Gray Moon Rising is here! (And "how the heck do you write so much?")

It's here! It's here!

Since I already reminisced at great lengths about the Seasons of the Moon series in my last post, I'll spare you guys more mumblings on that. Suffice it to say, after some gray hair-making worries from Amazon, the book has arrived. :) The paperback is just a couple days out, too, so hang in there if you're waiting for it.

I would like to say that, just after mentioning the book on FB and Twitter, my readers have already put this in the top 50 of hot new releases in contemporary fantasy (at #40 as I write this), which is HUGE. And you guys have already put it in the top 100 of juvenile horror, too! I am flabbergasted and honored and touched that so many of you are running right out to get it. Your support means the world to me. :)

I'd also like to take a moment to discuss something that's coming up a lot from my online friends, which is a pretty big question to address via Tweet or Facebook:

How the heck do you write so much?

This is in response, of course, to the fact that Gray Moon Rising is my sixth full length book published in 14 months, which piles on top of three novellas, a short story, and a light smattering of work under other pen names. That's right, I am so stupidly productive that I have multiple pen names.

First of all, it's not really that much. I originally wrote Death's Hand in 2008. I only wrote about 25k in new material when I published it. I wrote Six Moon Summer in 2010. Monsters was written in 2004. So knock those three projects off of my writing marathon for the last year -- that's about 150,000 words I did not write in 14 months.

That does leave 330,000+ words that I've written, edited, and published in 14 months. I guess that's not bad, considering I only quit my day job two months ago, and all the help I've had.

In fact, this little dude has secretly ghostwritten two of my novels.
I'll let you guess which ones.

To be frank, there's only one reason I write this much, despite working two jobs 12 of the last 14 months, having a very helpful (and hungry) toddler, and starting my own small business.

This reason has black hair, a goatee, muscly arms, and looks like the sexy lovechild of Frodo and Harry Potter.

He smells delicious and earthy and is always, always smiling.

He's the one who's happy to see me even when I'm being a grumpy booger.

It's because of the guy who has cooked almost every dinner since we got married, woke up early to pack my lunch before work, and got my breastpump together so I could sleep in for just a few more minutes and have the energy I needed to write.

You know, the dude who keeps the house clean and the other side of the bed warm and has really nice buns.

The one who has endless energy for playing with and loving our pudgy son.

Thank you, Husband Guy. I have never finished anything in my entire life--much less an entire book series!--and while I have had a dozen editors and thousands of readers, you are always the first to pick up the book. And make sure I have time to write them. The whole series is thanks to you.

Yup.

♥ ♥ ♥

Seasons of the Moon

I just hit "publish" on Gray Moon Rising.

Ohmigosh.

It's going to be ~12 hours before it's actually available, so now I'm sitting at my desk hitting "refresh" on Amazon instead of being productive. I've poured all of my time, energy, and love into this series, and I am so, so anxious about ending it.

I updated the first three books in the series yesterday, so I took a little time to read through what I had written. Six Moon Summer was drafted in November 2010, so it's been quite some time since that book was on my desk. And what a long eighteen months it has been.

When I wrote the first book, I had no idea it was going to become a Thing. I was just trying to stay sane. I hadn't written anything in nine months, I had a brand new baby, and my entire life felt like it was upside-down.

In a good way.

Getting to escape to the dark forests of Gray Mountain was a relief. I wrote it while nursing my son at my desk (stacked on two Boppees--protip for you writer moms out there), or whenever my husband managed to bounce the Helpful Newborn to sleep for five minutes, and it was so nice. It's probably why the contents of the book are so gloomy, though. Being a new mom is hard.

But it did mean that I got to spend time with Seth. :)

     Rylie was so absorbed in the life and colors of the woods that she didn’t notice she had company until he stepped in front of her. “Hey, hang on a second!" 

     His voice was deeper than she expected. Seeing him closer than before made her realize he wasn’t just dark-skinned and broad-shouldered—he was also really cute. He had a strong nose and full lips, offset by shaggy brown hair slanting over one eye. A single fang hung from his pierced left ear.

     “Hi,” she said, her cheeks growing hot. “Are you from the boy’s camp?” 

     He gave her a long look up and down, face to feet, like he was sizing her up. “My name is Seth.”

I intended for Six Moon Summer to be a standalone. How much could I have to say about a werewolf girl and the werewolf-hunting guy she crushes on?


Quite a lot, it turns out. Readers demanded a sequel to Six Moon Summer, and I acquiesced.

September 2011 rolled around, and I released All Hallows' Moon, which has a lot more of Seth's background, and it introduced Eleanor and Abel. Those two characters really surprised me. I didn't expect to find Eleanor so deliciously hate-worthy, or Abel so darn lovable. He started out pretty scary, actually.

     Footsteps approached, and a man spoke. “Are you going to introduce me, Seth?”
      The newcomer looked like Seth, but taller and older, like he might have been in college. His facial scarring wasn’t as scary in the daylight. The shadows of night had twisted his face into something more monstrous.
      But even with a smile just like Seth’s, Rylie could remember seeing Abel on the road in the dark, holding a rifle loaded with silver bullets.
      “Oh yeah,” Seth said. He sounded totally normal. How could he be so casual standing between a werewolf and a hunter? She felt like she was going crazy. “Rylie, this is my brother, Abel. Abel, this is Rylie. She’s a friend of mine.”
      “You make friends fast, little man,” Abel said. It stretched his scar when he smiled.
      She could imagine raking her claws down his flesh, leaving him ragged and screaming. That was how he had gotten the scar in the first place, wasn’t it?
      Rylie gazed at him mutely, unsure of what to say.

I thought Abel was going to be a really good antagonist, but it turned out that Seth loved his brother too much for me to really make him a bad guy. He might have bad intentions, but Abel is actually really good--and by the time I released Long Night Moon in March, I was kinda loving him. Hard.

But Long Night Moon was a really curious book, emotionally speaking. It's definitely the darkest of the series. Like, if Star Wars had werewolves, Long Night Moon would have been The Empire Strikes Back. Yet I wasn't in a dark head space when I wrote it. The story naturally flowed in that direction. I was really worried everyone would hate all the unhappiness, especially given the nice ending of All Hallows' Moon.

Everything went bad for Rylie in book three. Really bad. But things went really good for the series! Apparently, everybody adored poor Rylie's suffering, because the book kinda went nuclear--it sold 1000 copies right off the bat and has a streak of sixteen (sixteen!!) five star reviews on Amazon. It's been almost four months since it came out, and I still have people pop up to tell me that it's their favorite. The love for Long Night Moon is seriously staggering. (And, weirdly enough, it has outsold All Hallows' Moon. Don't ask me how that works.)

So when my last book was received like that, and I was suddenly faced with the task of ending the series...

No pressure, right?

The Helpful Newborn who inspired me to write Six Moon Summer in the first place isn't really a baby anymore, by the way. He's a toddler tyrant who looks like this:

Objects may be less innocent and harmless than they appear.

So twenty pounds of baby, three YA books, and a lot of stress later, Gray Moon Rising is done. And I mean done-done. Everything is out of my hands and into Amazon's.

I am not nervous.

Seriously. Um. Cough.

MONSTERS is (are?) here! :)

I promised Monsters would be here before Gray Moon Rising, and I meant it! It's here! :D

In extra cool news, it's totally free on Amazon today and tomorrow. I thought you guys might like to have it as a special treat. If you're happy to get a free novella, of course, you can thank me by leaving an honest review on its Amazon page—it only takes a minute and it will help me IMMENSELY. Plus, I'd like to know what you think of the take I had on vampires back when I was a wee bairn of sixteen years old. I think this is the only vampire thing I've ever written, ever.

(By the way, how many times can I link this book in this blog post? Ahaha! XD)

In EXTRA JUICY good news, Gray Moon Rising is going to be here even sooner than I promised. I've gotten it back from most of the editing team, so I only have to do a couple more things before I can hit publish. This one's really going to sneak up on you. ;) If you'd like to know the INSTANT it's available on Amazon, you should sign up for my mailing list, natch. The Army of Evil gets first dibs on everything.

Happy Reading!

Introducing Monsters: A Bloody Love Story

Gray Moon Rising is out of my hands and with the editing team, so I'm not worrying about it anymore. I will no longer freak out about whether such-and-such was written correctly, or if I did the best I could with whatever scene is worrying me at the moment. For the next week, until it gets back to me, everything is golden.

So now I'm working on other things.

As you all know by now, I've been seriously writing since middle school (although I wrote quite a few short stories before that, too--just not seriously). I wrote a lot of completely unreadable material between the ages of 12, when I finished my first book, and 24, when I am now polishing the sixth full-length novel that SM Reine will publish.

I also wrote some things that are not so terrible. For instance, "Something Wrong," which appears in the Here Be Monsters anthology, was originally drafted at the wee age of 15. (That ebook is free, by the way, and I highly encourage you to pick up a copy. Lots of good stories there.) It's ridiculously pleasing to me that almost every good review on the anthology cites my story. Nobody looks at it and says, "Well, that was definitely written by a sophomore in high school." This is the kind of thing they say:

A neat mix of dark stories and well, morbidly dark stories... I'm looking at you SOMETHING WRONG author S.M. Reine.

There's some serious stand-alone pieces that are gems, most notably: "Something Wrong," by S. M. Reine, and "Figs," by Jeremy C. Shipp. Either one of these stories would be worth downloading the book--and reading it.

The best story hands down is Something Wrong. After reading it (twice in a row!), I knew this anthology wouldn't let me down.

Although I enjoyed each and every tale, I especially liked S.M Reine's 'Something wrong' for its simplistic, yet elegant prose.

Aw, shucks, guys. You'll turn a girl's head with talk like that. ;) Anyway, seriously, pick up a copy of the anthology. It's awesome.
  
So you can probably tell that when I was 15/16 years old, I had a Thing for horror. That was when I went through my big Stephen King phase and discovered HP Lovecraft. (My love affair with Edgar Allan Poe started much, much younger.) I also had a Thing for the early Anita Blake books, which are not horror, but have some horror potential. And I'm not talking about the dreadful sex scenes that started gushing in the latter half of the series.

With those dark inspirations, my writing at the time was also pretty dark. Even my idea of a romance was primarily focused around the concepts of trust and surrender, and the idea you could never really have a perfect love. So when I tried to write a romantic thriller at that age, it ended up being: 1.) dark, 2.) violent, and 3.) completely unromantic, and 4.) very bloody. Pretty typical for me, I guess.

What came out is what I've now titled Monsters: A Bloody Love Story.

  
Even though it's one of my older stories, I think it's pretty good. Obviously. I wouldn't waste your time with it if I thought it stunk like gym socks. ;) I've given it a rigorous editing to shake out the spiders, too.

It's probably best categorized as a paranormal thriller, since it's an action-packed roller coaster of vampires shooting the crap out of each other, but there's one or two darky dark bits, so I don't recommend it for my younger readers. Even though I wrote it when I was young. Yeah, I don't know.

Monsters will be out very soon--like, in the next weekish. Almost certainly before Gray Moon Rising, funnily enough. But for now, here's the blurb:  

Julieta’s never been quite right. She likes the company of corpses. She studied vampires in college. She dreams of darkness and cold metal and blood. She thinks that becoming engaged to Michael—beautiful, warm, godlike Michael—might be her salvation. But then he vanishes, and she buys a gun to take his place. 
  
Alec is nothing like Michael. He’s an assassin, and he shows Julieta how to be the perfect monster. It’s not love, but killing vampires together is almost better. When Julieta is taken by a coven of vampires, Alec is the only one who can save her, and what they face leaves them only one question: Who is the better monster?


What do you guys think?

Lara Croft: Kicking Butt or Being Protected?

TRIGGER WARNING.

Tomb Raider is one of my favorite series of games. As Lara Croft, not only do you get to run around in shorts finding cool stuff in jungle temples, you get to jump around like a spider monkey, shoot bad guys, and wear your hair in a braid. AND you're wealthy, British, and have a mansion with a butler that you can lock in a freezer. So she's kind of like a female answer to Indiana Jones (who I also adore).

Basically, Lara Croft is the end-all, be-all of AWESOME.

Unfortunately, she's generally been regarded as a character whose purpose is to be looked at. I'm not going to make any bones about it: Of course Lara Croft is hot, bizarre Barbie proportions aside, and there's nothing wrong with enjoying that. But she's also a great character. Most of the time, she is not partnered with any men (although she does have a team of men at her back in some of the games), and she is defined by her own accomplishments.

I don't have any problem playing games with male action heroes, but being able to play a female action hero is refreshing. I like controlling a character who looks a little bit like me. That is, brunette and female-bodied, although I do not have boobs that could poke eyes out.

So you can understand my anger and distress when I read articles like this.

Players will want to "protect" an increasingly-battered Lara Croft in the upcoming Tomb Raider reboot, its executive producer has said. 

The series' young heroine will lose her best friend, be beaten, bruised, kidnapped, and finally be subjected to an attempted rape. 

"When you see her have to face these challenges, you start to root for her in a way that you might not root for a male character," executive producer Ron Rosenberg explained to Kotaku.

I'm really too angry to articulate all the things that infuriate me about this, but Escher Girls has an excellent analysis that shares my sentiments.

I have complained in the past about content creators defaulting to "threat of rape" with female characters. It's lazy writing. It's stupid. And it alienates women, who are 47% of the video game market. In fact, "adult women represent a greater portion of the game-playing population (30 percent) than boys age 17 or younger (18 percent)."

But that's not the only issue. Frankly, it's insulting to men to assume they won't be able to relate to a female character, or at least regard her as an equal, rather than a character to be protected. Believe it or not, men aren't wild, slavering monsters who sit around wishing that their video game women had a little more rape in their lives.

I think the main problem here is the (false) idea that men must be threatened by a powerful woman who is their equal - or even their better - and so the best way to bring her down a rung is to subject her to a crime that is largely perpetuated by men. (Which is not to ignore the fact that many men are victims, too, but that's tangential to the subject.)

The video game industry is currently undergoing a pretty big feminist wake up call, so I hope gamers won't have to deal with stupid things like this for much longer.

I just can't believe we're still dealing with this crap in the twenty-first century. What a disappointment.

By the way: The game's developers have since issued a clarifying statement that doesn't really help anything, in my opinion.

Cover and blurb for Gray Moon Rising!

It’s been almost a year since Rylie Gresham was bitten by a werewolf on Gray Mountain. Now something is beckoning her back to the place she was attacked, along with every other werewolf in the world. But they aren’t the only ones heeding the call. A group of hunters notices them gathering and sees it as their chance to wipe out the entire species.


Seth is about to graduate high school when he learns of the final hunt. He secretly plans to save Rylie and his werewolf brother even though he has to play along with the hunters to do it. But Rylie doesn’t want to be saved. She’s already decided to solve her problems with a silver bullet if answers aren’t waiting on Gray Mountain.


One way or another, everything is about to end—whether it means Rylie’s liberation or the end of her life…


So there you go! Blurb and cover for Gray Moon Rising. :) It's going to be out around July 5th (hopefully sooner). What do you think?