Excerpt of Unnatural Order Vol. 1: The Prisoner by Christopher Yost and Val Rodrigues

I am thrilled to be hosting a spot on the UNNATURAL ORDER Vol. 1: The Prisoner by Christopher Yost & Val Rodrigues Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out my post and make sure to enter the giveaway!

Excerpt of The Quelling by C.L. Lauder

I am thrilled to be hosting a spot on the THE QUELLING by C.L. Lauder Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out my post and make sure to enter the giveaway!

 

Author Evelyn Arvey Reveals Her Dream Cast

I am thrilled to be hosting a spot on the THE ARCHITECT OF GRAYLAND by Evelyn Arvey Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out my post and make sure to enter the giveaway!

Author H.S. Gilchrist Reveals Her Dream Cast for The End of the World

I am thrilled to be hosting a spot on the  THE END OF THE WORLD by H.S. Gilchrist Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out my post and make sure to enter the giveaway!

 

Author F.P. Trotta Reveals Their Favorite SciFi Books

I am thrilled to be hosting a spot on the INTERGALACTICA by F.P. Trotta Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out my post and make sure to enter the giveaway!

 

Author Jodi L. Cox Shares her Top Book Recommendations

I am thrilled to be hosting a spot on the NETHER AFTER by Jodi L. Cox Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out my post and make sure to enter the giveaway!

 

Excerpt of The Meister of Decimen City by Brenna Ranney

I am thrilled to be hosting a spot on the THE MEISTER OF DECIMEN CITY by Brenna Raney Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out my post and make sure to enter the giveaway!

 

Excerpt of Bonding by Emily Pearson

I am thrilled to be hosting a spot on the BONDING by Matthew Erman & Emily Pearson Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out my post and make sure to enter the giveaway!

 

Excerpt of The Willing by Lindsay Lees

I am thrilled to be hosting a spot on the THE WILLING by Lindsay Lees Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out my post and make sure to enter the giveaway!

 

Excerpt from Star Wars: Queens Hope by E.K. Johnston

I am thrilled to be hosting a spot on the STAR WARS: QUEEN'S HOPE by E.K. Johnston Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out my post and make sure to enter the giveaway!

 

Trailer Reveal for The Lords of Invention by Trenor Rapkins

Today Trenor Rapkins and Rockstar Book Tours are revealing the trailer for THE LORDS OF INVENTION, his Steampunk Graphic Novel which released on March 10, 2021! Check out the awesome trailer and enter the giveaway!

Excerpt of Star Wars The High Republic: Midnight Horizon by Daniel Jose Older

I am thrilled to be hosting a spot on the STAR WARS THE HIGH REPUBLIC: MIDNIGHT HORIZON by Daniel José Older Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out my post and make sure to enter the giveaway!

 

Release Day for Shadow Bound Souls by Steve Rudy

I am thrilled to be hosting a spot on the SHADOW BOUND SOULS by Steven Rudy Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out my post and make sure to enter the giveaway! Link in bio.

A Deleted Scene from Aur Child by I.S. Lee

I am thrilled to be hosting a spot on the AUR CHILD by I.S. Lee Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out my post and make sure to enter the giveaway!

Review of The Edge of Forever

I received a copy of The Edge of Forever by Melissa E Hurst in exchange for an honest review and that is what you’re getting. I will endeavor to articulate my thoughts as best I can so sit back, relax, and enjoy.

In 2013: Sixteen-year-old Alora is having blackouts. Each time she wakes up in a different place with no idea of how she got there. The one thing she is certain of? Someone is following her.

In 2146: Seventeen-year-old Bridger is one of a small number of people born with the ability to travel to the past. While on a routine school time trip, he sees the last person he expected—his dead father. The strangest part is that, according to the Department of Temporal Affairs, his father was never assigned to be in that time. Bridger’s even more stunned when he learns that his by-the-book father was there to break the most important rule of time travel—to prevent someone’s murder.

And that someone is named Alora.

Determined to discover why his father wanted to help a “ghost,” Bridger illegally shifts to 2013 and, along with Alora, races to solve the mystery surrounding her past and her connection to his father before the DTA finds him. If he can stop Alora’s death without altering the timeline, maybe he can save his father too.

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My Review of Fire and Flood

  “And then I’d have to decide if I really wanted something exciting to happen or if I just liked to dream”

Tella Holloway is losing it. Her brother is sick, and when a dozen doctors can't determine what's wrong, her parents decide to move to Montana for the fresh air. She's lost her friends, her parents are driving her crazy, her brother is dying—and she's helpless to change anything.

Until she receives mysterious instructions on how to become a Contender in the Brimstone Bleed. It's an epic race across jungle, desert, ocean, and mountain that could win her the prize she desperately desires: the Cure for her brother's illness. But all the Contenders are after the Cure for people they love, and there's no guarantee that Tella (or any of them) will survive the race.

The jungle is terrifying, the clock is ticking, and Tella knows she can't trust the allies she makes. And one big question emerges: Why have so many fallen sick in the first place?

Victoria Scott's breathtaking novel grabs readers by the throat and doesn't let go.

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Between the Interstice: a guest post by Mike Robinson

Between the Interstice

On Lovecraft and Weird Fiction

"Back then, with the visions, most of the time I was convinced I'd lost it. There were other times, though, where I thought I was mainlining the secret truth to the universe."

                                                                                    ------------ Rust Cohle, True Detective

Behind the wide facade of Speculative Fiction twist the hedge-mazes of fantasy, brood the catacombs of horror and gaze the far-seeing floors of science fiction. Among them, between them, are the closets and crawlspaces of the niche, one of which -- a relatively bigger one -- is the place of Weird Fiction, a dark storage of many souvenirs from fantasy, horror and science fiction, though dusted with its own special charms.

            The former subtitle for my new book, Too Much Dark Matter, Too Little Gray: A Collection of Weird Fiction was actually, A Collection of Speculative Fiction. As one prone to appreciate sprawling ambiguity, to resist specific categorization, it’s a little ironic that I wanted to specify further. But there was a reason for that, besides the stodginess of “speculative”, which has none of the zany, fluid charisma of “weird”.

Goodreads

            While using “weird” may sound like a proud judgment, a literary outcast chest-thumping his identity as such, it’s more a direct homage to the tradition of Ambrose Bierce, Robert Chambers, H.P. Lovecraft and many others. Going further, it’s an accurate classification given my vision of Weird Fiction, a subgenre that, perhaps more consciously than other fields of speculative fiction, stirs together elements of the metaphysical, cosmological and horrific to grimly honor the Big Questions, remind us of our insurmountable ignorance, to pin down our squirming selves into our rightful position in the child’s seat, to whisper, maybe in some alien, mud-packed voice, that, hey, the world slippery and you won’t ever, ever catch it. The world, in short, is weird.

            And past all the horror, the strangeness, that to me is a nourishing thought. Let me explain.

            The moment I cemented my decision to not pursue an M.F.A (or any academic training) in writing is vivid. While enrolled at Otis College of Art & Design, I found in my mailbox a little perfect-bound literary booklet featuring work by the graduate students in fiction. I flipped it open to a random story. After wading cautiously into the second paragraph of a painful scrutiny of eyebrow-plucking, I was done. Other entries weren’t much better. Too many of them seemed concerned with stereotypical, high-literary minutia, unfortunately the focus and baffling preference of innumerable professors, awards, journals, and workshops (cough-Iowa-cough).

My first sale, the storyThe Hand of Spudd in Storyteller Magazine

            Personally, I have little interest in quaint journalistic accounts of Malaysian transvestite violinists at the turn of the century (yes, I made that up), or the endless slew of aptly-termed “McFiction” featuring some cocky narrator coming of age amongst his or her overfed, dysfunctional family. No, I prefer going head-on at the Big Questions, going at them, as George Carlin might say, with no less than a sledgehammer. Give me ballsy confrontations with Life, Death, the Cosmos, with Existence, with God.

            In their noble attempts at social redemption and inclusion, many contemporary teachers of literature treat writings in the framework of their political significance. To me, though, such attempts seem nothing more than new forms of division. It is looking at the grains and forgetting the shore. Does the world really need a Marxist reading of Huckleberry Finn, complete with ten-dollar jargon? Academics are on the lookout for the “next best thing”, the new trend in analysis, the new prism through which to see literary works of yesterday and today. I say: what about our shared heritage? Our shared -- and uncertain -- future? Not as any one ethnicity, gender, party, or faction, but as an entire civilization. A species. A collective piece of this vast Universe.

            Of course, much of this material is studied, and much of it is exhaustively considered and written about. Enter Weird Fiction!

            As any fellow devotee will know, H.P. Lovecraft -- arguably the most esteemed and influential practitioner of the genre -- cleaned out the catacombs with his pen, defying tropes of ghosts and vampires and expanding imaginations with interconnected tales of ancient civilizations antedating our own, of towering alien-gods, of unseen dimensions and humanity’s sanity-shattering smallness in an inexplicable cosmos. All this made more impressive by the fact that he wrote in the 1920s, when so much of that stuff was barely on anyone’s speculative radar, including scientists’. His unknowns are truly Unknown, and will forever elude explanation.

            Certainly Lovecraft’s work has failings, failings probably more surface-level than those of other lauded authors. He was well aware of his own wooden dialogue (hence, quotation marks are scarce in his pages) and his prose sometimes gushes into the purple. Nevertheless, his voice, with its richly archaic, darkly celebratory cadence, stands alone, and will survive as long as we’re unsure what lurks “out there”.

Me suited up, scoping “out there”

            Sadly, Lovecraft, and especially his “Cthulu” mythos, have become somewhat franchised, relegated to corners of the market generally aimed at Dungeons and Dragons fans, horror enthusiasts, and nihilistic young adults sporting black fingernails and lipstick. It is a wide “cult following”, but nonetheless a cult following. Although some scholars have acknowledged his importance, many see him as a troublesome bridge from Poe to Stephen King. It is this identity that has, I’m sure, dissuaded many from giving him a serious go. “Lovecraft? Oh, no, I don’t like that horror stuff.”

            But back up. Here we come back to the question of Weird Fiction itself, because I don’t necessarily consider the canon, or Lovecraft’s work, “horror”. Certainly there are horrific elements in his work, and his career does include several standard supernatural yarns. But in his treatment of cosmic mysteries, and the shadowed realms of prehistory, his is more a prying curious eye, forcing us to consider those Big Questions, to ponder notions of, and issues with, the likes of religion, biology, cosmology, archaeology, and psychology. He sets you on the outside looking in, a contrast to being in and looking further in to the point of navel-gazing. This exercise of outside-looking-in, one I believe most writers of fiction should undertake, helps in a kind of rounding out of thought.

            No matter the genre in which one writes, I believe the best, most poignant stories have at least an undercurrent of  this “larger awareness”, a perception conveying authority and wisdom. So many stories feel constricted by their own world, characters or concerns. Yet to read Lovecraft is to confront directly that raw Unknown that surrounds us, that is us. To get a healthy dose of perspective: a shambling, roaring, behemoth upswell of perspective.

            I mentioned earlier that I think such a perspective can be ultimately nourishing. In an era of economic, cultural and political tumult, when millions of Davids the world over shout in fiery voice against the few far-reaching, corrupt Goliaths, there is morbid comfort in knowing that, despite whatever the megalomaniacal egos of sadistic leaders, immoral bankers, or bribe-pocketing politicians might make of themselves, there are impenetrable forces beyond all of them that will cast mocking eyes towards their suited-up, gold-rimmed delusions, if they even care to acknowledge them. Lovecraft, and the general tradition of Weird Fiction, reminds us just how little power the powerful actually wield. After all, Goliath was, what, ten feet tall? When the mountain-sized Cthulu rises once more, those people will be nothing but scrambling ants -- along with the rest of us.

Prossia Blog Tour

I am back with another tour hosted by the amazingly talented Masquerade Crew.

Prossia by Raphyel Jordan

Raphyel Montez Jordan grew up in a household sensitive to the creative arts. As a child, his hobbies were drawing favorite cartoon and video game characters while making illustrated stories. This passion for art never left and followed him all the way up to his high school and college years.

It wasn’t until college when he underwent a personal “renaissance” of sorts that Jordan took his interest in writing to another level. When he was 19, he started writing a novel for fun, taking inspiration from the constant exposure of different ideas and cultures that college showed him while staying true to the values he grew up to embrace. However, when the “signs of the times” influenced the story and the characters to spawn into universes of their own, he figured he might possibly be on to something.

As he studied graphic design at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, Georgia, Jordan also used his electives to study sciences like Astronomy, Psychology, and Biology in order enhance the reading experience in his story. He eventually made it a goal to have the story published after he graduated, and dubbed the goal “Operation Prosia,” the very same project that would develop into his first published book, “Prossia.”

Even though his novel is not necessarily a religious book, Jordan utilizes his Christian faith by urging people to encourage, not condemn, in his story. Best known for ending his PSFC newsletters with “Unity Within Diversity,” he hopes “Prossia’s” success will inspire people to consider and support the positive outlook in the difference human kind can share, whether it be race, religion, or any other cultural difference.

PROSSIA

"A teenage alien girl might endanger her comrades in-arms due to an unknown secret she keeps while fighting in a galactic war. Herself."

Where were you, when you had to grow up?

For a seventeen-year-old Goolian named Aly, it was on another planet called Argutas, a world where she had to "adjust" in order to fit her new surroundings. Daydreaming got replaced with nightmares. Sparring got replaced with killing. Singing to adoring crowds in her father's store turned into shouting for cover. This is what fighting in the war has given Aly, ever since her tribe was drafted. This is the sacrifice she makes while defending galactic order against the Cyogen.

However, there's a danger lurking right among the allies and friends Aly has sworn to protect. It's worse than any Cyogen weaponry, or any being known in the galaxy. It's wrath has the potential of crumbling enemy forces, and bringing allied troops to their knees.

That danger is Aly, herself, and the best part is this: she doesn't even know it. The people she trusts the most are secretly monitoring her condition on the battlefield, and there's no telling what they might be willing to do if Aly accidentally unleashes the power that might jeopardize the safety of everyone around her. Then again, these are the same family and friends who are oblivious to the role they play in an even larger conspiracy blinding the entire known world.

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Raphyel stopped by today to talk about world building (specifically with ailens and science fiction).