The Map Shop

  Photo by  NEOSiAM 2020  from  Pexels Hello travelers, I thought I would present this excerpt from my WIP titled The Unfortunate Death of Dorian Greene. This story is a New Adult Urban Fantasy focused around vampires. This is still only the second draft of this story, so some events may change by the time it is finished.  For this excerpt, please be aware of trigger warnings for blood, violence, murder and a little body horror.  I hope you enjoy. Milky-white liquid pooled around her feet, dripping from her soaked dress, her long hair, and her claws to mix with the red flowing at her feet. Bright light pierced her vision, cutting and clawing at her brain. The beast hissed.  Squinting through the glare, she bent over the body and bit the artery, chewing at the flesh a few times before letting the blood flow into her mouth. Warm, sweet and metallic. She closed her eyes and continued to drink, the insistent drumming in her temples slowly subsiding as her ...

    Photo by cottonbro from Pexels   Hello travelers, If you are like you, you are stuck in the middle of quarantine. I recognize that this might mean different things for different people. Personally, I live in an area where everyone is supposed to be doing the bare minimum for health safety yet they are also pretty much back to normal life despite our spiking numbers (thanks Midwest America). I am an essential worker and have continued to work throughout the shut down in order to service my community with their library needs. I recognize i'm lucky to still be working though I do wish there were more restrictions and not such a big push to reopen given the current climate. When this quarantine started, a lot of people figured this was a great time to read all of those books that they never would normally get around to. I had a similar mindset. I couldn't go out. I was stuck at home all the time. Obviously this was the perfect time to put a huge dent in my TBR, right? A...

    Photo by george ketselashvili from Pexels   Greetings travelers! Writing is an amazing art form. You create people, worlds, histories, and whole systems of culture and government in your head, convey all of these things through a few symbols on a page, and suddenly this thing that has never existed and will never exist or can never exist is real and tangible and shared with hundreds of other people in the world. That is the beauty of writing. On the other hand, writing is a mind numbing, soul crushing, infuriating process where you struggle to get the words on the page in just the right order to convey just the right feeling or event or character trait so others will believe and enjoy your work. And by the time you finish a draft, you are so exhausted with this world and its characters that many writers, myself included, almost instantly go onto starting a new project without finishing the first one. If you want evidence of this, you should read my post about all ...

  Photo by  Lisa Fotios  from  Pexels   The Witcher is a series of books created by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski. His short stories, originally published in the science fiction and fantasy magazine Fantastyka, were later collected into two books, Sword of Destiny and Last Wish, which were published in 1992 and 1993. These stories introduce readers to the Witcher world, including Geralt of Rivera, the main protagonist of the series. In 1994, Sapkowski released the novel length saga, starting with Blood of Elves, that continues Geralt's story. There are seven novels in this saga and one stand alone novel as well as the short stories.  The Witcher has also been adapted into television shows, most recently by Netflix, and a successful series of video games.  This series is a mature fantasy with magic, monsters, and bloody sword fights as well as political drama and ideologies in regards to war and conflict. I was aware The Witcher was a series of v...

  The X-Files Origins: Agent of Chaos by Kami Garcia is a prequel to the Fox television show that was created by Chris Carter and aired between 1993 and 2002. Agent of Chaos was published in 2017 by Imprint Reads. Kami Garcia is the coauthor of the Beautiful Creatures and Dangerous Creatures and is the author of The Lovely Reckless, Broken Beautiful Hearts, Unbreakable, and Unmarked. For those who haven't watched the show, X-files follows FBI agents Dana Scully and Fox Mulder as they investigate unexplained circumstances and events while also dealing with a shadow government who may have orchestrated the kidnapping of Mulder's little sister, Samantha.  Agent of Chaos takes place five years after Samantha's disappearance. Mulder is living with his father despite their deteriorating relationship and is suffering from insomnia and obsessive fixation on various subjects that he finds interesting. Meanwhile, his father is pressuring him to attend Georgetown University for a soci...

Hello travelers, If any of you are avid Booktube fans like I am, I'm sure you've noticed this tag making the rounds right now. Some people did this back in June, others are only now getting theirs up. To be honest, it doesn't feel like the seventh month of the year. I still feel like it's March or April even though I know that's not the case. My calendar told me so.  Anyway, I thought I'd do a Freak Out post for you this week to "celebrate" the middle of the year. Firs off, a few rules: I'm using the questions posed by  Jesse the Reader  in his video, I will use one book per question-- meaning if I use a title as one answer, i cannot use it for another answer-- and finally, I can only use books that I have finished, not any that I am currently reading. 1. What's the Best Book you've read so far in 2020? Hands down, it's Nevernight by Jay Kristoff. As I've mentioned before, this book had me reading by the headlights of the cars behin...