Holly Black's upcoming release: 'The Coldest Girl in Coldtown'.

I had just finished airing excitement for the release of Love in a Time of Global Warming by favourite author Francesca Lia Block, as well as the upcoming new season of Sherlock. There as well is the ever-continuing promise of S.H.I.E.L.D. coming out in September. I had almost thought that all my potential for squee had been all used up for the time being.

Nope. I was wrong.

At the beginning of the month, I promised I'd be writing more on this upcoming title soon, and here it is:

Holly Black! That is a name people have no doubt seen on my blog more than a couple of times. (If you haven't, I have personally devised a clever tagging system at the bottom of each post so that clicking on 'Holly Black' will pull all such posts up. :D)

Holly Black's short story anthology The Poison Eaters got a fair amount of publicity in 2010 when it was released, but by far and away the most noise made of any short story in that anthology had to do with "The Coldest Girl in Coldtown".

Now, more than three years later, it's going to be released as a full length story in its own right. Now, first there was the cover reveal, then there was Entertainment Weekly releasing their exclusive trailer for the book slated to come out on September 3rd, here.

I'm not ashamed to say that I am excited. In fact, I'm already re-reading The Poison Eaters just to tide me through! And, as of today, the First 8 Chapters of The Coldest Girl in Coldtown are available for FREE, you saw correctly, FREE on Amazon now: http://www.amazon.com/Coldest-Girl-Coldtown-Chapters-ebook/dp/B00DB7R7E6/ref=sr_1_1_bnp_1_kin?ie=UTF8&qid=1375816503&sr=8-1&keywords=coldtown

Only until the date of the release. (September 3rd. Eeeeeee!!) So get in quick!

Charlaine Harris, Southern Vampire Mysteries and 'Dead Ever After'.

Okay, so, my love affair with Patricia Briggs clearly goes above and beyond any feelings I may have for Charlaine Harris' Southern Vampire Mysteries, or it's associated HBO television show True Blood. Time and again, I mention again how amazing I think Patricia's writing is. I don't think this blog yet has had a thing to say about the certainly more public series written by Charlaine.

At the risk of being just another commentator on the big issue that has come out of the latest--indeed, last--book of the Southern Vampire Mysteries, they are in a similar enough genre to the Mercy Thompson books and I think a person must almost have been hiding under a rock to have missed the outcry that has come along with Dead Ever After.


At the core, Charlaine completed her series of books in a way that many of her fans did not like. As with many fellow authors, she had a vision for the trajectory of the series and, even with the popularity of certain characters over other certain characters, Charlaine made the decision not to waver from her original view on how the books would end.

Now, in the wake of many impassioned and angry fans, Charlaine has had to cancel public appearances and otherwise hide under her own rock until the sensation passes, instead of celebrating the end of a particularly popular series of books.

At the end of season three, I put True Blood aside when they went off and seemed to kill everyone but Sookie at the end of season three, leaving me feeling like I would have sacrificed the main character rather than lose all the rest. I ranted about it a little to my friends that year. I even started voicing it again when time came around for season four to be premiering. I certainly did not write hate mail to the author and producer of the series, or even post my opinion publicly.

As far as the books, I've been trying to figure out how far I'd gotten. Dead and Gone is the last one I read, I think. As much as I loved the 'mysteries' element of these stories, I thought that the character interaction was, on occasion, a little thin. There were a lot of questions about Sookie and Eric getting together that I thought went overlooked in favour of other things.

I've got a Goodreads.com account, and I do post reviews of all the books I read up there. All the books I finish. There have been many I haven't, and to those I simply put a 'Did Not Finish' marker on my blog here and move on.

For any books I've finished and not liked? There is always something constructive one can say about a book. I've also read my fair share of writing in various creative writing courses over the years. It is common courtesy, even when you do not like what you've just read, to say something positive before you give the criticism. I take that route whenever writing a review to a book I didn't feel was all that strong. There's got to be some reason you kept on reading it, even if you didn't like some parts of it, so why not mention those, too? (To be truthful, I also list the one or two things I thought weren't strong in books I absolutely loved.)

The issue has brought up questions of whether authors, as both artists and producers of a service, do or don't have an obligation to give their readers what they want. It's a really interesting debate, but also really scary if authors are put in a position where they have to give in to their readers if they don't want to face all this.

Of course, this is hardly the first time anything of this nature has occurred. In what's probably the most famous previous occasion of public outcry against an author's decision, and probably something that's coming to a lot of peoples' minds right now, Arthur Conan Doyle made the decision to wrap up his Sherlock Holmes series by killing him. In this case, of course, the author did give in to public outcry and brought him back.

(Unlike True Blood, BBC's Sherlock is something I'm looking forward to with baited breath. Come on season three!)

I'll tell you what, though. The public outcry over the end of the Southern Vampire Mysteries series of books has made this little read want to sit up and finish reading these books on my shelf, just to see how she did decide to finish them. :D

What I like to read when I'm writing urban fantasy.

Inspired by the Author's Chat post on the weekend, as well as questions I've been getting from a couple of recent interviewers, I've decided to write a blog post based on the things I read when I'm writing my Shadows of Melbourne series.

In preparation for starting to look at a second draft of the third book Smoke and Mirrors and make my first steps on a draft for Harsh Light of Day, I currently have a copy of Patricia Briggs' Bone Crossed on my waiting-to-be-read pile.


Patricia's paranormal fantasy novels are like a breath of fresh air. The market is currently flooded with vampire novels and these novels stand out. If I could be seen to write like anyone out there in paranormal fiction right now, it would be Patricia Briggs.

The characters, the plots... I definitely have the feeling that I am standing right within the world she's created when I'm reading. I love the friends that her main character Mercy Thompson has, the way those friends complicate and enrich her life. I love that each single book plot wraps up, while still leaving the reader wanting to know what will happen next on the greater, overarching plot of the series.

Most of all, I like that someone else is writing these books, and I'm not the one who has to figure out what to write next.

From Booklist: In a world where witches, vampires, werewolves, and shape-shifters live beside ordinary people, it takes a very unusual woman to call it home...

I'm so looking forward to start reading it!!

I'm also pretentious (and academic) enough to have picked up another couple of books to flick through as I develop the vampire and werewolf plot lines in upcoming Shadows of Melbourne novels. The most instrumental texts I have on my shelf to that end are Our Vampires, Ourselves by Nina Auerbach and Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes.

Auerbach's book is an amazing look at the history of the literary vampire, starting from Byron's vampire story begun on the same night as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The format of the old Gothic tales are looked at closely. Those tales aren't things I necessarily think about when I am writing, but reading through Our Vampires, Ourselves has given me some great ideas to do with a character who has only appeared peripherally so far in Gothic.

Women Who Run With the Wolves is a book I have picked up, put down, picked up again, put down, and never owned myself until running across it recently in a university book sale. I snatched it up immediately, determined to pick it up this time for more than a passing read. This book had been in my mind as potential insight into the deeper relationship between Dahlia and her adopted werewolf kin. The book is, of course, interesting for many other archetypal and societal reasons.

**
I've also received the link to a guest post I did a little while ago over at the Ramblings from this Chick blogspot. Feel free to go over there and have a look:
http://ramblingsfromthischick.blogspot.com.au/2013/01/guest-post-with-author-nicole-d.html

"Gothic" and Fairy Folklore

I don't know when it was that my interest in the fantasy genre became a little bit more particular. I remember it wasn't that long ago that I couldn't conceive of a workable urban or mythical fantasy story.

I've written in a couple of different places now the story of my Honours year last year. I was fairly concentrated on my strict subject of fairy tales and Beauty and the Beast in particular and I just got to a point where I couldn't think about it anymore. I was a little bit ahead at the time and I thought to myself, What if I take a quick week off to just write something else. Something flippant. Something that I don't have to edit immediately or get right the first time.

That was the first draft of Gothic. It was a bit strange, actually. I'd told myself I wouldn't write a vampire story. Although I'm intrigued by the idea of writing an epic vampire novel, I just don't think that what I would put out there could compete with the multitudes of vampire fiction already in circulation. But then, Gothic isn't just a vampire story. It's also a story about a human girl, about family, about a community of werewolves. And when I thought about it that way, it didn't seem so daunting to put it out there, even in the midst of all the other vampire fiction.

In the next novel, Revelry, I'm going to be adding fairies to the mix for the first time.

In Celtic mythology, the Sidhe fairies (pronounced "shee") are seen almost as gods, or spirits of ancestors and nature of that culture. European folklore sees fairy kind as the sort who would steal human children and sometimes leave one of their own in their place. There have been countless stories and poems written around this folklore, including



"The Stolen Child" by Keith Donohue, based on the William Butler Yeats' poem of the same name. I absolutely loved this book. Donohue writes from the point of view of the group of fairies who group together to steal the child and leave a changeling in its place. He creates this beautiful mythology where every member of this group was once a stolen child, and in stealing new children and replacing them, they get to go back into the human world they've lived outside of for so long. This novel inspired a whole set of vignettes that I wrote a little over a year ago, some of which I am currently thinking of fixing up and compiling together in a book of short stories.

So here I am!

So here I am at blogger with my new layout put together by the lovely Regina at HeartFelt Promos.

My name is Nicole and, it may not be obvious just yet, but I'm a bit of a fan of fantasy. I'm not quite sure when that started. I could possibly blame it on some of the artwork I am a fan of.



Let's face it, in fantasy, you can get away with a lot more. The lines of good and evil are blurred. Motivations of characters can be more complex as a vampire needs to drink blood, a werewolf needs to change under that full moon. Those kinds of vital urges -whether they are fought against or given into- give a writer a lot to play with.

So, anyway this is my blog at blogger. Feel free to look around. There will be more tabs across the top of the site soon enough.

Until next time.

New Realease - "Gothic"

I come to you today, fresh from my first day at a new job, thinking that I will have a couple of weeks away from my writing to recharge and re-energise after the last week of restructuring one novel, editing another and beginning two new ones.

Here I am, ready to take the world by storm. 

(in a couple of weeks)

Then today, I get an email from my friendly, neighbourhood publisher.

"Erm, ehm, promotion, promotion, promotion!"

Imagine me headdesking at this moment as I scratch my head and utter, 'I knew I forgot something...'

So!

Leap of Faith LLC have been kind enough to take a ... leap of faith :D ... with my new novel Gothic, which is in final stages of editing and awaiting cover art.

Gothic is the first in a new paranormal romance series sketched together in the middle of my Honours year last year (much less stressful than the writing I was actually researching and getting marked on, I tell you! (Anyone who has ever done an Honours year can tell you this is true.)) Of course, then I talked to my partner about this book I had just written and he said, 'So what happens if you did this next...?' and so a series was born.

But Gothic... I have had so much fun writing this story. 

It's a story of a human girl, Dahlia, who's mother died when she was eight. After her father ran away with grief, she was taken in by her vampire godmother and the rest of the werewolf pack of which her father had been a part. When the story starts, Dahlia has just moved out of home and wants to live the 'normal' life, i.e. a life without quite so much vampire and werewolf influence. In the first few weeks of class, she finds out that her godmother has contacted one of her vampire friends to watch over her. He, Elliott, ends up being one of her confidants. Another student, and human girl, Renee ends up being another close friend.

Hijinx ensue! Time for some more visual assist:

Elliot is another supernatural featuring in Dahlia's full supernatural dance card. He is of the mild snark and general hilarity, and claims at times to have brushed elbows with such popular figures as Lord Byron and Bram Stoker.


Renee meets our girl Dahlia through her normal university boyfriend. She's super cute and acts about half her age because she wants to get the university experience "just right".

One of the best parts of this story is that I have clear images for both of these characters. The lovely actors who are acting as muses in my head right now are none other than the lovely Ms Ksenia Solo from Lost Girl and Mr Ian Somerhalder (nicknamed 'Smoulderhalder' with good reason by fellow cast mate AND GIRLFRIEND Nina Dobrev) from The Vampire Diaries. Say what you will about these shows, but these two people are gorgous. Anyone who knows me will know I shamelessly fangirl this TV series that is based on the L. J. Smith series of books from my childhood.

So that's me and mine for in the last little while. More news and excerpts to come next time I get a chance to be on the computer.

One Month, and the countdown is definitely on.

It's only one month now until Gothic hits the virtual bookshelves, and this little brown duck is starting to get just a little bit excited.



A couple of things have happened in the last little while, most of it on the Leap of Faith website. Last time I posted to promote this little work, I know I had a friend of mine ask about where my name was on the list of 'coming soon' books and/or authors. And now, Ta Da!!

http://www.leapoffaithpublishing.com/Nicole%20D.%20Fergusson.html

Does this change me? Does the promise of instant fame, riches and adoration transform who I am at some basic level? Does it inflate my ego, make me feel like my hours spent slaving over my laptop lifeline are all worthwhile now?

Mostly, Gothic's release date makes me keenly aware that there is a sequel novel that I need to finish polishing up, and 20 pages of notes in another document for a third novel in this series that I still need to round up the time to write up. As for instant fame, riches and adoration... I think I'll just settle for picking up a second contract after this one ;)

But I'm chuffed. About Gothic and about having that first book published in a number of years, I definitely feel chuffed. :)

Anyone who has had anything at all to do with writing/editing/publishing knows that this is not a quick process. I first started writing Gothic in October last year, got the acceptance letter for Gothic back in February of this year, and with edits, formatting, cover art and everything else, this project will span almost a full year of work. I'm not the only one who's invested a lot of time and energy into this book. My publisher has kept me awash with how excited she is about this book, how excited she is to have readers devouring it. My editor has kept me humble and continued to insist that dashes are needed where ellipses currently sit. My friends have reblogged my Tumblr posts on their own sites with beautiful messages convincing any and all that they should, must, will buy Gothic if they have anything to do about it.

And, of course, there's my beautiful fiancee, who brought me tea and hot chocolate when I was writing the first draft of Gothic for several hours a day in the space of a week. Who went on long walks talking about this book during the editing process. Who has checked in with me every couple of weeks or whenever it's been a little while since he heard something new on the book front.

Who is singularly to blame for inspiring the 20 pages of notes on the third book, most of which was dot pointed before the second book even got to polishing stages.

And who puts my dream of writing first a lot of the time.

I'm really looking forward to having this book out. I'm really looking forward to sharing that moment with every single one of these people.