Tartaros Launch + Giveaway

I’ll be honest with you here: I never expected to write the book that Tartaros turned out to be. When I wrote, I had no concept of what urban fantasy was, or contemporary fantasy, or paranormal fiction. I was intent on writing fantasy and sci-fi, and Tartaros seemed like fantasy when I wrote it.

Then people started throwing all these other weird labels on it. Things like ‘paranormal’ and ‘contemporary fantasy’ and ‘young adult.’ Nope, I hadn’t even considered that it might be YA (understand: I wrote this fresh out of high school, so that thought didn’t occur to me). I just knew I had a book, and it had demons.

That’s the one thing I could understand being in there, really: I love demonology. I have since high school, when I first read the Lesser Key of Solomon. And sure, the demons in Tartaros have almost nothing to do with the actual Catholic demons, but it’s a subject that fascinated me.

But that’s still not what inspired me to write Tartaros. It was a picture. A picture I’d taken a few months ago and hung on the door to my bedroom. I passed by it for months and, for whatever reason, I looked at it and this queer little thought popped into my head:

He would make a really good demon hunter.

Word for word. I remember it because it was so profoundly out of left field. I had little reason to think he would make a better than average demon hunter. He was fit. That’s about it. But something in there resonated with me for some still unknown reason.

From there, the story spilled out. And I tried a million ways to plan it. I wrote it out, scene by scene, on note cards…which I believe I ended up throwing out. I tried to do an outline. I tried fitting it into a novel planning form. Then I said screw it and just wrote a good story…and apparently it worked.

Tartaros, out now through Prizm Books.

Excerpt:

Daniel rose to his feet and stared at Yolanda. Light shone from her eyes and mouth. Her muscles pushed against the skin. The blood from her cuts sizzled again as Daniel stared at her arm. The three slashes he made were already replaced with tiny scars.

Her muscles continued to bulge out. “Daniel?” Her voice, weak and scared, quivered from her throat. “Are you there?”

He heard sudden cracks coming from her body and saw her legs bend forward. Bits of bone fell from her shattered knees and floated around her. He rushed at her, but when he made contact, an electric pain raced up his arm. He flew back to the opposite wall and crashed into the window, sending glass shrapnel across the floor. He watched her body curl and tighten into a ball.

Rathbone crawled through the broken glass and threw a bottle into the fray. It shattered before it hit her and the contents, whatever they were, swirled around with the bone fragments. Yolanda’s blood crashed to the floor next and splashed into the whirling sphere in turn. Daniel couldn’t move, couldn’t even cry for terror. Panic paralyzed him as he looked on.

Yolanda’s form obscured behind the thin veil of blood and bone, soon disappearing all together. When he could finally move, Daniel dragged himself across the floor, pangs of agony sliding through him with every bit of glass that cut his body. He reached up to the ball of blood and pushed his hand through. A beam of light shot out of the puncture and bounced around the walls. He fell back to the floor as more light washed over his body. The sphere broke apart and blood spattered around the room, filling up the carved runes with bright red.

Then everything went blank and Daniel felt nothing

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Twitter: @VossFoster

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Tartaros Available Here: http://goo.gl/Q97Mh

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Blog tour schedule:

January 2nd: Voss Foster :: Demon Hunting and Tenth Dimensional Physics (http://vossfoster.blogspot.com)

January 3rd: Frances Pauli :: Speculative Friction (http://francespauli.blogspot.com)

January 4th: M. Pax :: Wistful Nebula (http://mpaxauthor.com/blog/)

January 5th: B.B. Hartwich :: B.B. Hartwich Author Blog (http://b-b-hartwich.webnode.com/blog/)

January 6th: Adriane Ceallaigh :: Adriane Ceallaigh (http://www.adrianeceallaigh.com/)

January 7th: Jaleta Clegg :: The Far Edge of Normal (http://jaletaclegg.blogspot.com)

January 8th: S. Evan Townsend :: Writer's Thoughts (sevantownsend.blogspot.com)

And, remember, there's also a giveaway. One lucky commenter from this tour will win a free copy of Tartaros. Just leave your eMail in the comments!

Voss