Free Fiction Friday: Twice Dead, by Kalayna Price

Due to a little mix up, this post didn't actually go live on Friday, so it's sort of Free Fiction Monday now, but that doesn't sound as good so I'm declaring it Friday in my world. (I have a very casual relationship with time under the best of circumstances.)

Kita is adjusting to her new liquid diet -- an adjustment she rather resents. Not that everything was chocolate and sunshine before (though both were possible before the sexy but infuriating Nathanial sank his fangs in her business). Kita's ability to shape shift into a kitten when her peers shifted into lions and tigers complicated her life, to say the least, but getting stuck in one form -- that of a human shaped tick, a.k.a. a vampire -- sucks, literally. Her adjustment period is violently interrupted when she discovers a headless corpse during a party for a visiting vampire council. But, the headless dancer won't be the only corpse she encounters.

Kita's involvement draws the attention of the Collector, an ancient vampire with an inclination to acquire two things: power and oddities. As a pureblood shifter turned vampire, Kita ranks high on the collectability list -- not a safe place for anyone who values her freedom, and Kita is not the only one on the list. But with the body count rising, there is more at stake than freedom. A killer is slithering through the underbelly of Haven's vampire community, and with the supernaturals dealing in unnamed favors, it's a bad time to be a kitten who can't slip her skin.

The TriMu and I discussed it and we decided that maybe we're not the best candidates to present a review of this book. We all think Kalayna's a genius and love her work unconditionally, which kind of makes objectivity a challenge. I mean, I could sit here and gush in geeky squealing fangirl fashion extol Twice Dead's virtues as a supportive critique partner, but then I would feel a little silly.

Outside the TriMu, some folks over at Fictionwise, where it' hanging out near the top of the Dark Fantasy charts, seem to like it too. People on goodreads have been enjoying it. It's getting good reviews on Amazon as well. Oh, and Mandi over at Smexy Books gave it a 4/5 this weekend while this post was busy not showing up on the internet.

So it's not just us. We love it, others feel the same, and I'm sure you'll enjoy it as well.

To win this book, leave a comment on this post including the following information:

1) Your name
2) How you found us
3) A question for us to answer in our next Mailbag Monday post

Comments will be closed at midnight (Eastern) on Sunday, February 28, 2010 and the winner will be announced on Monday, March 1, 2010 Comments will be closed at midnight (Eastern) on Thursday, March 4, 2010 and the winner will be announced by Kalayna on Friday, March 5, 2010.

This is just my opinion and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of other members of the TriMu. Also, I didn't get this book for free. I bought it with my own money from the bookstore, and it's not an ARC or acquisition reviewed for compensation.

Working and Listening

I'm reading through Madeleine L'Engle's Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, a collection of her ponderings on art, writing, and spirituality. L'Engle is most famous for her middle-grade novel A Wrinkle in Time. I came across a passage in the early chapters of Walking that felt like a good way to start off my writerly year.

"When the artist is truly the servant of the work, the work is better than the artist; Shakespeare knew how to listen to his work, and so he often wrote better than he could write; Bach composed more deeply, more truly than he knew; Rembrandt's brush put more of the human spirit on canvas than Rembrandt could comprehend.

When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.

But before he can listen, paradoxically, he must work. Getting out of the way and listening is not something that comes easily, either in art or in prayer. . . . Someone wrote, 'The principle part of faith is patience,' and this applies, too, to art of all disciplines. We must work every day, whether we feel like it or not, otherwise when it comes time to get out of the way and listen to the work, we will not be able to heed it."

The Inklings

Inklings: 1. vague ideas or notions; slight understanding 2. (slang) small pen marks 3. writers group created and attended by C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield, Warren Lewis (C.S. Lewis’s brother), Charles Williams, and others 4. individual members of writers group called the Inklings.

I just finished reading The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community by Diana Pavlac Glyer. I picked it up because it is about the writer’s group that two of my favorite authors were a part of and I wondered if the Tri Mu couldn’t learn a thing or two from them.

The Inklings met weekly to encourage each other, argue with each other, edit manuscripts and support creative community. They would get together around 9 p.m. every Thursday, Warren Lewis would brew tea, and C.S. Lewis would ask “Well, has nobody got anything to read us?” Someone would read aloud from a manuscript he was working on and the others would critique it as it was being read. The manuscript genres varied from Tolkien’s 15 years with The Lord of the Rings to Owen Barfield’s poetry to C.S. Lewis’s Christian apologetic works to Warren Lewis’s histories of 18th century France. The group would go until well past midnight; joking, arguing, critiquing and reading sometimes until dawn. In addition to their weekly critique meetings, the Inklings met in other venues both professionally and personally. Several of them worked as Oxford dons, so they visited each other on campus. Also, members of the group met for a social Tuesday morning breakfast at the Eagle and Child Pub (affectionately known as the Bird and Baby). They even took part in week-long walking tours of the English countryside where they wrote farcical poems about one another and “Passed the Plot” around as we are doing online right now.

Glyer’s book encouraged me as a writer because it gave me a glimpse into the creative processes of people I consider literary giants. J.R.R. Tolkien rewrote The Lord of the Rings several times in the years he was working on it and nearly gave it up more than once. As C.S. Lewis says, “He has only two reactions to criticism: either he begins the whole work over again from the beginning, or else takes no notice at all.” According to Glyer, Tolkien would never have written the book at all if not for the encouragement from the Inklings. He preferred digging into the back-story – his languages and histories – to writing the novel and may never have pushed himself through the 15 years of effort it took to write his “new story about Hobbits.”

C.S. Lewis’s creative process took on a different form than Tolkien’s. He would ponder an idea for months without writing. He compared the process to a pregnancy – to being “with book.” He also tried ideas out in different literary forms before landing on the perfect genre. For example, the second book in the space trilogy, Perelandra was originally a poem. Lewis also talked his ideas out with friends and colleagues before he set them down. However, once he started writing, he wrote in a fury. Each of the Chronicles of Narnia took six months to write, and he finished a draft of Pilgrims Regress in two weeks. He did little revision work after setting pen to paper, although he did edit and focus his stories based on advice from the Inklings.

The premise of Glyer’s book is that creativity, specifically the extremely successful creativity of the Inklings, is not an isolated event, but occurs in the context of society. She highlights five main activities of all artistic groups - encouraging, challenging, editing, collaborating, and offering public support. So far, the Tri Mu has taken part in all of these at different times. Encouragement keeps us going. Challenges sharpen our ideas. Edits strengthen our writing. Collaborations exercise our creativity. Support gets books sold (or at least gets us comments on our blog entries).

So, to officially kick off our Modern Myth Makers’ blog, I want to remind everyone that “No writer is an island, no idea is original, no effort is a solo effort. We stand upon the shoulders of giants, we collaborate with our colleagues and with the immortal words of our dead literary ancestors. Literature – indeed, all human effort – is dignified and uplifted through collaboration and cooperation.” (Cory Doctorow)

~D