthless shadows hungry for the blood of new divinity as well as the razor-wielding god of thieves, Nat is on her own. Her journey leads through a wilderness of gods old and new, across a country as restless as its mortal inhabitants, and it’s too late to back out now.

Blood may not always prevail. Magic might not always work. And the young Drozdova is faced with an impossible choice: Save her mother’s very existence…

…or accept the consequences of her own.

Now available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and independent bookstores

The soundtrack for the series is available here.


It’s…odd, to see this book come out. I’m four stories down the road–publishing is a delayed gratification game, always–and a lot of this duology was bound up with pandemic lockdown. It feels utterly weird to see it come to fruition. I was genuinely unsure if I would survive to see Nat’s story reach the world.

Yet here I am. Very, very strange indeed.

I’ll be taking most of the day off to hyperventilate in a corner, as is usual on release days. You’d think I’d get used to them, or that they’d become ho-hum. Nope, I will never become used to this, and they will never be ho-hum. I have to hope that despite some early review bombing, the books will get to the readers who need them.

Despite everything, Spring is on her way. And I’m content to have it so.

Good (Weather) Fortune

Little listening ears.

It’s been a good year for mosquitoes, but also a reasonably good year for my hostas, hellebores, and calla lilies. These babies in particular are loving the current conditions, and it’s one little bright spot in ongoing disaster.

So far we’ve escaped a heat dome or days-long pall of wildfire smoke. I know a lot of other locations aren’t so lucky, and am both grateful for and slightly ashamed of our good fortune. I suppose the trees are relieved too–or whatever trees have escaped this year’s neighborhood lumberjacking spree.

We live on a hillside, folks. Those tree-roots are keeping us from sliding into the bloody river, and I’m not seeing the trees being replaced. I’m sure this will all end well.

Anyway. I have a good Reading with Lili planned, but I don’t know if I can spare the time. Writing must take precedence. If I don’t manage today, it will happen next week. We’ll see, and in any case the weekend is chugging towards us at speed.

Suppose I’d best get braced.

Small and Beautiful

Tiny, tender shoots.

Boxnoggin needs a lot of walkies. He can’t run with me–he’s far too nervous, despite years of patient training, and doesn’t grasp the importance of staying in his “box” the way Bailey did almost immediately. He still requires exercise, however, and time spent with his nose in stuff. So we walk for a mile and a half, sometimes more, every morning. It wears him out for the rest of the day, and he’s a much different dog than the one we brought home from the shelter.

The walks are good for me, too. I get to let plot points move around inside my head, and see all sorts of tiny changes as the year progresses. There’s always something new, like tiny hairs on green fingers, leaves protecting tender inner cargo. What you can’t see is Boxnoggin below, busily attempting to find the best angle for peeing on the tree-trunk.

He focuses on the truly important things, while I simply wander with my head in the clouds.

Today is very busy. I hope I can fit in a Reading with Lili–last week’s was on Brave New World, and I want to do a companion on 1984. (Which will be super cheerful, I’m sure.) But I’m not sure if I’ll get to it between all the other errands, not to mention Friday Night Writes. At least the backed-up queue for Great Chapters is sorted, though it’ll take a month or so before we’re truly caught up.

Anyway, Lord van der Sploot needs a walk before anything else can happen, so I’d best swill my coffee and get started on the day. There will be something small and beautiful waiting for me, I’m sure–I hope your Friday is pleasant and your weekend just as exciting or as peaceful as you prefer.

See you next week!

Creative Clutch

There was a bit of a cover reveal yesterday–A Flame in the North got shown on Insta and Twitter, et cetera. (Subscribers have already seen bits and pieces of that book, plus the one after it.) I can’t really think about that right now with the release of Salt-Black Tree looming so close; getting release-day nerves for two books at once might well do me in.

In other good news, my shower is bone-dry. The dripping has indeed stopped, hallelujah and pass the butter. It wasn’t a huge problem–though whenever there’s a leak it’s only a matter of time before it accelerates–but now I don’t have to listen to water plonk-plonk-plonking while attempting to sleep. Consequently last night was very restful indeed, save for Boxnoggin being a bit miffed since it’s too warm for him to stick his nose in my armpit.

I never thought I’d see the day he didn’t want to cuddle with his schnozz in my axillary area, or even pressed against my jugular. Humans are so very odd; we think nothing of letting canid predators get their teeth close to that vulnerability. Of course, Box can’t even fathom the possibility of snacking on my entrails at the moment. I think he has a dim intimation that doing so would rob him of the cushy deal he’s got going on with regular walkies, cuddles, and bacon grease in his bowl all the time.

The wild isn’t calling this dog, no sir, or if it is he’s put her on hold.

So the score is: I’m finally running without the ankle brace; the bloody leak has been fixed (on the first try, even!); one book is due out next month; the Tolkien Viking Werewolves are finally inching towards their time in the sun. I should feel grand. In fact, I should feel damn near invincible.

Maybe it’s just free-floating anxiety, but all I’m feeling is the breathless sensation of waiting for another shoe to drop.

At least I found the next few scenes in both Highlands War and Gamble. I think there might have to be a fight in the former, which I’ll need to block out rather carefully. The latter is in the cat-and-mouse bit of a romantic suspense arc, so it needs a good double-cross relatively soon. Of course, after this upcoming weekend I have to shift gears, get the waiting revision for Sons of Ymre 2 dealt with–and good gods, that book feels like it was done ages ago–and turn back to writing fresh stuff again, probably within a matter of days. Good thing I’m used to working a creative clutch, so to speak.

I have a hazy idea for YouTube Live write-ins, but that might not come to fruition. I am far too solitary a creature. Still, I’ve been bowled over by the response to the short question-and-answer livestreams, so maybe that’s a thing that can happen. The trouble is, I have a face for radio and I am most definitely not a breathless, constantly yelling “influencer”. So it probably won’t work…but I’m kicking around the idea, just in case. You guys seem to like witnessing the creative process, though to me it’s almost boring because all the action is happening inside my skull.

Adapt or perish, swim or drown. Even my capacity for sudden change has been a bit strained in the past few years. It seems like things are turning around…unless, of course, the violent authoritarians pull more bullshit and the habitually supine centrists let them. Can’t worry about that right now, I have too much else on my plate.

So I suppose it’s off to walkies, getting a run in before the heat gets too awful, and a day of getting Kaia Steelflower through a duel (verbal or otherwise) as well as setting up a double-cross for a member of the Ghost Squad. In between all that I have to feed myself and get a few chores done. I’ll be scrabbling like a white rabbit, though there’s no Alice in sight.

Off I go then, revving the engine and popping the gearshift from first to third. Hop, hop, hop…

Soundtrack Monday: Where the Streets Have No Name

It’s time for another Soundtrack Monday! And we’re a bare month away from the release of The Salt-Black Tree, so I’ve been thinking about the Dead God’s Heart soundtrack a lot.

U2’s Joshua Tree album is perfect road-trip music, and I’ve played it more than once while the highway stretches under tires and the thrumming of an engine fills the bones. Of all the tracks, though, Where the Streets Have No Name is the one that really lets me know I’m driving. The instant the beat drops it feels like flying, and of course the lyrics cry out for wide spaces, tumbleweeds, and a ribbon of road stretching to an infinitely receding point in the distance. Nat Drozdova spends significant time in the desert during the second book of the duology, so naturally I had to listen to the entire album while writing her trip to a certain grandmother’s round, cactus-cloaked adobe.

I haven’t been on a road-trip in a while. For one thing, while the kids were young I couldn’t afford it, and nowadays there’s that damn plague. But maybe someday in a few years I’ll be able to. Normally I dislike travel with a vengeance; still, I think at least once more before I shuffle off the mortal coil I’ll just…get in the car, and go. I’ll have to somewhat plan the spontaneity, but that’s no hardship.

Nat’s story is very American; we do love our car rides, the slipstream and the hum of tires. The highways, freeways, and entire network of pavement or dirt roads on the continent has always made me think of veins, the railroads as a network of humming arteries to match. The vast sweep from sea to sea is a creature with several drowsing hearts, and the new Drozdova finds a few of them as she searches for herself, the truth, and the gem her mother wants–it’s no wonder it took me several years to be ready to write this story.

I think I did okay. It’s nice to reach some kind of peace with the work. At least I know it’s getting to the people who need it, and that’s a blessing.

I wonder what’s over the next hill…

Soundtrack Monday: Nuevo México

It’s another Soundtrack Monday!

I’m working on the third Ghost Squad story, so naturally I’m thinking about the first two. Damage is a very desert-oriented book, being set in the Southwest; as a result, some Ottmar Liebert found its way onto the soundtrack. His Opium double album is great writing music, and I was glad to have it playing a few times while sussing out just exactly what Vince was doing.

I especially love the Nuevo México track. For all his tamped-down silence there’s a great deal going on inside Desmerais, and the music often gave me a key to it. There was a lot of exploratory writing, just poking at him to see how he’d respond, but he only opened up for real once the kidnap attempt in the parking lot was over. With that done, I could fill in a lot of earlier holes, which was a blessing.

Anyway, the third book is also desert-themed, but further north–set in Vegas, the music is correspondingly different. Tax is just as repressed as Dez ever was, though he handles it way differently. The lighting in the book is different, too; I’ve talked before how I see what’s happening in a story, and how specific series or books have their own lighting and color palettes. In Damage the light was a very thick gold, in Duty it’s much grayer and rainier since that story’s set in Western Oregon. In Gamble, it’s back to gold–but a thinner, springlike instead of summer sunshine color. The similarities in palettes across the three are greater than their differences, but it’s amazing what a change a simple light tint can do.

There’s one more book in the series–Grey’s story, which is much closer to the East Coast. I’m sure that’ll change its color and its music, but that’s a problem for a different day.