Fantasy

Caught in a Glance

Hi Readers!

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First Love is on sale now! Grab your copy of First Love here!

And now, we have a special presentation to celebrate the launch of First Love. Last week, Shade sat down with a blogger for a very special interview. At the end, Shade discusses our upcoming books!!! 🙂

So let’s get to it. I’m passing the conversational wand to you, Shade.  Don’t make me regret it. —Ran, son of Sarn

Interview With a Shade

Blogger: What drew you to the First Love anthology?

Shade: I’ve been bugging my scribe, Melinda Kucsera, for years to write the story of how I met my best friend. (He’s also my first love.) Since Melinda’s not here right now to answer these questions, I’m answering them for her.

Don’t worry. She’s fine and currently working at her day job. In fact, she has no idea I’m answering these questions for her. But the cast of the Curse Breaker series, of which my story is but a small part, usually doesn’t let her answer these kinds of questions. We know the story better than she does because we’re living it.

Who am I? I’m called Shade. If you want to know more about me, you’ll have to read First Love. 😊

Give us a little tease for your short story for First Love.

Sarn nodded but said nothing. Either he couldn’t talk, or he chose not to. Either was maddening because he was so swathed in dark green cloth that nothing except his hands and feet were visible. I yearned to unravel that mystery, and that was an odd feeling. After so many years of living in numb exile under the mountain, I wanted to leap out of hiding and be known to this boy who also hid from the world.

Maybe we can hide together you and I, my Mystery Boy. And maybe, one day when I’ve earned your trust, you’ll show me your face. A pleasant fantasy spun out while I tried not to bob or hum the tune such poetic ramblings deserved. Such was my curse. I thought in verse when the mood was upon me even though my dream of becoming a bard had died in the fire that had scarred me. —Shade, excerpted from First Love.

What fantasy elements do you use in your First Love story?

Oh boy, how do answer this without giving away too much? Since I fall madly in love with a mage, there’s definitely magic in there. After all, we do live under a mountain that’s surrounded by a ridiculous number of enchanted trees, and we mine magical rocks for a living. That’s all I can say without spoiling things.

What inspired your story?

I begged Melinda to tell the story of how Sarn and I met. I’d earned a rather bad rap in Curse Breaker: Enchanted because I’d made some poor decisions. Letting a demon possess me might not have been the best idea I’ve ever had. My passenger caused a fair amount of trouble for my beloved before all was said and done in that story.

But Curse Breaker: Enchanted only told part of the story of us. I wanted the rest on record because I was the best friend Sarn ever had before the demon incident, but you’d never know that if all you read was Curse Breaker: Enchanted.

First Love is my time to shine, and it just might net me a second chance to do right by my beloved if that angel is right. We’ll find out more about that in later stories.

To what extent are your characters based on you or people you know?

Umm, I hate to break it to you, but I’m a real person. I might live in a fantastical world full of magic. But I assure you, I’m not fictional. My world exists somewhere beyond dreams. Somehow our scribe, Melinda, can see what goes on there and chronicle them. There’s a book coming out soon (Curse Breaker’s Companion: Catch a Scribe) that explains all that and just how characters like me can cross over to your world. More about that later.

Do you know your ending when you write?

Melinda writes our adventures in real-time as they happen. So, no, she has no idea how they end, and neither do we. We’re busy living the adventure-in-progress. But, according to other cast members, Melinda’s getting better at predicting what will happen from book-to-book. But we like to keep her guessing.

What is the best thing about being a writer?

Melinda gets to write about us and ride along on our fantastic adventures. What could be better than that?

What is the worst thing about being a writer?

That’s easy. Since Melinda is the only scribe who can see our world or interact with it, she’s the only one who can write down our stories. So, she’s besieged by requests on an hourly basis. Her inbox is a scary place.

Which writers inspire you?

This is a tough one because Melinda reads like crazy and at the end of every book she says, “I wish I could write like that.”

I’m pretty sure she admires something about every book she’s ever read, and that’s a lot. She has over 2000 audio books on her phone, and she’s listened to 90% of them. 😊 (We, her characters, try not to get too jealous of those book-flings.)

What other books or short stories have you written?

Besides contributing to First Love, Melinda has written:

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What is your current work-in-progress?

Melinda is working on:

 

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(A Darker Shade of Love, is the sequel to my story in First Love.)

 

 My tale takes a darker turn when a group of summoners set their sights on my beloved, Sarn. I will do anything to stop them from stealing his magic and with it, his life.

But my beloved is not the only one endangered by the summoners’ quest for more power. They’ve employed a ruthless leech to steal my beloved’s magic. If I thwart him, he’ll steal the life-spark from everyone he meets.

If I save my beloved, I doom a lot of innocent people to a premature death and risk losing his heart forever.
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Catch the Scribe is the  1st *official* novelization of our newsletter.

 Catch the Scribe before she falls.

When grief threatens to overwhelm a lonely scribe, the fate of her fictional world hangs in the balance. If she doesn’t finish the book and get it into the hands of readers, all her characters will disappear forever.

(Join our epic adventure to escape our book series and fight for our survival in your world. )

*Relic Hunters is the expanded version of a novella from A Different Kind of Hero anthology. It contains more mayhem and magic than the original.

 They were hunting relics, but they found so much more than they bargained for. And lost more than they could ever regain…

Under the enchanted forest’s tangled canopy, a mage-gifted boy unearthed a strange stone.

Meanwhile, above, two knights heading back to their order’s chapter house are forced to stop when their relic-finder goes berserk. Something old and magical lies beneath the forest, and it’s their job to contain it.

But that’s easier said than done when that relic is in the hands of a young mage who possesses a power he can barely control.

There are several other books Melinda is working on, but those two are the closest to done. So I’ll stop there.

This is Shade, one of the heroes of First Love signing off. Grab your copy of First Love now. I’d love to meet you in the pages.

Get your copy of First Love now!

Deals, Giveaways & Other Cool Stuff

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