Release: The Elf's Apprentice by Frances Pauli

She's back again! You all know by now how much I love Frances Pauli's books. Well, there's another one to add to my shelf, and maybe you'l add it to yours too: The Elf's Apprentice. Book One of the Love and Magic Series. I got the privilege to read this one early, and it's an incredible book.

A sorcerer, a rebel, and a whole kingdom under fire...

As the sorcerer's new apprentice, Kia's fiery temper is bound to get her into hot water. Evander is obnoxious, arrogant, intolerable, and undeniably the most beautiful elf alive. Even if she passes his relentless testing, working at his side just might kill her. 

Worse, her master has powerful enemies inside the palace. When their attacks turn personal, the sorcerer's apprentice becomes the perfect bait in a deadly trap set to destroy the man who has become far more than just her boss. 

Two lost souls must defend their world, but even if they save the kingdom, they risk losing each other forever.

Buy it Now for Kindle!

Excerpt:
"That's a human," he said. "You're getting desperate."

"She's very good. The best I've seen yet." Lyssia's tone brooked no argument. She got one, just the same.

"And you're the expert on apprentices, I suppose. Perhaps you should stay up here and do my work, and I'll attend to your throne?"

"I am not unskilled, you'll remember."

"And I'm no diplomat." Evander sniffed and stepped away from the wall.

Kia forgot for a moment that they were debating her. The elf sorcerer moved like honey flowing. Each gesture was measured, considered, and then executed with the typical elvin grace, but melded with the deliberate intellect of a master sorcerer. He peered around Lyssia at her, and his eyes held her entranced, frozen as if they truly could cast her in ice.

"I don't need an apprentice," he said.

Kia felt the rejection like a slap that time. This room, this opportunity dangled in front of her, and he meant to snatch it away again without even giving her a chance to try for it.

"Yes you do," Lyssia said. "If for no other reason than to manage this disaster."

"What disaster?" Evander released Kia from the grip of his attention and turned the full chill of his mood on the princess. "This room is exactly in the order I prefer it."

"That book is on fire."

"What?" He spun that time, lost a fraction of his composure in the realization that one of his braziers had, in fact, caught a book on fire. His arms waved in an arc. The sleeves of the heavy red robe he wore billowed, and the flames died. A single line of smoke rippled up to the rafters. "Bother."

"You see?" Lyssia crossed her arms again and winked at Kia over her shoulder.

As if they'd won, Kia thought, but she very much doubted that they had. The way she saw it, they'd only irritated the beast.

"You bring me imbeciles," Evander complained. He kept his back to them now, as if they weren't worth noting, and he moved to the nearest table and adjusted a stack of papers. "Idiots. I can't work with them."

"You haven't even tried."

"What? This one? What does it matter? The last seven were morons. Why should this one be any better?"

"You will test her." Lyssia's tone shifted now. He'd pissed her off good, and Kia held in place when the princess marched toward the sorcerer. "You'll do it, Evander, or I'll schedule a full month of diplomatic dinners."

"You wouldn't." He stopped fiddling with the papers and stared up at the wafting smoke.

"Try me." Lyssia stood taller and stuck out her chin.

They left Kia to herself, standing alone inside the door, forgotten except as a topic for their argument. She was unwanted, invisible, and he'd never, ever let her work here.

"She probably can't even cast a column of fire."

"You are the most difficult man..."

Kia focused on the slate tiles in the center of the room. Don't speak unless addressed, Lyssia had said. Well, Evander was not about to address her, and casting magic wasn't exactly speaking. She drew the symbols in her mind, pulled the ambient magic out of the ether and felt the full weight of the room's history in that flow. Sparky wild magic with a mind of its own.

It tasted of him, of charcoal and orneriness.

She drew the power into her skin, molded it with her intent backed by the magic of the sigils she'd selected. Then, she threw it outward, anchoring the package with a final symbol, to a tile in the middle of the floor.

Flame lifted from the square of stone. It rippled upward. An eruption of fire rising in a dense, dancing column. It burned under her command and made a pillar seven feet high before flickering back on itself like a fountain. Kia held the spell, kept the fire alive and waited for anyone to notice what she'd done.

"....perfectly capable of maintaining my own affairs. What is that?"

It didn't take long.

"I believe it's a column of fire," Lyssia answered. She put a little triumph in her voice, but the look she cast at Kia held a warning.

Be still, it said. Don't push your luck.

"Barely." Evander sniffed, pulled himself out of his argument with Lyssia, and focused instead on Kia. The eyes. This time when they found her they had a darker edge. "So the monkey can do a trick, I see."

Kia held the spell together, but only just. The flames at the top shot a few sparks, sputtered as if a gust of wind had snatched at them. Evander seized up that weakness. He meant to force her to lose concentration, to distract her into failure. But at least he was actually testing her now.

"Can your pet manipulate it?" He still didn't address her directly either. He kept his words for Lyssia, but he unleashed a fully self-satisfied smile upon Kia. "Can she change its form?"

Kia focused. She ignored the sorcerer, even when he stalked closer to her. The column tried to resist her, and she couldn't help but suspect his hand in that. Still, she drew the lines in her mind, imagined the form she wanted, and pressed her full desire to succeed into the weaving.

The column shifted. It branched and flowered, transforming into a burning tree in full bloom.

Evander harrumphed and stepped directly in front of her. He leaned in, and her view of the column was replaced by a fall of white hair and a pair of eyes that darkened like gems, glinting, daring her to keep going.

"Make it taller."

Kia stretched the tree another three feet.

"Now shorter."

She cut it down to half size.

"Hotter," he said.

Kia sucked in a breath and stared directly into the blue of his eyes. The fire tree blazed white hot, but Evander didn't even turn to look.

"Passable." His lips moved like honey too, making soft graceful lines. "Now make it fly."

Guest Post: Frances Pauli: Writing War

I'm pleased as punch to have Frances Pauli here to talk about her new, wonderful book, Dogs of War: Vertigo.

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I grew up with a father who was a Vietnam vet. He didn’t discuss it, didn’t like to talk about it, but it was there just the same. He liked to watch war documentaries too, and we hated them. I could not stand the boredom of long Sundays full of black and white non-fiction military programs.

Hindsight is a funny thing.

Well, we didn’t care for his watching the news either. Most kids don’t. I get it. It’s scary and it makes you feel like you can’t change anything. That’s why it’s so important to watch. Nobody tells you this, but enough build-up of that feeling is exactly what makes people get mad, stand up, and go change things. It’s true.

But I digress.

The war thing drove me nuts. If war was so awful, why was it always on the television? I ignored it for the most part, I breezed through history classes because of strong memorization skills more than any real interest in history. (Other than ancient stuff—that shit’s cool, right?) I grew up and lost my dad and started my own family and…wrote a war book.

Wait. What?

It’s true. I wrote a war story and it’s my favorite book yet. I’m still not entirely sure how it happened.

I spent a lot of time researching the book too, and that meant…you guessed it, lots of watching war documentaries. Not just tolerating them either, not getting through them, but actually enjoying the story of war. I became fascinated with it, in fact, and I still am.

What is the one thing everyone tells you is the most important thing about a story? Okay, it differs from expert to expert, but most of them will put conflict somewhere near the top. Most of them, in fact will put it at number one. Conflict. Tension on every page, as Donald Maass so succinctly puts it. Some would say that without conflict there is no story and war is, by definition, conflict.

It is heroism and complications. It is tragedy and horror and beauty all at the same time. It is, basically, stuffed full of story material provided you find an angle that appeals to you. I found that angle with my dogs.

When I discovered a picture of WW1 soldiers and their dogs in an AKC magazine, I was hooked. It didn’t even take long enough for me to blink, which is a good thing cause I was staring and couldn’t have blinked if I wanted to. I knew in that instant that I had to have their story. Not only that, I wanted to tell it.

And once I started down that road, I found more stories and more. That is the beauty of my profession, of tracking a story wherever it leads you. In this case, it led me to Vertigo and to the next two books at least. Because there is way too much story here to contain in one volume, and I am very grateful for the chance to let this one unfold.

BLURB:

 A modern day accountant with a level head and her feet firmly planted
in ordinary reality, Genevieve doesn’t believe in past lives, demons
or true love. All of which seems like a perfectly practical approach
to life until the thing that killed her in World War One decides it’s
time to try again…

 Genevieve Oliver doesn’t break the law. She doesn’t take risks, and
she definitely doesn’t believe in anything weird. So getting pulled
over for speeding on the way to pick up her new dog wasn’t exactly on
her to do list. Even more surprising, the cop who shows up at her
window seems familiar. She’s never seen him before, and yet, just
looking at the man makes her want to cry. But Viv has her head on
straight. She shakes off the encounter and heads to the dog breeder
only to have an old magazine photo trigger a full blown, past life
flashback. Not only do the soldiers in the picture look like her and
her mysterious cop, she remembers them, a memory that holds as much
danger as it does passion.

 Now Viv is bouncing between two lives and being stalked by something
evil in both of them. As the love story of two soldiers unfolds, her
own heart opens for a man who may not even be available. Not that she
has time to worry about minor details. If she can’t figure out the
demon’s identity fast, Viv could lose more than just her life. She
could lose everything she never believed in.

EXCERPT:

She’d messed up the search. The article had it wrong, she was
certain. The soldiers and dogs in her photo were French. They had
to be. Plus, searching for Belgian dog soldiers hadn’t netted her a
thing. She’d also tried Red Cross dogs, but came up with far too
many pages to sort, even when she specified images only. Most of
the shots she found were contemporary, rescue dogs from recent
disasters and modern warfare.
Tonight, she’d try France.
First, she had a puppy to get to know. Paula recommended
letting her girl settle in the first night, and she’d managed to resist
the urge to smother the poor thing. She’d carried the pup out into
the backyard three times during the night, and resisted bringing
her into bed the few times she whined, but otherwise she’d done
her best to respect the dog’s privacy. Now, however, they needed
to get going on that bonding, and the way Viv saw it, her pup
needed a name.
She parked herself, cross-legged, in the center of the living
room floor with a tub of liver treats in her lap. The pup lay in the
kennel doorway, paws crossed and ears up. She’d squirreled half
the squeaky toys into the bed, buried a few in the couch cushions,
and currently held her favorite between needle sharp puppy teeth.
She eyed Viv suspiciously and bit down until the toy squealed.
Her skin color leaned toward copper, with a few scattered
light spots under her neck and chest. It was much softer than
Tortugas, like chamois. Viv had discovered as much during the
brief contact taking the little girl out for her runs, but aside from
the rare tentative sniff, the dog hadn’t shown any interest in letting
her touch it otherwise.
The liver treat had her attention though. Viv held it forward
and waited while the black nose twitched. The toy squeaked one
last time and then dropped to the hardwood. Both front paws
reached, and a low whine came from the pup’s throat. Her tail
thumped against the blankets, and she scooted forward on her belly.
Just like Champ did on the barbed wire course.
Ice slid down Viv’s spine. The liver dropped from her fingers,
and she fumbled for it with a racing heart. Just like Champion. Where
the hell had that come from? She held the treat out again, but as
the pup belly-crawled across the floor, she saw a black face, one
with feathery hair and both ears erect and listening. And coils of
spiked wire just above the mud.
“It’s okay,” Viv crooned. “You can do it.” She had to stop
herself from saying, boy. This pup was younger, and scared. She
had no hair and she wanted a treat, not a medal. A slow inhale, a
moment of calm, and Viv knew that. She sat on her living room
floor in 2013. Not France, no war, and no LePiu looking over her
shoulder. Where had that name just come from?
“Here girl, come on,” she whispered, and half hoped for the
images to return. She wanted to know about them—about Champ
and Pieter and Marcel. And LePiu.
She’d wanted this dog for years. This dog. The beautiful, soft
little nudist creeping across the room—so close now she could
feel the puppy breath on her fingers. She held perfectly still and
looked into the watery brown eyes. This dog. But Champion had
looked at him like that.
Viv saw it. He lay on his side in the mud, and the unnatural
pose alone was enough to tell him he’d fallen, that he’d suffered
a wound. The pain just finalized that verdict. It spread like a cold
ache through his midsection. He reached the one arm out, and
saw his own fingers stretching toward the dog. Champion. The
enemy hadn’t noted Champ yet, and the black dog crept like a
shadow toward his pistol. It lay inches beyond his fingertips. Come
on, Champ. A few more feet.
Someone rolled him over. Fire tore outward from the wound,
but it wasn’t nearly so horrible as the face snarling inches from his
own. The skin stretched tight over prominent bones, and the eyes
were two huge sockets, black pits filled with nothing.
Viv screamed. The puppy exploded away from her, all claws
and scrambling for purchase on the wood. The tub of treats flew
to the side, and all she saw was the sparsely haired tail disappearing
behind her couch. Her heart banged against her ribs. The eyes of
whatever thing she’d seen still glared at her. She could see them
through her living room. They burned into the back of her mind
and refused to go away.

BUY LINK: http://mundania.com/book.php?title=Dogs+of+War:+Vertigo

The Church of the Immaculate Roast

The grower...
The roaster...
The French press...
May the Bean be with you!

In other words? SpoCon had some damn good coffee.

I know I said I would be posting voraciously all throughout SpoCon.

I lied.

Now, however, I can really hook you up--as well as insert some shameless promotions for certain amazing people.

Now, on Saturday there were some decent panels--there were, I promise--but the crowning achievement of the day was the last two set of blogs. Paramore in paranormal romance and adult themes in science fiction and fantasy. The first was a hellaciously awesome line-up to begin with--Courtney Breazile, Moira J. Moore, and one of my new favorite people, Lilith Saintcrow (see my previous blog post). That panel discussed very serious issues--the power differential between a human and the other in paranormal romance, the believability of an obscenely pwerful creature being led around by a mere human, and the important issue of bestiality when it comes to werewolves.

After that, Erik Scott de Bie joined us for adult themes ranging from violence to sexuality and even touching a bit on psychological darkness. That panel stretched on another hour or so after it was supposed to end and definintely got derailed by our moderator--but that made it so very memorable and enjoyable.

Then came Sunday, a day devoted to gaming. However, I still attended the brilliant NaNoWriMo panel (Frances Pauli, Lilith Saintcrow, and a woman I sadly cannot remember the name of...for shame) and an end of day panel on metaphysical crystals.

All in all, I give this particular con a 4.5 out of 5, which I understand is somewhat because of their new switch to a hotel instead of Gonzaga. I still preferred RadCon, however. But not a lot.

Wishing I had more Cold Forge coffee,
Voss

Con Day One

If you've been paying any attention to me at all, you should know I'm currently at SpoCon 2011.

Well, aside from the hour plus wait for pre-registration, everything was fairly smashing.

First panel I went to was this brilliant thing with Patricia Briggs, Frances Pauli, and my new favorite chocolate-toting alpha-heroine, Lilith Saintcrow on the uses of myth in urban fantasy. While it degraded slightly into a talk of magic dinguses (or is the plural dingi?) and bronze rubbers (she meant a rubber of bronze, apparently), it was still rather enlightening.

The brainstorming panel was, admittedly, the same old smae old.

All in all, though, things are going pretty well. I mean, where else can you see Patti Briggs stake Edward Cullen?

I give this a 4 of five so far--and I have two days left.

Optimistically yours,
Voss

Guest Blogger: Frances Pauli

Today I am honored, priveleged, and damn lucky to have the wonderful Frances Pauli here as my guest blogger. Since today isn't about letting me blither and blather on, I'll turn you over to her loving care.


Thank you so much for having me over for a visit.

When Voss first suggested the topic of writing serial fiction, I was tempted to say a great many things. I intended to discuss characters, and how having a big, quirky cast does wonders for keeping the story alive, how you can switch protagonists if necessary when the current one happens to plot themselves into a corner. I planned to cover tangents, which can get us in a great deal of trouble in the novel, but serve as a gold mine of side trips and looping plotlines to fill and extend the serial author’s box of tools.
Both of these things are great points, and true. But then I remembered the grand, holy grail of episodic fiction technique. I remembered where I learned it all in the first place.
Soap Operas.
Stay with me. I know you want to bolt, and yes, they’re awful. But one would have to be incredibly stubborn—or simply stupid—to ignore the fact that here, in the afternoon drama fest, are stories that have kept an audience riveted for decades. Some of the classics have entertained generations of audiences, have spanned twenty, thirty, fifty years or more. Every day.
Do you believe you can write an episode a day for half a century and keep your audience’s attention? If you could, wouldn’t you be damned proud about it? Maybe these wicked, low-brow, fiction nightmares just might have a thing or two to teach us.
So I shuffled back through my memory. You see, I never actively watched Soaps, not even in High School when my friends were hanging on the turbulent relationships of Felicia and Frisco or if they preferred a different channel, Beau and Hope.
I turned up my nose at them all. Okay, there was a short period in my late twenties where I became mildly obsessed with Passions, but it didn’t last. And, I mean, it had witches and stuff. Sue me.
No, it wasn’t through my personal experience that I learned the mystery of the serial drama. It was by proxy. Rewind some more and my childhood play was often acted out to a backdrop of my mother’s soaps. We had Luke and Laura then. We had J.R. Ewing. I mentioned the nighttime version didn’t I?
Oh dear. An entire country joined in camaraderie to figure out Who SHOT JR? I’m not kidding. It was like the moon landing…It was, well, big. I also caught snatches of Dynasty, Falcon Crest etc. Basically, call it what you will, the nighttime serial drama is the shadier version of the afternoon Soap Opera. It has the same bones.
And when Bobby Ewing turned up NOT dead, and a whole season was written off as a dream, America let out a collective groan. Well, we can learn from others’ mistakes as well as their successes.
Hands down, the Soap Opera is the ruler of serial drama. It has what it takes. Like it or not.
I watched a documentary awhile back entitled, Never Ending Stories. It addressed the Soap Opera phenomenon and, I believe, offered superb advice to the aspiring serial author. I can’t reiterate it all here, but if you see it pass on your cable or Netflix or whatnot, spend a little time on it. I assure you, its worth the little wound to your pride. In the meantime, I will pass on a few things I picked up from it…and from a lifetime on the edge of the Soap Opera addiction.

#1 The Ground Rules. Soap Opera fans know the rules. The industry has established tropes that are reliable and comforting to the viewer. There are too many to list, but things like: once you’re dead, you can come back any time you like (surprise!), and if anyone ever disappears, is abducted, or has major surgery, when they come back they are most likely an impostor. You get the idea. Now, you don’t have to adopt the, somewhat ridiculous, tropes of the daytime drama, but you can develop your own. That could be fun as well.
#2 Bigger than Real Life. Everyone in a Soap Opera is either filthy rich or a dangerous criminal. We don’t really want to examine the reasons for that too closely, but suffice it to say that people watch these things like their life depends on it because they want to BE those characters. They want to live that life, face that danger, sleep with that…okay, we understand escapism, but the point is: extreme and exaggerated. Nobody in a Soap is ordinary. Even the housekeeper was once a porn star who killed a man and ran off pregnant with his child and is now hiding from the mob under witness protection so that she can testify against…someone. Simple? I think not. Character as caricature is the rule here.
#3 The Cliffhanger. Have you seen the end of a Soap episode? I know its hard to watch them all the way through, but if you do, you know the shot: one person’s face, horrified, wide-eyed expression, maybe an open jaw and a tiny hint of over-dramatic head shaking. They’ve just walked in on something, and it’s awful. It’s so monumentally awful, or possibly impossibly wonderful, that the camera is required to zoom in close enough to see their pores so that you can examine the emotions ravaging their face. BUT, we’re not going to tell you what they saw until tomorrow. Worse than that, we won’t tell you until almost the end of tomorrow’s episode. You know, cause we have to spend the first part recapping and building tension. Some weeks we’ll wait until Friday to do this, so you can enjoy an entire weekend of concern and speculation. Then, whammo. There it is, and probably, as that settles over you, we’ll do the whole thing again with another, bigger head jiggle to boot.
Okay, I’m poking fun here a little, but you know. A milder version of these steps will work. You can mock at will, but you can’t argue with a track record like that. And so, what began as me seriously pondering the tools of a serial author has landed me here, admitting that everything I ever needed to know, I probably learned from the Ewings.
Oh dear.
The good news is, unless you lived in a home without television—which I’ve heard is possible—you probably learned it all too. So get out there and write that Soap, I mean, Serial. That’s it.


Frances Pauli writes Speculative Fiction with Romantic tendencies. Her Urban Fantasy and Science Fiction series are available through Mundania Press, and she also publishes romance stories with Devine Destinies Her ongoing serial fiction can be found at: http://spaceslugserial.blogspot.com and more information on her works and writing at: http://francespauli.com