Fantasy

Hailstones and What-ifs collide

Hey,

A lot happened since my last email, and I need to catch you up! Hang on to your hats if you’re wearing them because it’s been a wild few days.

Who am I? I am Ran, the son of the Curse Breaker and also his sidekick. Whether he realizes that or not, that’s who I am. He knows I’m his son, and he loves me to pieces. But we’re still working on the sidekick thing. We’ll get there. It just may take a few years.

And yes, he’s still alive and misunderstanding the sidekick thing when I’m grown up. I forgot to mention last week that Rosalie’s first chapter in Gateway to Hell, the first book in the Rogue Gods Trilogy that’s coming as soon as the characters let Melinda end the book, veers off into a what-if scenario.

I had a nice note all prepared to explain that, and then I forgot to include it in last week’s email. I’m so sorry about that! Long time readers hopefully caught when the what-if scenario kicked in.

(The events that caused the what-if happened in one of the chapters that we didn’t show you as part of the extended preview we’re doing because we wanted to show you each point of view character’s first chapter. So you’ll have to read the trilogy to find out who did it, why they did it, and what on earth did they do to fork the timeline and send me and some other characters off on this what-if?)

But if you’re the new to our books, then you might not have known that my aunt stopped the demon invasion before it could start in His Angelic Keeper Hiddenwith help from an ex-goddess who can turn into a dragon, the feisty angel guarding the place, my dad’s grumpy guardian angel, the ex-goddess’ dragon-shifter daughter and time-travelling son, and one memory-eating elephant searching for the courage to do the right thing.

Why did I allow this what-if?

If you’ve read some of our books, you may have seen a pattern emerging.

In His Angelic Keeper Hidden, someone (you can read the book to find out who) said that an earth mage would be much better suited to collapsing the spell that would give the army access to our world.

So I wondered, as one does, what would my beloved Papa do if a similar scenario knocked on our door? After all, he is an earth mage…

I know Melinda wondered this too, but that scenario already happened. So it was done in her mind, and too bad that Papa couldn’t get involved because he was busy saving the City under Mount Eredren again.

But after he was hurt in Curse Breaker Revealed, he needed some time to recuperate. He got that time in Shards For His Giftwhile I had my own little adventure. (And everything was great until Jerlo played with some dangerous crystals and caused my papa to to go deal with it. Shame on you, Jerlo!)

Then the characters from the Rogue Gods trilogy showed up with an idea for a story. They told Melinda it would be a standalone book, and it would take a look at what could have happened if Malachiah succeeded and the events if His Angelic Keeper never happened.

This was a the perfect way to find out what Papa would do if a gateway opened up near Mount Eredren!

So I said okay. After all, they only asked for one book, and it could lead into the next Curse Breaker book where Papa could work loads of magic with me helping, of course. So why not?

(For reference, I asked for 5 new Curse Breaker books, so I couldn’t say no to just one for the Rogue Gods cast. Then I’d look greedy or selfish, and I’m not. I just like to appear frequently in books for your amusement, of course.)

When you read Gateway To Hell andthe sequel, Summon the Gods, you’ll see how the characters tricked Melinda into writing a trilogy. They were pretty clever about hiding their true intentions.

But there was no way we could go from the end of Summon The Gods to the next book in the Curse Breaker series. And you’ll see why when Chasing Dragons comes out.

So that’s where we thought the what-if started but the characters had another what-if in mind, and it went further back than His Angelic Keeper Hidden. I may have mentioned that the trilogy pulled in events from the Robin of Larkspur prequel series too.

But I digress as I often do. I wanted to catch you up on recent events before finishing our preview of the Rogue Gods Trilogy. The kickstarter didn’t launch yet since Melinda is fighting the characters to end book 3, Storm the Gates.

I warned her about letting Fay, the ex-goddess of fate, into the book, but Melinda’s like “she’s so fun to write about,” and I’m sure she is, but she’s not the main character in this trilogy. Melinda needs to go after them and make them end the book, not follow Fay around as she does cool things even though you might like to follow Fay because who doesn’t like a tough woman who can become an even tougher dragon?

Hopefully, Melinda will win the battle for the end of the book this week, so we can edit and format the third book and order some proofs. I’ll let you know next week who won that battle. Let’s hope Melinda does so I can get some more page time in the Curse Breaker series, where I belong.

Onward to the other updates! On Thursday, some epic weather hit the little corner of NY state where our scribe, Melinda, lives. Hail fell with a deafening crash that sounded like the sky dumped a ton of broken glass on her building. Some ice balls were more than an inch long!

This is what it looked like when it was coming down. The white dots are the hailstones.

Heavy rain accompanied the hail, creating so much noise, that we couldn’t hear anything else. The hail and the rain let up maybe 10 minutes after they started, leaving piles of icy balls in the ground and in that weird valley between the hood and the windshield.

The temperature plummeted, and a dense fog boiled up out of the ground like we were in the Gray Between. Sirens blared around us. Ice balls rolled around as Melinda wandered away from her building in search of the sirens as you do when you have no idea what just happened.

And I must leave you there for this week. But I promise, I will tell you more about the storm and what happened next week because things took a fantastical turn that no one expected. But our intrepid scribe was on hand to witness it, so she can report on it in this newsletter.

Will we finish the preview? Of course! But I’ll go crazy if I don’t tell you about our real-world adventures because they were crazy! So we’ll do that first. I hope that’s okay. I really need to talk about this with someone!

***

Don’t forget to follow the Kickstarter, so you know when it launches. It is coming ASAP!

Melinda is a perfectionist and she needs to see the proof copies since there will be images and shiny gold foiling. She wants everything to be done before she’ll launch the kickstarter. So that’s why it hasn’t launched yet.

Guerren is on the right, and Rosalie is on the left.

This chaotic duo will either save the timeline and the world or destroy both. Only one of them will have fun doing it. You can guess which one. I might have fun helping them. Maybe. Anything is possible.

Why’s there a dragon behind them? Well, you’ll have to wait and see! (11/12 dragons approve this message. The 12th dragon didn’t respond.)

New Podcast Episodes & Videos

Listen to our podcast in your player of choice. Or Watch it on YouTube.

There’s no new podcast this week. Melinda attended an event on Friday night in Brooklyn. Since it took her 3 trains and about 2 hours to go from her house to the bookstore in Brooklyn, she couldn’t record a podcast on Friday.

Our Saturday guest cancelled because his characters pulled a Rogue Gods’ move on him, and he’s still trying to finish the book he wanted to come on the podcast to talk about. We totally understand and empathize with that!

New Releases, Sales, & Other Book Stuff

Crown of Slumber: A Steamy Sleeping Beauty Retelling

A steamy enemies-to-lovers romantasy with fae and dragons. One edition has color illustrations, and the other has black pages!

In Case You Missed It