So I did, and she said yes! And so in honor of the audio version of RAVEN CALLS being released today, I’m posting the blog she sent. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

The Life of an Audiobook Narrator

I’ve had the privilege over the years of recording some extraordinary books, and it occurred to me a few years back to contact some of the people who write them. It was with great excitement and awe that I first contacted Catie to say how much I loved her work, and it was with the same great excitement that I responded to her request for an entry for her newsletter.

I’m currently in the midst of prepping RAVEN CALLS, the seventh book in the Walker Series. I adore it. It’s not fair or nice to play favorites, but… this is one of my favorites. The whole series has been an absolute gift to me. But this one has had me laughing even more (if possible!) and has made my imagination and my heart dance around with joy.

I’ve had three series I’ve done that have meant a great deal to me, and I’ve made contact with all of the authors. In the midst of one, I had lunch with the author at a pivotal moment: I had been through a really rough time in life, and wanted to thank her for her work. In that dark stretch, I got to spend days in a booth with her characters, and it brought me such comfort. To my great surprise, she confessed that she had written the first book of the series while going through a divorce… that she had written the characters to bring HER comfort!!! It was amazing to know that a book she had written to bring happiness into her life affected me in the same way, and I hoped it was the same salve to many other women who listened to it. I feel the same with Joanne Walker… she’s the inner shaman/ goof/ klutz/ kick ass chick who I wish I were on the inside, and her antics can always make me laugh on a rainy day.

I got into audiobooks through something of a fluke. The well-known reader Jonathan Davis has been a dear friend of mine since we did a play together, and he invited me to send an audition to a company he worked for. This company happened to have an opening—a reader with a similar voice had just left—and I was the lucky recipient of the best job I’d ever had. Here’s another way to tell the same story: I have the privilege of working a lot as an actress, but it wasn’t always that way. For a long time I waited tables and catered, and I had gotten to the point of no return. So I decided to have a frank conversation with God. “God,” I said, while wearing a tuxedo and serving canapés, “I can’t imagine this is my greatest good on this earth. If you want me to keep being an actress, you need to give me a way to live. If not, I’m throwing in the towel. You choose.” Shortly thereafter I got a call, and my life profoundly changed. Somewhere between God and Jonathan Davis was my salvation.

From the company I initially started with, I made contacts that went off and formed their own companies… and wound up doing this wonderful work in several different studios. I was one of the first people called when Audible started their own production company, and they are still one of my greatest employers today. One of my early books was THUNDERBIRD FALLS, the second in the Walker series, and I fell in love with it immediately. I was so excited for this book… it appealed so deeply to my love of language, folklore, and funny, powerful women. But there was a catch… another reader read the first book, and this is never a fun situation to go into.

Listeners are loyal. It’s something I’ve learned. And to switch horses on them midstream… pisses them off. So it was no surprise that there was much controversy about this. I read the book with great love and passion, but I was a fairly new narrator at the time, and a bit nervous. The listener reviews nearly killed me… there were all these comparisons to the first reader’s take on it, and it was really hard for me to deal with that. Besides which, I thought she was wonderful, and couldn’t understand the change either… my guess is that she moved or something, because they never switch readers on a series if they can avoid it.

So the whole thing was a source of great paranoia to me at first… and there were a ton of reviews that preferred one or the other of us. To be honest, my terror was selfish… it was less about my work, which I was beginning to be confident about, and more about the series… would they take it away from me? If there were more books, would I get them, or not? I was so relieved when I got the next one, and the next one, and the one after that, five in all for me to read over the years. I feel like these characters have become old friends, and I so look forward to taking them with me into the booth again. At the same time, it’s an interesting thing, having read for so long… there are early choices I made, particularly character’s voices, which I wouldn’t choose now [Catie's note: That's okay, as I told Gabra, 'cause if I'd known where they were going, there are some choices I'd have made differently for characters early on, too!]. But what can I do? I’m sorta stuck with them! I tried in one series to switch the voices mid-way, and that was like cooking a stew then deciding to make a consommé. It’s invariably better to stick with the stew.

Reading audiobooks is a strange skill, and a strange experience. I love it, but it’s not for everyone. I typically read about 4-6 hours at a stretch, and it is an extraordinary combination of patience (you can’t move around a lot), stamina (I call it “strapping my Nikes to my vocal chords”) and creativity (we want to hear the characters, but don’t do TOO much!) Usually it’s just me and an engineer, and at this point, we’re all pretty dear friends. It’s an intimate situation, reading a book to someone, and we have all worked together for years. So you can imagine that between long takes, and lots of tea, there are wonderful conversations, all of which occur on either side of insulated glass. Pretty strange? Yes. And pretty awesome. Especially for some of the more graphic romances I’ve read… those tend to be pretty funny nights. Please imagine a bunch of women in their 30s reading graphic romances to mostly male engineers in their 20s! It’s wonderfully fun. I think you need a great sense of humor to be an audiobook narrator. You need to be able to laugh at yourself, and intuitively find the humor of the piece you’re working on, both in equal measure.

There’s often a lot of prep that goes into it as well, depending on the material. For RAVEN CALLS, I’m planning to ask Catie if she knows how to pronounce all the Gaelic words she’s put in there, and if she can help me with it! We often have to ask the authors things like that, particularly if you’re working on sci-fi. I recently completed a sci-fi book that had something like 5 pages of pronunciations, all of which were directly from the author… when you have an entirely self-created world, it’s often like that. But it has cropped up all over the place… I once read a romance that was set in Japan, and had to consult a native speaker about the phrases. And once I read a non-fiction book about an indigenous culture in Alaska and had to make my way through Inuit words. That was a picnic! Again, we all have a good laugh over it, and try our best to do the kind of work we are proud of. At this point, I have recorded over 200 books, so there’s very little that can truly surprise me.

So here I sit, about to prep more of RAVEN CALLS, and I get to look forward to some time with Joanne and her adventures in a dark booth. Likely, an attractive young male friend of mine will be sitting across the glass, and in between Joanne’s tangles with her past and present, my friend and I will talk about our lives. I’ll occasionally say a wrong word, and we’ll laugh. I’ll have to say the Gaelic phrases several times until I’m happy with how they sound. And we’ll drink tea and coffee and listen, together, to all the places this story will go, to all the paths Joanne will walk down, to her irreverent and witty self-effacement. And, frankly, we’ll thank God that this is “one of the good ones” and that we can truly enjoy the evening.

So this is for you, the listeners, who will soon have a chance to read or hear this great new installment… I hope you have as much fun listening to it as I plan to have reading it. Cheers to that!

-Gabra Zackman

“THERE ARE ONLY TWO OF THEM,” Alma said somewhat stridently, which made me suspect that she had faced that particular phrase one too many times. Possibly one too many times that very day, in fact.

I said “Oh aglghlgh!” or words to that effect, bought them both immediately and had her sign them for me. :)

This encounter taught me something important, which was to never assume a fantasy story is a trilogy just because there’s more than one volume. Having now (or at least as soon as WAYFINDER is out) committed two duologies myself, I am quite sympathetic to the sudden outburst of THERE ARE ONLY TWO OF THEM!

So I was pretty pleased, more recently, to discover Alma on LJ, and I’ve been following her blog for a while now (she writes some truly beautiful essays), and today I am entirely delighted to present to you an interview with Alma in advance of the release of her new novel, MIDNIGHT IN SPANISH GARDENS.

With no further ado–Alma Alexander!

CEM: You’re the product of/have lived in many cultures: Yugoslavia, Africa, New Zealand, America–and those are just the ones I’m certain of. I know this is like asking a fish what it thinks of water, but do you think your international experiences helped guide you into writing fantasy in particular?

Alma: Inasmuch as I am a chalice that accepts being filled with new sights sounds and experiences as something that is both inevitable and something that I have grown to crave over the years after being exposed to so much of it when I was a child, yes, in a sense it did – because when you’re creating a world, as a writer, it is important that you create one which is self-contained, self-sufficient, and cohesive, no matter how fantastical or bizarre it might seem from the outside.

Worlds have rules, always, and it’s important to know what those are, even if you plan to break them later. But in order to break them convincingly or with any kind of necessary weight, you first have to know WHAT THEY ARE and WHY THEY ARE IMPORTANT. I learned early that the new worlds I might find myself in may look and feel and sound and taste awfully odd and weird to me – but that to those from within those worlds, they were the everyday, the quotidian. It taught me to accept the fact that magic may be and all too often is an indivisible part of our daily existence, if only one knows where to look for it, and how to accept it with both curiosity and grace when it is discovered.

Every one of us may have a certain place on this planet which is “home”, familiar and recognizable and instantly explainable to strangers because it is so firmly and deeply and instinctively a part of us and who we are and how we perceive ourselves. But what my world travels have given to me is an ability to put down roots in all sorts of strange places – perhaps not the deep tap roots that grow solid and strong and all the way down in the places where I first opened my eyes and learned to see, but even those shallow surface roots that I grew elsewhere have always allowed me to suck up the sustenance and moisture (in the shape of knowledge and understanding) which I needed in order to survive in the new place. Shallow roots do not mean weak plants – the great redwoods of California are reputed to have fairly shallow roots which spread very wide – and that’s enough to support a sequoia. I’ll take that.

(Lots more behind the cut!)

CEM: Speaking of the many places you’ve lived–is there one place in particular you would tell everyone in the world to visit, if they could? Someplace that breaks your heart just by its existence? (Aside from Spanish Gardens, which I trust you will explain a bit about later. :))

Alma: Plenty of places. I have this innate capacity for wonder which has seldom failed me, and I have been stirred by many places on this Earth. The Alps; the Highlands of Scotland; Tahiti; the black sand volcanic beaches of New Zealand; those Californian redwoods I mentioned earlier; Serengeti; Victoria Falls; the Grand Canyon; the Yukon Territories in mid-September when they are golden with turning aspen. I love this world of ours. All of it. And there is so much more of it that I haven’t seen, but would love to go – I would love to visit the Galapagos Islands, see the Northern Lights above the Arctic Circle, see the wild horses of the Camargue, see a blue whale out in the open ocean, climb Mount Kilimanjaro, step into the City that Time Forgot at Petra, walk the eternal ice of Antarctica. There are so many dreams left to be dreamed.

CEM: Writers tend to be voracious readers. Whose books can you not live without?

Alma: J R R Tolkien, Guy Gavriel Kay, Roger Zelazny, the early seminal works that I read by people like Henryk Sienkiewicz (it’s OK, – he’s Polish, you CAN say that surname without sounding like you’re about to sneeze, but I wouldn’t be surprised if my more Western readers had never even heard of this Nobel Literature Prize winner…) and oh, so many more. My house has literally THOUSANDS of books in it, I live in a house with an honest-to-goodness library (one whole room dedicated to JUST this purpose, with wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling shelves). I love all of my books.

CEM: Describe your writing process a bit. Do you plot each and every arc? Do you use music to help set the mood? How do you get through any rough patches? Is your focus limited to one manuscript or do you multi-task?

Alma: In order of asking – hell no I don’t plot each and every arc. I am the poster child for the wing-it school of writing and I frequently discover things that astonish me when I start on a project, things I had not imagined were there when the initial idea first presented itself. One of the most elegant “brackets” I’ve ever done – an event that occurs early in a book, and is then echoed in another event close to the end of the book in question – was the cat story arc in “Secrets of Jin Shei”. It gave rise to one of the most affecting lines of dialogue that a story of mine has ever boasted – and for a moment, after I wrote it, I sat staring at the screen with my hands still on the keyboard and thought to myself, I never wrote that. That’s the way I write – I take dictation, as it were. From the characters. From the story.

Sometimes music is helpful particularly since I “see” things with symphonic music in a very vivid visual way. But I don’t have a “story soundtrack”, not as such.

Rough patches – er, um,, yeah. I rant, and I procrastinate, and I have been known to abandon a project that’s stalled cold and go and work on something else, and whine, and complain, and go through periods of complete self-doubt about the value of an entire project because of one problem encountered on the way. Usually when I return to the stalled project after my creative subconscious has finished having this little snit I somehow discover that there is a way through, over, under, or around the problem which has given me so much pain and suffering. So I take the road that’s offered, and off we go again, full steam ahead. I find that a little time away is invaluable for clearing the brain… so long as you keep in mind that letting a project “sleep it off” doesn’t mean abandoning it to a deep dark coma that will eventually have it slide into death. A little procrastination is JUST what the doctor ordered; too much, and it can kill a project stone dead.

Which kind of answers your LAST question, too – yes, I do multi-task, inasmuch as I can sometimes be working on at least two very different stories in tandem, as it were. And there is also other stuff that needs to be done – stuff like, oh, I don’t know, taking time out from the NEW novel (yes I am writing one – isn’t everybody?) to do a bunch of guest blog appearances and interviews in support of a book that’s just about to hit the marketplace. A writer HAS to multitask – often one book is in the process of being hatched as an idea, another is mid-way through and requires plot noodling to get it going again, and a third is just about to be released and requires the writer’s mental energy to be focused on efforts of putting the book out there, promotion, publicity, that kind of thing (particularly since publishers don’t do so much of that any more). Multitasking is not only useful… it is essential.

CEM: And, having demanded essay-style answers for the previous questions, here’s an easy one: tell us a little about your upcoming book, Midnight in Spanish Gardens!

Alma: Several things came together for this. The first of them is the what-if question, the choice that comes to so many and perhaps leaves unnoticed, the “what if things were different” moment, what if I had done this, not done that, chosen a different partner, a different job, a different life. What if I were really somebody else? What are the things that I TRULY find important in my life, the true keystones of it, the issues that define me and without which I would no longer be who I believe myself to be? What would it take to make me turn my back on those things..?

Five people come together in a place called Spanish Gardens and are offered such a choice. This is a story… of what happens next. It is also a story that LOOKS like it has five protagonists. In fact, it has six – because the sixth one, quite simply, is Spanish Gardens itself. The place exists, or once did, and if you read my descriptions of it in the book you will know exactly what it was like. People who haven’t been back there for thirty years and who haven’t seen one another for almost that long or have never personally met at all will describe the place to you in eerily similar terms – it’s as though something… IMPRINTED… back there. This was a place that held true magic, and it didn’t just lie in the fact that it concocted the best Irish Coffees ever made on this world.

I truly believe that everybody has a place like this in their lives, or once had one – a place that lives on unchanged in memory, a place that you could speak only truth in, a place that held up an uncompromising mirror to what and who you truly were – that made you take a long hard look at those what-if questions, and forced you to give honest answers to them, no matter what the cost.

And finally – the end of the world. It seemed fitting that the most appropriate time to question your own existence is on the eve of what might be Apocalypse Now – in some ways choices become even more important when you’re basically out of time to make them, when you have to decide NOW NOW NOW because otherwise the decisions will be forced upon you anyway.

It all came together – the place that I loved and still treasure in my memories, five incredible characters with secrets and issues of their own who produced a story which is not just lightweight froth and foam but tackles some real contemporary issues, and the perfect timing of the Mayan calendar which gave me a timeline I could not ignore.

So – come in – have an Irish Coffee – take a look around – and then, when you’re done reading the book, when you’re sitting there in the aftermath, there’s going to be one last question left on a slip of paper that slips out from the back of the book or you find lying on a table somewhere – what would you choose?

In closing – a few words about me, and a few more about the book –

My main website is at AlmaAlexander.com (take a look at the bibliography page!) and I also have a website dedicated to my YA series, Worldweavers, at AlmaAlexander.com/worldweavers/ , and you can find a book trailer there, as well as excerpts from those books and also ordering information. I blog regularly at anghara.livejournal.com and if people want to get to know the real me that’s the more dynamic site right now. I’m also on Facebook (facebook.com/alma.alexander , or facebook.com/pages/Alma-Alexander/67938071280 ) and if you want to read more literary and writerly essaylets you might visit StorytellersUnplugged.com on the 30th of every month and keep up with me there.

If you want to look into purchasing any of my books, you can go to several places:

Amazon (actual books) or Amazon (Kindle books)

Smashwords for other ebook editions (and go there to keep an eye on the Alexander Triads project, themed collections of short stories…)

Or visit your friendly neighbourhood indie store and ask them to get my books for you if they don’t have them…

You can pre-order “Midnight at Spanish Gardens” at Sky Warrior Books, and will shortly be available at Amazon and Smashwords!

Please note, for those of you already trying to figure out where it fits into the continuity: it doesn’t. This is a world that wasn’t; essentially fan fiction by the authors themselves. Faith’s world and mine have a lot of similarities, but not enough to pretend even for a moment that they’re actually the same world. So while I hope the story will provide a great introduction to both characters, it doesn’t actually belong in either of our universes.

Don’t forget to come back tomorrow to find out who’s won the magnificent prizes being given away (details at the bottom of this post)! And now, enjoy!

We got a good six feet or so before I noticed the crowd was parting before us. Not that I blamed them. I would part before us too, because my newfound buddy looked like a badass, which gave automatic street cred to anybody hanging with her. Skinwalker. I hadn’t encountered that one before. I hadn’t encountered much with the kind of confidence she exuded, either. I’d fallen in beside her like we’d been practicing our whole lives. I wasn’t often enthusiastic about going to see what was causing obvious magical awfulness, but Ms. Tall Dark and Yellowrock looked so obviously prepared for anything, the whole idea sort of sounded like fun.

We got about six more feet before I saw the name of the bar we were passing by and let out an amused snort. “Vamp Mojo, huh? I kind of thought New Orleans would shy away from embracing the whole Anne Rice motif.”

Jane slid a look at me. Yellow-eyed look that sent creepies crawling down my spine. No wonder the guys back at my garage in Seattle had stopped talking to me once I went all magic and woo-woo. The golden gaze was just plain unnatural. I was relieved when she answered, because it gave me an excuse to stop meeting her eyes.

Well, it did for half a second anyway, because she said, “In my world it used to be dance club owned by a vampire. Now it’s a vampire bar.” She sniffed indelicately. “A blood bordello.”

I laughed. She didn’t. All the rich delicious smells in the air suddenly turned my stomach, and I swallowed bile. “There’s no such thing as vampires.”

This time Jane did laugh, but it wasn’t a particularly delightful sound. “I think I’d like to come from wherever you did. Vamps are at the top of the food chain, here. Literally.”

My feet lost their enthusiasm for heading toward the magical block party. Jane surged on a few steps ahead of me, only turning back when the crowd started closing in again. They didn’t matter; we could still see each other easily, what with the height advantage over two-thirds of the population. I swallowed. “There are really vampires here?”

Jane came back, planted herself in front of me, and nodded. The whole action was an emphatic statement. I, much less emphatic, pinched the bridge of my nose. “Okay. Look, before we go rushing in where angels fear to tread, maybe we should try to get some tiny idea of what we could possibly be facing. I don’t have vampires,” I said. “Werewolves?”

“And werecats. Of the African variety. Lions in prides, Leopards in small groups, though they tend to be solitary hunters. Wolves. All predators. No were-gazelles or were-bovines. Witches. Shamans. You?”

My eyes bugged. I felt them. Another quarter inch and they’d pop right out of my head. “You’re joking. Werecats? Isn’t that, I don’t know, very teenage girl wish fulfillment?”

Jane grunted. The sound was weirdly cat-like, and I got the nervous feeling I probably should have shut up about fifteen words earlier. Instead, I rushed on, answering her question. “Witches, yeah. Shamans, obviously. Sorcerers. The occasional demon. Gods of various sizes.”

“Gods?”

I wet my lips. “I take it you don’t truck with them. That’s probably just as well. Probably that means whatever’s down there,” I said with a nod toward the frothing light of doom, “is coming from something that meets us in the middle. Witches. Shamans.” Except I didn’t have vampires, which probably meant we were already in over my head. I didn’t see the need to mention that just yet.

Jane jerked her head in a way that might have meant “Probably” or it might have meant “Stop wasting time, let’s get a move on.” The latter interpretation was buoyed by her turning on her heel and leading the way forward again. “Come on, Dorothy. Let’s see what Big Bad Uglies this world has to offer us.”

I let her take point again. This was her city more than mine, assuming it was anybody’s city at all, tonight. She did the head-jerk thing again, pointing left. “That used to be a jewelry store. Yesterday. And that was an art gallery, not a restaurant. Not my world, not anymore.”

Her words sent more creepies down my spine. Around us, partygoers, some in feathered masks, danced, screamed, showed their breasts in return for a twenty-five-cent strand of beads, drank, vomited on the sidewalks, and swayed into and out of danger of collision like zombies. I took a moment to make sure they weren’t zombies, and came away satisfied they were just stoned. The smell of marijuana was ripe on the air, and mixed with the other scents it was both heady and rank.

Not as rank, though, as a rotted-meat stench that didn’t so much waft as thunder down the street. I automatically held my breath, and somehow the smell got worse, burning my eyes with its power. I coughed, wiped my eyes, and glanced over peoples’ heads in search of the smell’s source.

Sadly, it wasn’t all that hard to find. Something taller than we were was coming up on our right, and I say something, not someone, because it had horns. I knew at least one guy with horns, and he was a someone, but this fellow also had gills. And scales. And a spreading hood, like velociraptors had. A demon velociraptor. Great. I’d gotten yanked into another world where vampires were real and demon velociraptors stalked the streets. Not just demon velociraptors, but demon velociraptors who hadn’t had a fashion update since the 1980s, because the thing’s flared hood was streaked in vibrant neon shades of red, green, blue, and yellow.

It saw us at the same time we saw it.

Don’t forget there’s a contest running all week! Comment either here on CEMurphy.Net or over on FaithHunter.Net and be eligible to win one of the following prizes:

- a complete set of the Walker Papers (Urban Shaman, Winter Moon, Thunderbird Falls, Coyote Dreams, Walking Dead, Demon Hunts, and Spirit Dances).

- a complete set of the Jane Yellowrock books (Skinwalker, BloodCross, and Mercy Blade {Raven Cursed will be out in January 2012, but it’s not part of the prize package!}).

- an electronic edition of the (tentatively entitled) EASY PICKINGS, a Jane Yellowrock/Joanne Walker crossover story, out sometime this summer!

Please note, for those of you already trying to figure out where it fits into the continuity: it doesn’t. This is a world that wasn’t; essentially fan fiction by the authors themselves. Faith’s world and mine have a lot of similarities, but not enough to pretend even for a moment that they’re actually the same world. So while I hope the story will provide a great introduction to both characters, it doesn’t actually belong in either of our universes.

That said, please enjoy this excerpt from EASY PICKINGS!

There was something weird about crossing the city lines into New Orleans. Not just that the Big Easy was by anybody’s standards–in fiction, anyway–the center of all things supernatural in the States. It was bigger than that, a nasty jolt that wrenched everything a couple steps to the left. Even the city’s aura looked different from inside than it had from a few miles out, and I had absolutely no clue why.

The exciting thing about my life was that I’d probably find out.

For all my traveling around as a kid, I’d never gone through New Orleans. N’awlins, the way the natives said it. I loved that sound, like it was a word to be rolled around in and licked off the skin. So I did what any tourist would do upon arriving in the heartland of American Weird.

I hit the French Quarter.

Three days before Mardi Gras, the Quarter was hopping. It was probably the worst time of year to visit if I actually wanted to see New Orleans, but it was the best time if I wanted to throw myself eyeball-deep into beads, streamers, costumes, half-naked girls–Gary was going to deeply regret not having come along–parades, parties, obscene amounts of incredibly good food, and bourbon. I’d never actually tried bourbon and was kind of looking forward to it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t indulge right away, because the fish-hook sensation in my belly, the one that had been hauling me around ever since my shamanic powers had awakened, was getting tighter and more uncomfortable the deeper I got into the Quarter. I didn’t think my magic would give me an even break–let me heal up from a hangover, in other words–if I ignored it in favor of tying one on.

The city was a veritable teeming mass of humanity. Scent bombarded me from every direction: booze, perfume, pot, food, oh, God, the food, and the pervasive stink of sweat that no amount of deodorant or cologne was going to drown. Voices rose and fell in shrieks of laughter, joy, dismay; shouting was the only way to be heard, even if you were talking to the guy standing next to you. Everyone was beautiful in that flush-of-life way, though here in the heart of the city, so close to Mardi Gras, there were an unnatural number of genuinely beautiful people. They ran the color spectrum from rich blue-black all the way through to translucent white, with me thrown in on the whiter end, though when one of those really white girls stumbled into my arms, the skin tone comparison made me look rich and gold beside her. It was only back in Qualla Boundary, surrounded by others of Cherokee descent, that I felt stand-out pale. I pushed the girl to her feet and watched her trotter drunkenly away.

Maybe it was thinking about North Carolina and the life I’d left behind there that made me notice her. There were too many people to explain it otherwise, though the fish-hooks in my gut pulled so hard and sharp that they might’ve been an explanation on their own. It didn’t matter: she was half a block away and visible for about five seconds through a break in the crowd. She wore black leather damned near head to toe, all of it so snug against her body it had to be custom-made. Silver sparkled all over it, zippers and guns and blades and silver stakes in her hair like an Oriental fan of death. She looked hot, both literally and figuratively, and I thought the reason I’d glimpsed her at all was everybody else thought so too, and was backing up to get a better look at her.

She had to be at least my height, just a hair under six feet tall, even without the shit-stomping motorcycle boots she wore. And speaking of hair, if you took my crop cut and her four foot braid and divvied them out, we would both end up with what society considered a normal amount of hair for a woman. She was even built a lot like I was, rangy long limbs, though I thought I carried more muscle across the chest and shoulder from years of working on my car. Her skin tones were darker than mine, more pure Indian, but if somebody’d told me we were sisters, I’d have been inclined to believe them.

Particularly when she glanced my way and a flash of light caught the color of her amber eyes.

In my world, yellow eyes meant magic user. I should know: my own eyes were probably gold as sunrise just then, as the Sight kicked in to study one of the most complex, gorgeous auras I’d ever seen. Earthy colors tangled with something absolutely inhuman: dark, sleek, sentient and dangerous. A hunter, sharing body and soul with a human, and just ever so slightly bubbling with resentment over it.

I sure as hell knew what had brought me to New Orleans, now.

Don’t forget there’s a contest running all week! Comment either here on CEMurphy.Net or over on FaithHunter.Net and be eligible to win one of the following prizes:

- a complete set of the Walker Papers (Urban Shaman, Winter Moon, Thunderbird Falls, Coyote Dreams, Walking Dead, Demon Hunts, and Spirit Dances).

- a complete set of the Jane Yellowrock books (Skinwalker, BloodCross, and Mercy Blade {Raven Cursed will be out in January 2012, but it’s not part of the prize package!}).

- an electronic edition of the (tentatively entitled) EASY PICKINGS, a Jane Yellowrock/Joanne Walker crossover story, out sometime this summer!

Seriously, that sounds all tooting our own horn (and it is), but the only thing I had to do with it at all was page proofs for my essays, so I hardly have a horse in this race. I did, though, end up skimming through everybody’s essays and information, and holy moly, we have some really, really good advice in there. I mean, really truly good stuff. Things that I wished I’d known when I was getting started. Things that are still insanely useful to learn now. I mean, like, I have a copy of this book and I want a copy of this book. That’s how awesome it is.

HOW TO WRITE MAGICAL WORDS is now available for pre-order through the publishers, and *believe* me, the writer in your life wants a copy. Plus, if you order it now, the publisher will ship it to you for a nickel, so the total cost of the book, including shipping, is $18.00 even.

They believe orders placed now *should* get to you by Christmas, and if not by Christmas by New Year’s at the latest, and what better gift for a writer than some brilliant and inspiring advice to usher in the new year and all those resolutions with? :)

*looks despairing* This would be easier if I’d read more than seven books this year, all of which I quite liked. I may have to go with Jack Campbell’s THE LOST FLEET: VICTORIOUS, which is the final book in the Lost Fleet series, which are military SF that do exactly what they say on the box. I have enjoyed them probably beyond their actual literary value because of that, but since there’s not much more you can ask for in books, yeah, I think that might be my favorite recent book.

Close runner-up, though, is Jackie Kessler and Caitlin Kittredge’s SHADES OF GRAY (sequel to BLACK AND WHITE), which is a superhero novel and also does exactly what it says on the tin to a very satisfactory level. That, it seems, is what I’m looking for in books right now. :)

Also, one more guest blog from me over at Drey’s Library, this one about the future of the Old Races universe!