Category Archives: League of Reluctant Adults

Blog, League of Reluctant Adults

Houston, there is no problem

So I gotta give mad props to Murder By the Book in Houston. I have heard nothing but awesome things about this indie bookstore and knew that someday I’d get out there when the right opportunity came along. Well, it’s come along.

They contacted my homie Jaye Wells (author of the Sabina Kane series and the forthcoming Prospero’s War series coming next year) and said, hey, Jaye, wanna come down to sign the CARNIEPUNK anthology when it comes out in July? We’d love to have you. Jaye relayed the invitation to everyone else involved in the anthology and SOME OF US SAID YES, including me! So I will be in Houston to sign CARNIEPUNK on July 27 with Jaye Wells and quite possibly some of the other authors in the anthology. Those that can’t be there will probably send along bookmarks or bookplates or nineteenth-century handmade Amish swimwear. It will be something of a shindig, methinks.

Understand that it makes absolutely no practical sense for me to do this. Royalties from the anthology are going to be split thirteen ways or something like that so I will make maybe nine cents per copy. (For more on why it makes no sense for authors to tour, please see this post that goes into numbers a bit.) But I have many impractical reasons for wanting to do this. I can make a list!

1) The last time I did a joint signing with Jaye—that was in Dallas last summer—we had a great time. Lots of completely awesome people showed up and I got to sign a pregnant woman’s belleh. (The kid has since been born and is named Oliver, I hear tell. Hi, Oliver!) I am fond of great times and would like to have another one. I feel certain that the people of Houston are as capable (maybe MORE???) of having a great time as the people in Dallas. It is a hypothesis, anyway, and I am anxious to test it.
2) Authors like to hang out with other authors every once in a while because otherwise we spend our lives alone talking to ourselves and wondering if we need to be medicated.
3) I have heard that Houston is a fairly spiffy city but one cannot take such assertions at face value. I must judge for myself. I’ve never been there and neither has my wife, so we’re going to explore a wee bit. Where should we go?
4) Someone will probably throw BBQ at me and I’M GOING TO LET THEM.
5) I’ve had a few readers ask me to come to Houston and I do like to make people happy if I can.
6) J.J. Watt. I had a dream in which he and I went on a cattle raid together and I was sure glad he was on my side. On the other side were cattle wearing Tom Brady jerseys. He sacked them all and I gave him a high five. It dislocated my elbow. I’m sure I won’t meet J.J. while I’m there, and it’s probably best for my metacarpals that we don’t because he would utterly crush them in a handshake, but I will feel more manly just knowing that we’re looking at the same sunset.
7) My brilliant, awesome friend Hillary Jacques and I came up with this anthology idea one night on Twitter. (Her story is in the anthology too!) We worked for a while to make this happen and as such it’s kind of a sentimental thing for me.
8) I’m going to get Jaye Wells to sign my copy because HECK YES I’m a fanboy. She knows this and still tolerates me. If Mark Henry or Nicole Peeler or any of the other authors make it down there too then OMG asdf;lkj!!!

Carniepunk CoverThough this appearance is primarily to promote CARNIEPUNK—a finer collection of urban fantasy authors you shan’t find!—I will of course happily sign anything from the Iron Druid Chronicles too. I will also sign foreheads and forearms and pregnant bellehs and if you bring a cat we will tape bacon to it and take a picture and send it to John Scalzi because he LOVES that shit.

Kids, please don’t tape bacon to your cat at home. Do it in an independent bookstore.*

Again, huge thanks to Murder by the Book in Houston for extending the invitation and for supporting urban fantasy. They are entirely responsible for making it happen. Please support them and/or your local indie bookstore. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone in Houston! If there’s someplace that I simply SHOULDN’T MISS while I’m in town, let me know!

*I’m kidding. Don’t do that.

Blog, League of Reluctant Adults

Still Life with Badass & Beer #3

Today we have a very special beer to pour into a very special glass. The beer is “imported from Vermont,” which makes it sound exotic somehow. (Hear that, everybody in Vermont? Your neighborhood is exotic.) The brewer of Hill Farmstead Anna—Shaun Hill—is something of a world-renowned chap who lives in the exotic realm of northeast Vermont. Anna is a honey saison brew that I can’t wait to try. Hill Farmstead crafts many small-batch, interesting beers. Thoughtful ones, too, like Phenomenology of Spirit.

The glass into which I shall pour the honey saison is emblazoned with the logo for Atticus & Oberon’s Sausage Fest. I’ve received many requests to sell these, and after looking a wee bit into setting up something on my website, it appears that it will take far more of my time and energy than I can afford. Instead, I’ll set up a shop with Cafe Press, so you can put the Sausage Fest on a shirt or hat, glass or shooter, whatever you’d like, and they’ll handle all the shipping and stuff and I can concentrate on writing.

Who’s the badass? Why, that’s a Pureblood Warpwolf howlin’ for some honey saison. He’s got a Death Howler spray attack and has an animus that allows you to ignore enemy defensive buffs. Whoa. It just got awful nerdy awful fast, didn’t it?

Hope your holidays were filled with warm fuzzies and that your new year will be full of trips to exotic locales like Vermont!

Blog, League of Reluctant Adults

The League is Made of Win!

Well, maybe. It’s certainly made of nominations! I’d like to give some high-fives to my homies in The League of Reluctant Adults who have been nominated in the Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Awards! The Romantic Times doesn’t just do romance—they have awards for Urban Fantasy, Mysteries, etc.

FOUR fabulous Leaguers were nominated in the Urban Fantasy Protagonist category! Behold:

Nicole Peeler for Tempest’s Legacy
Jaye Wells for Green-Eyed Demon
Diana Rowland for My Life as a White Trash Zombie
Jeanne Stein for Crossroads

Plus, in the Shapeshifter Romance category:

Molly Harper for How to Flirt with a Naked Werewolf
Michelle Bardsley for Must Love Lycans

And Michelle Bardsley again in the Paranormal Romance category for Never Again. Woo! Go Michelle!

In other news, thanks to my fabulous readers, Hounded has made it to the semi-final round in the Paranormal Fantasy category in the GoodReads Choice Awards! I appreciate the love very much; thank you! If you’d like to see Atticus and Oberon get into the finals, vote for Hounded before November 20!

Blog, League of Reluctant Adults, Publishing Stuff

The Disclaimer

If you’re an aspiring author, perhaps (I hope!) you are already aware that you should never, ever pay an agent or a publisher to be published. The way the business works is, legit publishers pay you; therefore, anyone offering to get you represented, published, or copyrighted “for a small fee” is a Dishonest Hole of an Unsanitary Nature.

Alas! We live in a world full of such Dishonest Holes—people willing to prey on other people’s dreams and laugh about it—or, in one case, get angry about it when they’re called out. Writer Beware and Absolute Write, both excellent resources that I highly recommend, have been targeted by a website called The Write Agenda. (I’m not linking to it because Dishonest Holes deserve no traffic.) Since The Write Agenda is anonymously operated, poorly spelled, and they are attacking/boycotting authors who are legitimately trying to help aspiring writers avoid scam artists, it’s pretty clear that The Write Agenda is a front for those same scam artists. We at The League of Reluctant Adults expressed our outrage that we weren’t boycotted too—because we are all proud to stand beside John Scalzi, Victoria Strauss, Jim Macdonald, et al. in their fight against Anonymous Dishonest Holes. That was on Oct. 7. I pulled out my big guns and called them cockwaffles.

The response of the cockwaffles has been to put me and some other authors on their brand-new “Recommended Authors” list. All of the authors are sci-fi/fantasy, and while I haven’t checked, I’d be willing to bet that all of them either commented on the League post of Oct. 7 or otherwise annoyed the cockwaffles with blog posts of their own. Ha! Aren’t they clever, recommending us instead of boycotting us? Whatever.

Now, part of me wants to respond precisely the way my fellow author Ari Marmell did. But he did it extremely well and I’m not sure I can say it any better. So I will confine myself to saying one obvious thing and one perhaps not-so-obvious thing:

1. Obviously, I do not want to be one of The Write Agenda’s “Recommended Authors,” because I despise everything they stand for.
2. Their use of Amazon sales rankings as if they actually mean anything demonstrates that they a) either don’t know jack about how publishing really works, or b) are assuming you don’t know jack about it, and regardless of which is true, you can’t trust a damned thing they say.

Blog, League of Reluctant Adults

Special Guests: Kelly Meding’s Spiffy Characters!

Kevin says: I have made no secret that I am a fan of Kelly Meding’s Dreg City series. She has a new series coming out this week that looks wicked cool—a superhero yarn called the MetaWars. TRANCE comes out on Tuesday—I can’t wait!—and I’m tickled to have Kelly here to say howdy. Please say howdy back n’ whatever else in the comments! Here she is…

Juggling two book series at once is a bit of a crazy-making experience, especially when it comes time to promote the new series and introduce it to readers.  Especially in introducing the MetaWars series to the readers of my Dreg City series.  MetaWars is both similar and different, and I’m very excited to offer it to the world.

It occurred to me that, instead of me introducing the individual new characters to readers, I’d let other characters do that for me. And not just any characters—the Dreg City characters will be doing brief one-on-one interviews of the MetaWars characters.  And if you haven’t read either series yet, or haven’t even heard of me, then I hope these Interviews will at least pique your curiosity.

Today Milo Gant, a Hunter in the Dreg City books, will be interviewing Renee Duvall, supporting heroine of the first MetaWars book TRANCE.  What follows is a transcript of their interaction, which includes five pre-written questions, and then a final statement from Renee.

If you have any questions for either character, feel free to ask them in the comments section!

Enjoy!

Renee: I don’t bite, sweetie.  Relax before you sprain something.

Milo: Sorry, it’s just…I mean, you’re, uh….

R: Tall? Gorgeous? Blue? Stacked?  All of the above?

M: Yeah.  I mean, you’re blue, yeah, and tall.  I mean, I’ve seen gremlins and gargoyles and shi-um, things before, but I’ve never seen a blue person.

R: I get that a lot.  And since you’re being kind of adorable about it, feel free to stare.

M: …..

R: But, you know, talk, too, while you’re staring.

M: Sorry!  So, let’s see…question one, who are you and what do you do?

R: I’m Renee Duvall, but on the job I go by the name Flex. It’s not a super original code name, I guess, but it’s to the point.  As for what I do, I used to be a Vegas dancer, but now I’m a superhero.  What do you do?

M: Me?  I hunt things.  Goblins and vampires and things.

R: Awesome!  Ever been to Vegas?

M: Er, no.  And I think I’m supposed to be asking the questions.

R: Oh, right.  Go for it, honey.

M: *coughs*  So question two, what do your Meta powers do?

R: It’s pretty awesome.  You ever play with Silly Putty?

M: Not lately, but I know what it is.

R: You know how you can pull it out and stretch it really long?  That’s me.  My arms and legs and neck, and even my torso can all stretch out really far.  Just not, like, my head or anything.  I can’t flatten out and slide my whole body under a door, but I could probably get an arm under there.  I’m super flexible, too.  It’s awesome to be able to grab something across the room without actually getting up to do it.

M: That sounds very handy.

R: Oh yeah. It can be pretty kinky, too, depending on your taste.

M: *blushes*

R: Do you have any cool powers?

M: I, ah, can throw sarcasm around with the best of them.

R: *giggles*

M: Moving on, question three…oh man.  Okay, do you have a love interest?  If yes, who?  If no, why not?

R: An interest?  Definitely.  I mean, have you met William Hill since he grew up?  He was cute as a teenager, but damn, the man is amazingly gorgeous now.  There is absolutely interest there, but my powers kind of freak him out a little, which is pretty hilarious because he has super-strength.  And yet my Flex powers freak him out.  *giggles*  It’s kind of adorable, actually.  How about you, cutie?  You seeing anyone?

M: No comment.

R: Come on, we’re all friends here.

M: This is not my interview.

R: Party pooper.  What’s the fourth question?

M: If you could be anything other than a superhero, what would you be and why?

R: Believe it or not, I really loved dancing. I’d probably do something a little more high class than a show off the Strip, but it made me happy.  As happy as I could be, I guess.  But this superhero gig?  It’s what I was born to do.  It’s why I’m blue, and it’s why I’m here.  You know?

M: Yeah, I do, actually.  Last question.  Who is the one person you most want to have look at you and say they’re proud?

R: …….

M: Renee?

R: I don’t really have anyone in my life except for my teammates. I never want to let them down, so them.  I want them to be proud of me.  I’m not always the most serious person in the room, but what we do as a team is important, you know?

M: Yeah, I do.

R: Do you have a team?

M: *nods* And I’d give my life for any one of them, so I get it.  You never want to be the weak link.

R: Exactly.

*pause*

M: Do you have anything else to add before we finish up?

R: Nothing fit for delicate ears.

M:  All right then, well—

R: Seriously, why aren’t you seeing anyone?  You’re adorable.

M: Um…

R: Do you need me to knock some sense into somebody for you?

M: Cut!

END

Blog, League of Reluctant Adults

My Octoberfest

This week I’m hanging out in Scottsdale, my oooooold stompin’ grounds. I’m always amused whenever I visit where I grew up: part of it is nostalgia, but part of it is from noting how much the city has changed.

I’m staying at this resort thingie where my wife and I have a timeshare doodad. We got suckered into it when we were young, but of course you can’t get rid of them. We don’t trade or anything like that; the resort is nice, so we visit often and it’s a very cheap sort of staycation thing.

Of course, since it’s a timeshare joint and people are exchanging their weeks, whenever we go we’re the only locals there. There are people from all over the place, and the resort caters to the idea that everyone is there to play golf or take horseback rides in the desert. But every Monday, they bring out this dude by the pool to play steel drums and sing the same ten songs on top of a drum machine loop. He wears a really loud Hawaiian shirt—in the desert—and he sings a respectable ultra-vanilla karaoke version of several oldies.  His adaptation of “Margaritaville,” for example, isn’t all that bad with the island flavor to it. But I wanted to punch him for what he did to Otis Redding. Heck, Otis Redding would want to punch him. “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” is not a reggae song, but he played it that way. Ears bleeding, I fled the pool to blog.

I’m working on TRAPPED these days. I haven’t updated my word total to the right (yet), but I will soon. I keep getting distracted by stuff. What stuff? Stuff like this amazing kerning game that will complete suck you in if you’re a type nerd. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Thanks to Nicholas Olivo for sending me that link.

Also, I contributed to a massive post at The League of Reluctant Adults on Writer Beware and Absolute Write Water Cooler. My contribution got noticed and Tweeted by none other than Mr. Neil Gaiman, so that completely made my weekend. Thanks to the many people who commented and demanded that they also be boycotted by the cockwaffles at The Write Agenda, the other League authors and I will be donating our dollars to Writer Beware and Absolute Write!

I’m writing this at the Desert Ridge Barnes & Noble in Scottsdale, where an incredibly spiffy person named Lorien works. They have my books on a table behind the info desk there, right next to such amazing novels as The Name of the Wind and The Way of Kings and so on. I signed the series—all they had in stock—so head on up there if you get a chance!

In Indie bookstore news, I just found out that I’ll be at a shindig near the holidays at The Poisoned Pen in south Scottsdale (south siiiiiide!). On Sunday, December 11, at 2 pm, I’ll be showin’ up there with a whole bunch of other local authors. More on that when I hear who else is going to be there, but if you’d like something personalized for the gift-givin’ season, that’s where I’ll be. If you live far, far away, like in Malaysia or the Mongolian steppes, or maybe just Florida, you can also order signed and personalized stuff from The Poisoned Pen now using the info on my books page—they will ship internationally and have me write down whatever you’d like. :)

Rest of this week will be spent writing, except for when I’m kerning online or playing Warhammer with the Confederacy of Nerds. Hope you’re all enjoying October so far. :)

Blog, League of Reluctant Adults

The League Rocks!

I have, on occasion, been accused of immaturity. On every such occasion, I have been guilty—except for that one episode with the can of beer and a rubber chicken. That was an experiment.

My chronic immaturity is why I’m proud to be a member of The League of Reluctant Adults, a group of urban fantasy and paranormal romance authors with similar issues. They also happen to write really good books.

Jeanne Stein, for example, just got herself on the NYT Bestseller list with her contribution to Hexed, an anthology of kickass urban fantasy that came out on the same day as my book of the same name. Jeanne also writes a spiffy vampire series called The Anna Strong Chronicles. I’m gonna paste in the Publisher’s Weekly review of The Becoming, her first book, because they nailed it at the end when they spoke of her career:

Anna Strong can’t face herself in the mirror—not because she left her teaching career to become a bounty hunter or because she’s torn between her boyfriend and a new suitor, but because she’s been turned into a reflection-deficient vampire. After being savagely attacked by one of her marks, Anna is left for dead—only to become, surprise surprise, undead. Helping her come to terms with her new, nocturnal lifestyle is an attractive doctor and vampire by the name of Grant Avery. Anna’s new assignment is to find and destroy the rogue vamp that turned her and who is leaving a path of violent destruction in his wake. With plot twists, engaging characters and smart writing, this first installment in a new supernatural series has all the marks of a hit. Anna Strong lives up to her name: equally tenacious and vulnerable, she’s a heroine with the charm, savvy and intelligence that fans of Laurell K. Hamilton and Kim Harrison will be happy to root for. As Anna tries to temper her new bloodlust with her lingering humanity, the trauma of her “becoming” is as compelling as the action-packed story line. If this debut novel is any indication, Stein has a fine career ahead of her.

Coming out July 5, K.A. Stewart’s second Jesse James Dawson novel, A Shot in the Dark, is sure to rock your socks. (Or, if you prefer the letter W, it will rawk your sawks.) High five for the badass leather jacket! I need to get me one of those with a handy inside pocket for a flask.

Here’s the scoop on her book: Jesse James Dawson is a Champion, putting his life on the line for those foolish enough to bargain with demons and fighting to save their souls. But even a Champion needs some downtime, so Jesse takes his annual camping trip to Colorado for some male bonding over friendly games of paintball.

Unfortunately, the fun and war games are interrupted by a pack of creatures summoned up from the very depths of hell by an entity Jesse prayed he’d never see again. With the lives of his friends and a teenager’s soul on the line, Jesse’s only hope may lie with an even more dangerous enemy–his personal demon, Axel…

 

 

Also coming up on July 5, My Life as a White Trash Zombie by Diana Rowland! Can I just say how much I love this cover for a minute?

This is by Dan Dos Santos, same guy who does the Patricia Briggs covers for her Mercy Thompson series. He won a Silver Medal at the Spectrum Awards for it. And there’s a spiffy blog post where he walks you through the process of creating it. I want a big freakin’ poster of this cover. Or maybe just the tattoo on her shoulder. “I LOVE BRAINS.” That’s an instant classic.

And you know what? The pages inside are filled with awesomeness! Here’s the blurb: Teenage delinquent Angel Crawford lives with her redneck father in the swamps of southern Louisiana. She’s a high school dropout, addicted to drugs and alcohol, and has a police record a mile long. But when she’s made into a zombie after a car crash, her addictions disappear, except for her all-consuming need to stay “alive”…

BRAAAAAAAINS. Cannot. Wait.

 

Two of my favorite series from a couple o’ my favorite peeps continue this summer! Right after the holy nerd holiday of San Diego Comic Con, we get treated to books by Nicole Peeler and Kelly Meding!

Eye of the Tempest is Nicole’s fourth book (coming out July 26) and Jane True is one of my favorite heroines. Nicole is an auto-buy for me and her books always make me laugh out loud. Of course, Nicole herself makes me laugh too. Right now she’s in Pennsylvania and jonesing for some decent Mexican food because you can’t get any where she’s at. Please tweet pictures of yummy Mexican food and margaritas to @NicolePeeler because it’s fun to torture your friends (and random authors you don’t really know). Don’t worry, she won’t get mad at you. She’ll get mad at me and send a ninja poodle to hump my leg. Here’s the skinny on Jane True’s fourth adventure: Nothing says “home” like being attacked by humans with very large guns, as Jane and Anyan discover when they arrive in Rockabill. These are professionals, brought into kill, and they bring Anyan down before either Jane or the barghest can react. Seeing Anyan fall awakens a terrible power within Jane, and she nearly destroys herself taking out their attackers.

Jane wakes, weeks later, to discover that she’s not the only thing that’s been stirring. Something underneath Rockabill is coming to life: something ancient, something powerful, and something that just might destroy the world.

Jane and her friends must act, striking out on a quest that only Jane can finish. For whatever lurks beneath the Old Sow must be stopped…and Jane’s just the halfling for the job.

I’ve been gnawing at a strip of rawhide marinated in whiskey waiting for Kelly Meding’s third Evy Stone story, Another Kind of Dead, and it’s not just because the cover model has fabulously feathered hair the likes of which haven’t been seen on this planet since 1985. It’s not just because she can apparently call down green fucking lightning to take out those pesky trains. It’s because Kelly’s Dreg City is a fascinating world and I can’t wait to see what happens there next! Like, you know, MAD SCIENTISTS! It comes out Aug. 2. Here’s the blurb:

Been there. Done that. Evy Stone is a former Dreg Bounty Hunter who died and came back to life with some extraordinary powers. Now all but five people in the world think she is dead again, this time for good—immolated in a factory fire set specifically for her. Evy and Wyatt, her partner/lover/friend, can no longer trust their former allies, or even the highest echelons of the Triads—the army of fighters holding back from an unsuspecting public a tide of quarreling, otherworldly creatures—they can trust only each other. Because when the Triads raided a macabre, monster-filled lab of science experiments and hauled away the remnants, they failed to capture their creator: a brilliant, vampire-obsessed scientist with a wealth of powerful, anti-Dreg weaponry to trade for what he desires most of all—Evy Stone: alive and well, and the key to his ultimate experiment in mad science.

Coming soon to a digital outlet near you, some stuff to get your motor runnin’: Wild & Steamy, a self-published collection of spin-off novellas from three fabulous novelists, including the League’s own Carolyn Crane. Her Disillusionist series has been optioned for a TV series, and this collection includes a story from that world! Exact date for release of this is still a bit unclear, but it’s supposed to be late June/early July, so keep checking Carolyn’s site for updates!

Heck, keep checking here for updates…I might have forgotten something and will shortly have my short n’ curlies yanked out by the League’s enforcer, Mario Acevedo. He carries a tiny pocket shiv with him wherever he goes but disguises his menace with friendly Hawaiian shirts. Don’t fall for it, friends! Mario is fully weaponized!

Coming soon: pictures of pretty things. Questions about egg sacs. And doggies.

 

 

Blog, League of Reluctant Adults, Publishing Stuff, writing

Release Day Shenanigans!

HOUNDED is now available! I'm a real author! Squee!

Well, I’ve only waited twenty years for this day. What shall I do first?

Coffee! Ahhhh.

Right. Next, how about a handy-dandy list of all the places I’ll be on the Internet(s)?

1. John Scalzi’s Whatever blog, where I’ll be featured on The Big Idea sometime today.
2. Many o’ my friends in The League of Reluctant Adults graciously let me guest blog in their spaces about various doodads, and the next six are they: first, I’m at  The Biting Edge talkin’ about the query letter that got me my spiffy agent. That’s the blog of Mario Acevedo and Jeanne Stein, both of whom write excellent vampire series.
3. Over at the blog of urban fantasy author J.F. Lewis, I share my looong path to publication to give toiling writers hope. If a day like this can happen for me, it can happen for you.
4. Some time ago, author Kelly Meding challenged me to insert something into a book of mine and I manfully made it happen. I return the challenge on her blog and she has NO HOPE of meeting it. Mwah-ha-ha-haaa!
5. I discuss my back-to-back-to-back release schedule at Stacia Kane’s blog because she went through a very similar schedule last year with her Downside Ghosts series.
6. I want to start a flagon revolution. Jaye Wells, author of the Sabina Kane novels, shares this passion, so I’m talking about it over at her blog.
7. Because I’m a nerd, I’ve been working on a card game based on the events of my books. It’s the kind of thing that makes nerds happy. I spill the beans and give a sneak peek at the game over at the website of Dr. Nicole Peeler. She’s also doing a giveaway for me, so check that out!
8. I think I’m supposed to be on the blog of The Guide to Literary Agents today. If not, oh well, it’s a cool blog anyway!
9. I have an interview up today at the spiffy book blog called The Qwillery. There’s a giveaway going on there too! I think. I’m having trouble keeping track of this stuff.
10. My run at Babel Clash continues with Chris Wooding. Have you seen this yet? We started on April 26.

In all likelihood I’ll be elsewhere as well. I think I’m supposed to have something on the RTBookReview blog, but, um…not sure. Some reviews might pop up too, and I’ll do a roundup of those in a couple o’ days. Aside from the web, I’ll be tweeting more than usual today. Part of what I’ll be tweeting is my manic drive around the valley going into bookstores and signing whatever they have in stock.

Something else I will most likely tweet is a 140-character SQUEE! HOUNDED is finally published! To my editors, Tricia and Mike, I give you an uncomfortably long virtual hug! Thank you so much for your expertise and your enthusiasm for the Iron Druid! And to my agent, Magic E, you are the disco to my fries.

To the book bloggers and reviewers who have been so kind to me with your reviews n’ interviews—Jessica, Kristin, Mihir, David, Gail, Sally, Kat, Joanne, and more—can I just say how grateful I am that you take the time to promote genre fiction? I didn’t realize how many bloggers were out there or how awesome they were until I kind of got into this gig. I hope I get to meet you someday. Literate people rock.

For the celebratory dinner, I’m headin’ to Rúla Búla, the best darn Irish pub an Irish lad could wish for, either real or fictional. I go there in real life, and Atticus goes there in fiction—often. You should too, if you can! Cheers, my dears; my flagon runneth over. I hope you enjoy the adventures of Atticus n’ Oberon. :)

League of Reluctant Adults, writing

Go get the male

So, I did an interview thingie last week where I had to differentiate my UF hero, Atticus O’Sullivan, from other UF heroes. The key to the question was the word heroes, not heroines. There are considerably fewer UF heroes on the shelves than there are UF heroines, and if you’re talking about UF heroes written by males, the list gets even smaller.

Aside from being the only Druid lead in UF, Atticus is quite different from other heroes—but I don’t want to re-answer the question right now, especially since the interview hasn’t been published yet. Instead, I’d like to talk about what happened to my brain. Under the intense pressure of the question (GAH! 5 jillion foot-pounds o’ PRESSURE!) I could only think of three male protagonists written by males. I knew there were more—really good ones too!—but only three came to mind. Perhaps that’s my mental max. Here are the ones I didn’t think of at the time but SHOULD have: Harry Connolly’s Ray Lilly, Mike Carey’s Felix Castor, and Jon Levitt’s Mason. (And I know there are more out there but I haven’t read them yet.) The ones I did list were Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden, Ben Aaronovitch’s Peter Grant, and Anton Strout’s Simon Canderous. Everybody’s heard of the first guy. I’d just gotten finished reading Midnight Riot by Aaronovitch, so it’s no wonder I thought of him (good book!). But as I was twitching out my last muscle spasms from the adrenaline high born of INTENSE PRESSURE, I got to thinking how Simon Canderous stuck in my head. I found Dead to Me, the first book in his series while browsing in the bookstore (“Oh, cool!” I said. “There’s actually another dude hanging out here!”) and since I was all caught up on my Butcher and looking for something different, I bought it. Turned out to be quite entertaining—Strout is fond of puns, which makes me fond of him, and Simon Canderous has a really interesting magical power (Psychometry!) with some complicating side effects in his personal life. I found myself smiling as I read it and occasionally laughing out loud. I love it when I run across good reads like that. But why did I have to find this guy by accident?

A bit later on, I got myself invited into the august body of authors known as The League of Reluctant Adults and discovered that Anton Strout was a founding member. This confirmed my strong suspicion that he is cooler than me (but I suspect that of nearly everyone). Indisputably, though, he has a gigantic pair of titanium balls because he is the Sworn Mortal Enemy of Patrick Rothfuss. I mean, if you have THAT on your resume, there’s simply no way people can doubt the capaciousness of your sack. He even survived a concerted effort by Rothfuss to have him assassinated through the powerful medium of fortune cookie suggestion! Behold:

My bowels would liquify if Patrick Rothfuss engineered a fortune cookie campaign like that against me. But not Anton!

I have since traded some amusing emails with Anton and read more of his books—I just got finished with my sneak peek of his latest, Dead Waters (out February 22).

He continues to entertain and poke fun at urban fantasy tropes, and Simon Canderous deserves to be among the top male protagonists in urban fantasy. He is among the top in my mind, clearly. If you’ve never tried him out, there are four Simon Canderous novels to choose from: Dead to Me, Deader Still, Dead Matter, and the above Dead Waters. Time to go get the male!

If you’d recommend any other male protagonists in UF, please do in the comments! Might as well swell the TBR pile!

League of Reluctant Adults

I’m a Reluctant Adult

No…really! I’ve joined the League of Reluctant Adults at their invitation, and I’m thrilled! What is the League?


Well, it’s a group of 23 authors (including yours truly) who write Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance. We get together during conventions and whatnot to hold group signings, do unspeakable things to action figures, etc. I haven’t met any of my fellow Leaguers in person yet, but I’ve read quite a few of their books and I know from that experience that they’re brilliant. For example, there’s Nicole Peeler, Kelly Meding, Stacia Kane, Cherie Priest, Anton Strout…and more!


Go visit the League here and follow us! Nicole Peeler is introducing/hazing me sometime today on the site, so you’re sure get a laugh or two. You might have to scroll down to find me (depending on when you click over there because two other authors will be introduced), but it’ll be worth it—Nicole is pretty funny.