March 2015 — The Third War

Archive for March, 2015

Maybe the Glass Is Half Full

We wondered how James ended up in San Francisco.
Turns out his older brother Kevin had something to do with it. Enjoy!

“Another whiskey, laddy?”

Around him, the atmosphere of the bar muttered, clinked, and scraped as the afternoon crowd went about its business. At the back, around the bend of the long mahogany bar, Jimmy Cavanaugh stared morosely at the few remaining drops of amber in his whiskey glass.

Looking up at the man behind the bar, he shrugged. “Yeah. I guess.”

(more…)

Evelyn’s Big Adventure

Evelyn is definitely a city girl. Camping isn’t exactly an itch she needs to scratch.
But for Kier, she makes an exception. Bet she’ll never make that mistake again. Enjoy!

“C’mon, mom, keep up!” Kier yelled from a bend in the trail.

Evelyn, struggling with the aluminum folding chair she’d insisted on bringing, called back, “You could carry my chair for me, you know.”

With a put-upon air, newly teenaged Kier said, “You wanted the chair, so you have to carry it.” He turned to his best friend Barry. “That’s one of the rules of camping, isn’t it?”

Barry shrugged. “I guess so. I mean, you and me’re fishing, so we’ve got to carry the fishing stuff, right?”

(more…)

SnakeGrrrl

You met Tessa’s boa constrictors, Meg and Calvin, in Dreaming of Xeres.
This story tells how she got them, and
what happened when Riley met them for the first time. Enjoy!

“C’mon, Josh, it’ll be cool. You know the manager said we couldn’t have any pets ‘with fur’. Snakes don’t have fur so he can’t tell us no.”

“But they’re slimy. And besides, where would you keep it?”

Tessa batted her eyelashes. “In a terrarium, of course.”

Josh made a face at her. “I know that. I mean,” he said with an exasperated air, “where would you keep it in our tiny little apartment?” He shook his head. “I don’t think I could sleep in the same room as a snake. What if it gets out?”

“Are you seriously telling me you’re afraid of a teeny-tiny snake? This little girl’s hardly bigger than a pencil.”

(more…)

Musings On A Journey

The idea for this series had been knocking around in Kyros’ mind for about twenty years. When he lost his job, he asked his husbands if he could be the house husband and try his hand at writing a novel. He had always loved to write, and had a degree in Technical Communication. He’s a really good idea person and editor but didn’t think that he could write well enough to publish. He came to me and we worried the idea over about two months, creating characters, magic, the guilds, the entire world frame for the story.

When we finally started writing, we put in six to eight hours a day for between five and seven days a week until we got the first draft done. We had characters show up that we hadn’t planned for and finished with a completely different ending than we originally plotted. We set up a Facebook page for our series and a forum site for readers and characters to play in. That led to us creating over a hundred characters profiles to play with there so we could use their posts in the story. (Hard work, but fun!) When we were done, we let it sit for a few days, but both of us found we didn’t know what to do with all our suddenly-free time! It was like going cold turkey on caffeine or sugar!

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