Haus of Rhi

As promised, picspam! Sorted roughly by order of appearance (except for Traken down there at the bottom), here's the rest of the cast of characters in Piaffe. Some of them don't have much page time. Others have a much larger role than what is seen or claimed in this volume of the series. I had fun exploring these first two, because Neolus and Erryn are two of my favorite supporting characters. We'll see more of them. Can I say that without it being spoilery? I really like them. Willoughby, who plays Neolus, is of Ojibway from Whitesand First Nation and Jamaican descent. Thuy is a Vietnamese model. Also worth mentioning is that Jherrfaulken Torrente character about halfway down. He doesn't actually get page space, but he kind of steals it. And his presence and influence loom a bit. He never really had a face, until I stumbled on a photo shoot a while back, and then I couldn't see him as anyone else. I'm sure he won't mind. Everyone wants to be named ...

The Sacred Manda Grove It was in drafting a spiritual system for Piaffe's world that trees became a major player. I didn't want there to be religious structure, per se, but I did want to create a measure of spirituality in the form of respect for the planet and all its inhabitants. A sharing of resources and space. Filtered Sunlight Because their language system is heavily Latinus influenced, I opted to transform Gaia into Ommat, literally "all things are," from om mat , which means "mother of all." She began not so much a specific goddess entity as she is a communion with nature. The sacred groves were space set aside for rites in which the dead were returned to the earth, the final embrace. I was in the throes of working these details back into the story, trolling the internet for images of what these groves might look like. How old were they? What kind of trees were mandas, beyond being old, dense, and dark? That was when my longtime friend Am...

Once upon a time, tanks could dance. One of my favorite parts of creating the world in Piaffe revolved around the insigni. I'll admit that my inspiration was born in Vienna, Austria at the Spanish Riding School where, at the age of five, I had the pleasure of straddling the back of a Lipizzaner mare. She was huge. Enormous. Fluid. Exploring the abilities of the mundane horse, the years of training required to perform complex maneuvers which the Spanish Riding School teaches, and extrapolating the possibilities of combining those with a sharp intellect and an aware mind, led to the evolution of the equine soldier. Forging that image in the reader's mind was a bit of a challenge. I see their towering presence in my head, but how could I convey it? I could see them moving in my head, but how does one describe it?

It's official. You can now pre-order my next book. It's slotted for a release date of February 20th, and what's more, it'll be available in paperback as well as digital format for those of you who've expressed interest. This is the first in a series, and while I'll try very hard not to be Robert Jordan or GRRM, I can't very well make any hard promises. Because as George recently said, years from now it won't be the wait for the next book that everyone talks about, but how good it is, and that's ultimately what I'm striving for. Not perfection per se (I realize it's an unreasonable and I'm working on that) but the best artistic effort that I'm capable of, given where I am right now. It's a journey. Let's see where it takes us. It's (finally) one I want to share with all of you. Keep an eye on my website, or better yet sign up for my newsletter, as I'll be sharing a free excerpt in the week before release.

It takes bravery and courage to move forward through life. Over and through and under and around all the obstacles and resistance rising up to thwart us. Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important. - Theodore Roosevelt  Confronting fears and pushing forward despite them takes strength. I like to think the Fool isn't unaware of the cliff before them, or the precipice of unknown. Instead, they're choosing to focus on the possibilities, the positive, and the potential gain of flight. They've stopped second guessing. They've stopped doubting. They've stopped asking "what if" and decided to find out what they're capable of. "The Fool's Journey" is often described as the parallel of "The Hero's Journey" which most avid readers would agree is a staple framework for the majority of literature out there, as well as movies. But as the calendar turns and offers an opportuni...

Is 2016 over yet? It isn't!?.... Fine then. I know I'm not alone in saying it, but it's been an extremely rough year. For all of us. I've struggled to find creative energy and inspiration for the greater part of this year. I've shown up, and I've been writing, but it's all been of a non-fiction nature. Tarot studies, shadow work. I haven't shirked my daily spreads, and sitting down to do that each morning, and the associated writing, is admittedly a huge part of what's kept me going long enough for the juices to start flowing again. The trigger point that tipped me back into writing earlier last week was an album that Aleks shared on Facebook -- the soundtrack from a video game, Mirror's Edge: Catalyst. Never mind that the character on the game cover looks suspiciously like a muse of mine, from a futuristic spec-fic I've been toying with, which will likely be my next-year project. Image link takes you to the full soundtrack on Youtu...

Okay, so I didn't reach that 50k goal. But November was far from a loss. Red's story is sitting just past the halfway point. I have a solid framework of where it's going and how it's getting there. I just need to find the energy and inspiration to write it. And...that's not a thing that will happen this month. My momentum dies every year around this time. It's inevitable. I'm planning to reach the fin  for her story during the month of January. It was one of the projects on my "To Write" list for 2014. Or was that 2013. I don't recall. I've been sitting on it so long, if it had been plant life we'd be dealing with diamonds right about now. Actually, I think that particular analogy is best allocated to my old trunk novel, DC. Whose first volume has been lurking in a shadowy corner of my psyche for the past year, draft completed and just...waiting. For the time to be right. And soon, I think. First, though, I want to finish with R...

As though winter isn't rough enough most of the time, this year Mercury went into retrograde for the entire month of February, and of course, oriented in Pisces. That's my constellation, the one that resonates with me the most--I'm technically an Aquarius/Pisces cusp, but when it comes to art, and writing, the Piscean in me comes to the fore. (The Aquarian side I save mostly for forced social interactions.) At any rate, February was a big fat bust. The most I managed to write on any given day was 100 words, when words came at all. Oftentimes just that much took hours to accomplish. Yet life is cyclic in so many ways, and Mercury relented at last. I could almost feel  the floodgate giving way, the surge of words scourging away the residue built up by weeks of frustration and headdesking. Of course, the parameters of my upbringing demanded this sort of pagan resonance receive disbelief and an "evil" label, so despite the years and distance between us, I still dou...

April's editing pass went better than I expected it to. Cleaning up prose and addressing a couple consistency issues I stumbled upon, that was the worst of it. Since Piaffe  sits at 80k it was no small task, but thank fuck I can call it done. Done enough that I need a break before tackling the completion of Levade , the second volume. I know I struggle with writing short stories, or even shortER stories, but really, there comes a time when one must stop and breathe or it becomes downright arduous. So, with that first volume of Dancing Circles  wrapped up rather neatly, I'm shifting on to the second project on my 2013 To-Do List. Finishing a half-complete project, Fang and Fire.

I should make an update, shouldn't I? Especially since it's been over a month since my last post, and my self-imposed deadline has expired. I bought seed starter kits and entirely too many packets of seeds, all of them the same thing: sage. I decided, back at the beginning of March, that since I buy so much of it to dry and burn, that I should really just grow my own. My seeds are actually sprouting! I have a tray of them in the kitchen window, and they are happily doing their thing. The packet said they needed to germinate for a few weeks, so imagine my surprise when I noticed them popping out after only a week. I will have a LOT of sage to plant outside in May. If I don't manage to kill the seedlings somehow, between now and then. I'm not ruling it out. After all, I do have a black thumb, haha. On to the latest writing news. That last push through the end of March actually went well. I won't pretend that I'm exorbitantly satisfied with the current state...

I was strolling along quite innocently through this forest of a story, rather certain that I had all the characters figured out. Or that I was in the very least intimately familiar with all of them. After all, this WIP I'm working on currently...this one has been with me for decades, not just years. I know this forest well. We've forged a few new trails over our time together, but the views are much better along these newer routes. I'd finally reached a place in my journey as a writer where all the pieces had begun coming together. An awareness of self that let me truly see what the story had been whispering all along. So not really expecting any surprise confessions from characters, right? Dude, come on. I've known y'all longer than anyone except my siblings for fuck's sake. Nope, they've managed to catch me completely off guard. And all the sudden I'm tackling a character who's physically abusing their significant other--because it's the mos...

The holidays and I have had a hardcore love/hate relationship for many years, so I tend to stay low-key from All Hallow's Eve through the beginning of the year. Sometimes it strikes an ennui in me that causes a creative lag. Not this time. It seems I've surrounded myself with enough protective energy and positive thoughts to ward off the worst of it. This beauty here is part of that! No, I didn't even wait until Yule to open my present, either. (Rhi must really learn to turn the date-stamp off on the camera so that it's easier to falsify improprieties such as this.) Bronze Dragonscale It's always a struggle for me to find pieces of jewelry I'll willingly wear. Naturally, this means the probability of finding things I don't ever want to take off is virtually negligible. Yeah well...I'm totally besotted. Meet my new beau; the dragonscale is inextricably adhered to my wrist. I'm even sleeping with it on. I've always preferred silver over ...

This one is safe, I swear. The weather was beautiful Tuesday afternoon, the sky a clear vivid blue. The temperature was perfect and a brisk breeze was blowing. I had a short dayjob shift thanks to my inability to say "no" when they asked me to work a release event Monday night. And so I got home at the perfect time to snap some pictures...

Dear readers, Hi! Send Twizzlers and black licorice jelly beans please? Oh, and more coffee of course. Not that I don't have plenty, but one can never have enough. The weather's great, sun's warm, and the occasional glimpses of Black Hawks and Chinooks are just enough to be a timely distraction. I was sorely tempted to go sit and watch the #soldierporn flying around all afternoon, but that sun-so warm and lovely in an indirect way on my front porch-promised the murder of a thousand lobster-burns if I dared neglect my day's task. So I saluted the Chinook with my Moleskine and went back to writing.

So I've set a goal to finish the WIP known as the Trunked Novel Overhaul before the end of June. That leaves me with, roughly, somewhere between 40-50k needing written, with the bit of backtracking I needed to do in order to detour around some plot-block issues I had. One of my fellow Riptide authors tweeted this morning about "Camp Nanowrimo" which, not surprisingly, I'd known nothing about because I live in a cave under a mountain most of the time. At any rate, I've signed up for the June camp . And because I'm silly and sentimental and this WIP has been with me forever, I tossed up an old sketch for the "cover art" spot: Insignis A piece inspired by one of the original characters, which has since been smooshed back into a lump of clay and recreated along with many others. The concept prevails, though. And I am acutely aware that I have less talent for drawing than I do for writing. This is here because, as I said, it's been a long ...

I've been rather quiet the past week, but there's a good reason, I swear there is! ...It's because I can't find much to say when all my energies are focused on writing. And that's where my mind has been, since Friday of last week. Writing. And...more writing. My week-long vacation is coming to a close. I've enjoyed the generous downtime. So has my writing. And while I haven't churned out monumental word counts or anything, I expect the WIP will be sitting pretty at 50k when I head back to the doldrums of The Day Job tomorrow. Sadly, I've no idea if that is supposed to be the halfway point, or what it is precisely. I'm refraining from sharing too many excerpts just now, since it's still in the formative "I don't even have a complete draft yet" stage. So, instead, I give you my muse. This is Jaedyn Myfala. And... he has a neck fetish. Apparently. It's a good thing he's so nice to look at, because he's going to be ...