Happy Halloween! Have a sneak peak at book 2!

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Since it has to do with the holiday. Warning, this is unedited and may differ from what you read in the final version of Daughter of the Earth and Sky:

“Mom, I’m home!” I dropped my book bag on the floor by the door. I didn’t have a lot of time to hang out at the house. I was due in the Underworld soon.
“Mom?” I rounded the corner into the kitchen, anticipating my after school snack. Sure she couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth, and she was scheming and manipulative, but she always made a good snack.
A Reaper was sitting at the table in her place. I came to a surprised stop, aware of two other Reapers slipping behind me. “Where is she?” It took more effort than I cared to admit to keep my voice from trembling.
The Reaper picked up a note from the table and read in a ridiculous falsetto voice. “Persephone, went to Buford with Minthe to shop. Cookies are in the oven. See you in the morning.”
I threw a quick glance at the oven to make sure the house wasn’t going to catch on fire. It was off, she must have left them in there just to keep them warm.
Shit. Buford, Mall of Georgia, the Melting Pot, and outlet malls. Mom would be home late. Again. She’d been out almost every day lately. It was all our fighting, I realized with a sudden clarity. She was avoiding me too, just like everyone else.
“Looks like we have you all to ourselves,” the redheaded Reaper said with a grin.
I shrieked in pain as one of the Reapers grabbed me from behind, fingers digging painfully into my ribs. Something in their touch was different. I actually felt it. Not just a tearing feeling at my soul, but actual hands on my actual flesh.
It hurt like hell.
“Happy Halloween,” one of the Reapers hissed.
I screamed as they dragged me through my house. One of the Reapers bumped into a chair and knocked it down. That never happened. Were they corporeal?
“Let me go!” I lashed out and actually managed to land a blow on one of their shoulders. It hurt me, I was still touching him after all, but for a second I thought I saw the Reaper wince.
“Swear fealty to Zeus.”
I shook my head and he wrapped his hand around my neck, sending shock waves through my body. I couldn’t breathe. I clawed desperately at his hand, and his grip tightened. I felt myself getting dizzy. He released his hand, and slammed me into the wall. “Swear fealty to Zeus!”
“No!”
His fingers dug into my jaw, and he lifted my chin until I was staring into his eyes. “You think this hurts? We’re just getting started.”
His lips found mine in a cruel, bruising kiss, tearing at my soul. There was no desire in his kiss, no attraction at all. It was just supposed to hurt. I struggled against the pain, trying to kick my way free, but the other Reapers shifted, one grabbing me roughly by the arms, the other taking hold of my legs so I couldn’t lash out.
Light sparked in the redhead’s fingertips. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but it couldn’t be good. Suddenly his fingers passed through my flesh. My screams ricocheted off the walls and one of the Reapers clapped his hand over my mouth. With strength I didn’t know I possessed, I wrenched free. I was out the door in a flash and halfway to the driveway, car keys in hand, when I smacked into a solid wall of flesh. I shrieked and fell backward, scrambling away.
“No! Please! Don’t!” I lashed out blind with panic.

Top Ten Tuesday: Kick but Heroines

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1) Persephone. Yeah, okay, cheating to use my own, but come on, she stabbed a guy with a pen.
2) Tally Youngblood from Uglies. I really really want to see that book as a movie
3) Katniss Everdene from Hunger Games
4) Elena Michaels from Kelley Armstrong’s Bitten
5) Rachel Morgan from Kim Harrison’s The Hollows series
6) Cassie Blake from L.J Smith’s Secret Circle, NOT the show, the book
7) Laurana from Dragonlance
8) Clary Fray from Cassandra Claire’s Mortal Instruments
9) Rose Hathaway from Richelle Mead’s Vampire Diaries
10) Zoe Redbird from PC Cast’s House of Night series

Mythology Monday: Halloween

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When people talk about mythology, they act like it’s something ancient. Something that already happened. We are constantly creating myths in our own culture today. Some elements occur over and over and over again, like the myth of Superman. It’s kind of similar to Hercules, Gilgamesh, Odysseus, take your pick. That’s all myths are, stories. There may be some basis in truth, but for the most part, they’re just fun to tell.

Halloween has a mythology all of its own. Every ghost story, campfire tale, and urban legend is better when it’s told in the dark of the night on Halloween. So let’s tell some scary stories, shall we? Leave your scary story in the comments, and the creepiest one will get a spooky surprise.

Here’s the scariest story I ever heard: (note: I didn’t come up with this, I heard it as a kid)

So there’s this girl, and she’s home alone. She lives in a big house and it has one of those glass sliding door. As she’s passing through the living room, she catches a glimpse of someone in her back yard. It’s a creepy looking man holding a butcher knife. She freaks and runs up stairs, locks her door, and calls the police. The come, but the man is long gone.

“You’re very lucky miss,” the policeman tells her. “The man you described is an escaped killer. Now, where did you say you saw him again?”

She stands in front of the sliding glass door and points to where she saw him in the back yard.

The policeman exchanges a look with his partner. “See, here’s the thing, the soil out there is still wet from this afternoons downpour, and there’s no foot prints.”

The girl gets defensive, “you don’t believe me?” she asks.

“Oh we believe you saw him, just not there.”

“Where was he then.”

The officer motions for her to look out into the back yard again, and shifts positions. Suddenly his reflection is visible in the sliding glass door.

“Right behind you.”

Thursday Review: Normalish

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“Becka’s acting strange, stranger than usual”

Normalish, by Margaret Lesh was a pretty good book. I really enjoyed it. It’s so strange how I JUST finished reading Perks of a Wall Flower and picked up this book. They are very much alike, and both outside of my usual reading realm. I have to say, between the two, I preferred this one.

Normalish follows a freshmen named Stacy as she copes with her fathers death, her sisters mental illness, and all the angst that comes with high school. The boy she sees as a friend wants to be more, and the boy she wants to go out with starts dating her best friend, leaving Stacy with no one to talk to about what she’s going through.

She falls back on her family. Her strange, wonderful family that eat Tofu turkeys, sushi, and tamales for Christmas dinner. Together they try to put their lives back together, and if they can’t ever get back to normal, then at least they know they’re normalish.

My favorite bit of the book was the boy at the mental institute, Bobby. I really enjoyed that entire subplot, heart wrenching as it was. I also love Stacy’s voice. I love how matter of fact she is, I don’t know why, but I like self-deprecating humor. Every time she called herself ridiculous, I smiled. The only complaint I had in the entire book was the way the Anthony situation was handled. I wanted more of a conversation, or at least that conversation to be public, but it was still awesome.

You can find out more about this book Margaret Lesh’s blog: http://www.margaretlesh.com/ and you can buy it in ebook stores everywhere.

W…w…w… Wednesday

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WWW Wednesdays is a weekly meme hosted by Should Be Reading. All you have to do is answer these 3 questions:

1. What did you recently finish reading?
Walking the Dog by Linda Benson. Great book, really enjoyed it. See my review in tomorrow’s blog
2. What are you currently reading?
Tournament of Chance by S.G Rogers. So far it’s good. Very fast paced.
3. What do you think you’ll read next?
The Mark of Athena by Rick Riordin, I’ve been looking forward to this one!!! Love Percy Jackson.

Happy Birthday to me!

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I’m twenty-six today! I think… hmmm… 2012-1986 = yup, 26. It’s amazing how little that number matters after 21.

Happy Birthday to me! What a great year! My book was published, my new one is coming out in just a few months, my daughter started preschool, and I’m almost done with my masters.

I’m taking it easy today, and hanging out with my family, but tomorrow I’ll get back to work on Persephone 3. Instead of presents, buy my book! Kindle now allows you to gift copies to someone special 😉

Top 10 Tuesday: Scary Stories

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Wow, it’s been awhile since I’ve read a scary book. I just realized that. I used to love scary stories, what happened?

Consequently, my scary stories are a bit dated

1) Scary Stories to tell in the Dark by Allen Scwartz

Anyone remember these? They were awesome! They had a billion of them. (more scary stories, even MORE scary stories, ect). My friends and I would buy them and read them out loud to each other at sleep overs

2) The Witch’s Sister Series by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. Still one of the scariest book series’ I’ve ever read.

3) The Dollhouse Murders by Betty Ren Wright- really creepy story about a doll house thats inhabitants move around at night reenacting a murder/

4) Sweet Miss Honeywell’s Revenge- Another creepy doll house story

5) Anything from R.L Stine’s Fear Street

6) The Sweet Valley Thrillers series by Francine Pascal

7) The House with the Clock in its Walls by John Bellair- OMG, I forgot about this one but it was SOOOO good. Creepy, but good

8) The Oath, by Frank Pereti. Christian horror about a dragon that kills you if you sin. Laugh if you must but we had the audio book, and I still remember when we were driving through the moutains on a long road trip down a dark winding road, listening as this dragon hunted down its prey… on a dark winding road in the mountains. Traumatizing. Absolutely traumatizing. Actually, anything by Frank Peretti

9) Anything by Christopher Pike

10) The Forbidden Doors series by Bill Myers.

Thursday Review: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

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The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a young adult novel told through letters by Stephen Chbosky. I bought this book for book club and ended up tearing through it in one day. It’s an intense read. The author takes the events in the book and spins them on their head a few times and it’s… intense.
The Good: This book was very well written, very very very engaging, and all kinds of literary fun. The twists were unbelievable. This is definitely a book to reread because you’ll get a whole different story the second time through
The bad: The character felt too young to be in high school. In retrospect that makes sense, but in the context of the book, other characters react to him or situations like he’s in seventh grade. There’s lots of “Do you understand what just happened?” and OMG, a senior is going out with a freshmen, the perv. When I was in high school, and now, teaching high school, there wasn’t much in the way of an acknowledged age difference between seniors and freshmen. There is from an adults perspective, but not from the kids themselves. It just kept throwing me, but by the end of the book that attitude was mostly gone.
The spoilers: WARNING…. SPOILERS

I couldn’t get over the suicide note/poem. It was so sad that his friend showed him this poem, and Charlie latched onto it without understanding it was a cry for help. It really added another layer to everything about Michael. I kind of liked that Charlie still never seemed to get that the poem was Michael’s suicide note. It made all his thoughts that much more tragic.

The thing with the Aunt just put this whole new spin on the entire book. I’m really curious how all of this is going to translate to film.

Top Ten Tuesday: YA Athors

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Can I pick myself? Hmmm…. lol, probably not. Here goes

1) Kelley Armstrong- I talk about her all the time, but seriously, I love her young adult series, The Darkest Powers, it’s amazing. My favorite thing about it is that her protagonists are smart. They react in intelligent, realistic ways to crazy situations. I aim for that with Persephone.
2) Scott Westerfeld- I love the Uglies Series. Midnighters was good as well. Ah, all his books are good. They’re so exciting and fast paced.
3) L.J Smith (her older stuff)- I read her all the time growing up. She’s possibly the biggest influence on me as a writer.
4) Peter Beagle- He wrote the Last Unicorn, Tamsin, and a million other books. I actually met him once, and he’s super nice. His work taught me that YA could be literary as well as interesting.
5) Suzanne Collins- Who doesn’t love The Hunger Games?
6) Rick Riordin- Ijust want to say for the record, that while I was aware of The Percy Jackson Series, I did not read it until Persephone was written, and the other two books were drafted to avoid any accidental influence.
7) Karen Hesse- She writes these amazing free verse poetry books like “Out of the Dust.”
8) Richelle Mead- She wrote The Vampire Academy, and that series put me through the wringer emotionally.
9) Cassandra Claire- I love the Immortal Instruments series
10) Susan Beth Pfeiffer- She wrote Life as We Knew It. Everyone should read that book, it’s chilling.

Mythology Monday: Homer

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So this isn’t exactly a myth, but Homer is alluded to in Persephone,so to me it makes sense to include him in a Mythology Monday. Homer is the alleged author of both The Iliad and The Odyssey. I say alleged because there is some dispute over the matter. There’s this whole Homeric question over when he lived and what he might have written, but for simplicities sake, let’s assume he wrote both. Homer was possibly blind, and may have lived in a few different time periods or not at all, but again, let’s keep it simple.

The Iliad tells the story of the Trojan War. It starts ten years into the war, and mostly follows Achilles, a demigod by the goddess Thetis, who is angry because his…. erm, war prize girlfriend, Briseis, was taken from him. He refuses to fight, so Patroclus his cousin/friend wears his armor and is killed. Then Achilles gets really mad, and starts fighting again. He kills the Trojan prince Hector, and disrespects his body. There’s a massive battle, then everyone takes some time off to bury the dead. A ton of other stuff happens in the story, Hector seems really nice and there’s this really cute scene with his infant son, so it’s really sad that he dies, but it’s an epic. A paragraph summary is bound to leave something out. Odysseus (called Ulysses by the Romans) is also in this book on the Greek side with Achilles.

The Odyssey starts ten years AFTER the Trojan war and follows Odysseus’s ten year journey home. (Home likes the number 10). Penelope, Odysseus’ wife is being pestered by suiters, but she hasn’t given up hope that Odysseus is alive. Given that she hasn’t seen her husband in over twenty years, that’s a lot of faith. She also has a son, Telemachus, by Odysseus whom he has never met. Sadness. Odysseus journeys home through all kinds of adventures, and then kills all of his wife’s suitors. They all live happily ever after (if you ignore that poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson).

Homer wrote a few other books and poems about the Trojan war, but these are the important two. They are important because every writer for hundreds of years tried to make their own version of these epics. Virgil wrote the Aeneid based on these books, Dante was influenced by them, Alexander Pope, and more recently James Joyce. There are still books and movies and all kinds of media dedicated to the stories from Homer’s epics. Including mine.

Granted, Persephone is only briefly mentioned in The Iliad, and is not mentioned in a terribly complimentary way when Odysseus travels to the Underworld (she’s referred to as Proud Persephone and sends the souls of women to torment Odysseus as he journeys through the Underworld) but she’s there. So is Hades, Helen of Troy, Cassandra, and many many more characters of my world.