Sunday, November 10, 2013

Land, Sea, Sky: the blog posts, vol. 2.

First off, I need to alert you guys to a fabulous opportunity (no, really, it's going to be fabulous!) coming up Thanksgiving weekend. It's the Master Koda Black Friday/Cyber Monday Bash, November 29th through December 2nd. Thirty-five authors (including Yrs Trly) will lower the prices on their participating books on Amazon to 99 cents that weekend. You can click here to see the list of books and authors. I've put Seized and my new book, Crosswind, into the mix.

Plus there will be a Facebook party all weekend, with games and prizes. The top prize is a Kindle Fire HD. Please feel free to stop by! Here's the link to the Facebook party page, where we're already chatting and getting things ready. I'll be anchoring the event together with K.R. Hughes on Cyber Monday, Dec. 2nd, from 7pm until 9pm EST. We'd love to see you there.

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So this week, I thought I'd introduce you to Darrell Warren -- or more precisely, Navy Lt. Darrell Warren. On the day of the Second Coming at the end of Annealed, Darrell had just left on a fishing trip near his home in southwestern Michigan. He wanted to celebrate getting his first real job -- as a nursing assistant in an elder care facility. He had also recently been accepted as a fourth-level midew, or medicine man, for the Potawatomi Indian band he is part of -- which meant, among other things, that he could lead ceremonies on his own. And with his financial future assured, he planned to move out of his parents' house and marry his girlfriend, Ruthie.

But while on the trip, Nanabush -- the Ojibwe culture hero -- led Darrell to the otherworldly plain where Naomi had recently concluded the big mediation. There, Nanabush told Darrell that his life needed to do a 180-degree turn, because the god needed for him to become a warrior. Darrell considered himself to be a peaceful man; the thought of joining the military was anathema to him. Still, he swallowed his personal desires and did what the god told him to do. But it left him angry.

As Crosswind opens, Darrell is a changed man -- a 30-year-old hardened warrior who has left his past as a healer and magic practitioner far behind. He has seen action with his Special Ops unit in Syria, including a notorious friendly-fire incident in Al-Laqbah in which most of his men were killed. Ruthie, whom he did marry, couldn't handle either the changes in him or the long separations required of Navy spouses; she has divorced him and gone back to Michigan.

The thing is, Nanabush never meant for Darrell to stop being a midew. He knew Darrell would need to be both a warrior and a medicine man in order to accomplish the goals of the gods. So Darrell's main job in this series is to reawaken his magical side and integrate the two parts of his being. That means, for starters, learning to channel the anger that he has used as a defense for the past ten years. He begins that process in Crosswind. Then in Undertow, which I think of as Darrell's book, he will have to learn how to set aside his anger and feel other, deeper emotions again. It's only then that his true healing will take place.

If Crosswind is Tess's book and Undertow is Darrell's, then the final book, Scorched Earth, must belong to Sue. I'll give you an introduction to her next week. And then the following week, the last full weekend of NaNaWriMo, I'll tell you about the structure of the series and why I picked the name "Land, Sea, Sky."

And speaking of NaNo, it's time for me to wrap this up and get back to the first draft of Undertow. Oh, wait -- before I go, a reminder that this coming Wednesday through Friday, Annealed will be free at Amazon. Tell your friends!

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These moments of fabulous free book blogginess are brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

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