Tag Archives: shapeshifters

Brewing News

Posted by Seriah Black Sheep on
Photo by Ioann-Mark Kuznietsov on Unsplash

If news here seemed quiet in the last several months, it’s because multiple things are brewing.

1. Increased Writing Community

I joined some really great writing organizations and Discords, including Passionate Ink, an erotica consortium, and San Joaquin Valley Writers. I’m also volunteering at the Fantasy, Futuristic and Paranormal Romance Chapter (FF&P) of RWA to get to know the other members better and learn how not to bore you to death if and when I start a newsletter of my own. Let me know in the comments whether you’d be interested in reading a newsletter from me, and what you hope might be in it.

I’ve been attending a ridiculous number of writing workshops. Most writers with whom I’ve become acquainted say I’m doing to much. I say I’m doing what is necessary to get my stories to you as the best those stories can be.

2. Attempted Poetry

(Not to Be Confused with Attempted Murder…Sort Of)

Last year’s AWP conference exposed me to fantasy fiction poetry (vs. prose). I was starstruck. I’d read Beowulf and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, so I’d seen some epic fantasy- and and mythology-type poetry before. But I didn’t realize there were poets today writing erotic fantasy mythological poetry like Rebecca Lehmann’s “Nike, Medusa, Jocasta, Split.” A little further reading into some online poetry databases and journals, however, revealed that many didn’t have a non-mythology category for fantasy poetry. Weird, right? Since when was that restricted? A recommended poetry book tried to get me to write about the dishes in my sink instead. No thanks. If I wanted real life, I’d stick my nose outside, not in a book. I’m sure Bre’s dishes are way more interesting than mine.

There was another motivation, too. It’s the one we fantasy writers don’t talk about. There’s this horrible thing that happens when a fantasy writer who’s definitely not a poet tries to write a fantasy prophecy. They pretend to be a poet, but something really lame comes out. I needed that not to be me. Rrohm has too many prophecies surrounding him for them to look like I played with a crossword puzzle and hoped for the best.

So, I attempted poetry. I’m not saying it was particularly good poetry. (My instructor and fellow workshoppers were kind, but I have no delusions of grandeur.) However, some BeastKing Chronicles things and some non-BeastKing things came out, along with the buriable real-life things. I started to wonder if a BeastKing Chronicles fictional poem could make it into a newsletter that I send out. Would that be a terrible idea?

Maybe that depends on how terrible my poetry is.

3. Attempted Short Stories

My short stories are breeding like crazy, and they’re coming out faster than I know where to put them. I was always a one-project person, but now I have many. The good news is they will get to you faster than BeastKing Chronicles, and some of them are running parallel to the BeastKing Chronicles plot about three books in. That’s right, I said three. I know you haven’t seen book 3 yet. At all. It has a guaranteed existence. It’s just in the rugrat stages right now. If you don’t mind a little bit of a spoiler, Kitiora has a story you can read in last year’s Seattle Erotic Art Festival’s literary anthology. The sequel is out on query, along with another non-BeastKing story.

Exciting news: Two other, longer short stories I am working on will be coming out this year for sure. One is an enemies-to-lovers dragonfly- and hummingbird-shifter time travel romance with a sordid castle and a dark, magic mirror. The other is a heroic-reversal love potion story where a blacksmith ropes a hero into doing her side quest and gets a bit more sexual tension than either knows what to do with. They’ll have some of the tones and power plays of BeastKing Chronicles, but are completely new stories in their own worlds. So if you’re interested in BeastKing Chronicles, you may enjoy these stories as well. As always, I’ll be bringing you an antihero to remember and a heat level to make you trip in your socks.

As a caveat, I do also have a few stories rolling out that will not have a heat level at all. You’ll still get all the surly antihero goodness, deep characters, special abilities, and otherworldly adventure. You just won’t feel like you’re getting heatstroke from mating heat. If you’re not sure how that would work based on my writing style, you’ll just have to come see for yourself.

4. A Thing Called a Website

As short stories continue to roll out into the public eye, and as I continue to prep BeastKing Chronicles and Salty, With a Taste of Dragon for querying, I’ll be updating this site to reflect that. One change already is the domain. Next steps will be taking more control over the way images and information on the site are laid out.

Perhaps the most exciting will be the addition of cover designs and/or short story emblems. In an era where stock photos amass, and photo credits and AI-generated images have become major concerns, I think it’s time I updated all the graphics on my website. I am scoping out artists, paying for images I can mutate, and learning the most basic of cover designing techniques. Many of my stories have mature and/or graphic content, and I think it’s very important that the cover images representing those stories stay classy and not the kind I would want to hide if small children were running by or my boss were to find me reading my new purchase in a Barnes & Noble café. I’ve been that person ducking behind shelves in the romance aisle, embarrassed that that dude over there saw me surrounded by poster equivalents of suave shirtless men. I’m not doing that to you, as far as I can help it.

Another exciting development is I’m drawing up new maps for BeastKing Chronicles. Or rather, it’s on my list to do. Say goodbye to the days of maps made in Paint. And feel free to point me in the direction of an ink artist/cartographer who does fantasy maps. I don’t want mine to look like I dropped you into a pixely video game dungeon.

Much like I’m no expert poet, I’m also not a professional web designer or graphic artist, so please bear with me as I navigate image licensures, commissions, and best practices.

As mentioned in yesterday’s post, another potential website update is in blog content. I am considering doing a mini series on uncommonly discussed niche writing tropes and sub-genres.

I am still on X, but I have also recently created social media accounts on BlueSky and Instagram. I will add links once they are properly set up. Many author guest speakers I have encountered over the last year are on BlueSky, and I’m glad to join them. However, it may be best not to expect a whole lot out of me on Insta until I have story trailers or something to share. That may be a while. Until then, all you’ll probably get out of me is DIY home library stuff, and maybe excited anthology cover photo shoots.

Court of Thorny Roses: The Huntress and the Shiny Fey Shifter

Posted by Seriah Black Sheep on

A Court of Thorns and Roses (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #1)A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas

My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

My Summary:
Feyre and her family are about to starve to death if she can’t find food. But killing that food means taking it from another predator, which has regrettable consequences. The next thing Feyre knows, she’s being dragged across the fey border for killing a faerie, leaving her family behind to starve. The power of the faerie whose subordinate she killed cannot quite make up for his social awkwardness. Tamlin has good reason to be awkward, however. Trapped in a mask from a masquerade ball gone wrong and stuck somewhere between defending his borders and sending his subordinates to their deaths, he seems to need help but refuses to be forthcoming with the information. Tamlin is fine, Tamlin is strong, Tamlin is going to save the day…until Tamlin needs saving, because Feyre failed to realize she’s the heroine and left him to deal with an old acquaintance he can’t win against. If the ever-stoic, survival-mode Feyre can’t put a name and actions to her feelings in time, it’s Game Over for everyone—humans included. Even if she does succeed, there’s no guarantee she’ll live.

This is a High Fantasy Romance that takes place on topography likened to the British Isle: heavy on the Fantasy and heavy on the Romance. It’s upper YA, but don’t think that’s going to get you out of gore and sex (though there are a lot of breaks in between). There’s also a near-rape scene, some brainwashing into doing adult things, drinking, and some gruesome stuff at the end. If you liked Hunger Games or Kate Daniels, you’ll be fine. It’s nowhere near Game of Thrones TV level.

My Thoughts:
If you are familiar with the original Beauty and the Beast fairy tale, you will recognize the original setup: girl lives with her father and sisters in a shack, father went broke when his merchant vessels went missing at sea, sisters are frivolous, girl or her father accidentally wrongs beast and beast demands her as payment, father doesn’t want to give her up as payment but she goes anyway. None of that should be a spoiler. What makes Beauty different is that she’s a scrawny, starving artist-turned-hunter who won’t go down without a fight, and she hates her family but protects them anyway.

From there, it starts to go all Fantasy genre on you. It’s a classic case of the fey stealing away a human and most fey considering them gullible food—and faeries, famous for their cruelty, play with their food. Throwback to Julie Kagawa’s The Iron Fey series: once you cross that gateway into the faerie realm, there’s no undoing what you see and experience. If you loved The Iron King, you’re going to feel nostalgic. Especially if you were rooting for Ash and Puck the whole way through and couldn’t decide between them.

I picked up this book because it came highly recommended to me from both strangers and friends. I’m a sucker for the Beauty and the Beast trope, but I’m also a stickler for uniqueness. That conflicted me a bit over this retelling.

S.J. Maas was a master of crafting suspense in this book. Not only that, I was biased against the book after reading Throne of Glass, and she overcame that bias by leaps and bounds. I read this entire book in one day. I, who am so picky that I rarely finish a book anymore.

That being said, I had two frustrations and one confusion about this story. One frustration was I could not connect to Tamlin—and he was the male lead, and eventually the “damsel in distress,” so that was really important. I must be really visually dependent (as far as visualizing in my mind) to have had this much trouble with picturing Tamlin’s appearance around a mask. There were allusions to his facial structure, but way more time was spent on his claws than on what his face might look like underneath. Granted, Feyre (the main character) did express need to know what he looked like, the longer she was around him, and even spent some intermittent paragraphs musing over what it would be like to see his face. But the only time I felt the giant blur that was his face (which made him feel impersonal) was overcome was at the pool of starlight. The rest of the time, I felt closer to Lucien than I did to Tamlin. While I realize that was somewhat by design, it actually had me rooting for a relationship with Lucien rather than Tamlin, which was counterproductive.

The confusion part came from Tamlin’s name. I spent half the book trying to figure out why his name sounded so familiar. Turns out I was thinking of the female Tamsin in the fey TV series Lost Girl. My bad. To Maas’ credit, the name Tamlin really does suit him.

The second frustration was getting almost zero info drops. I kept waiting to find out more about the regular plot, but learned more about the romance instead. As a Fantasy-Romance cross-genre writer myself, I well appreciate the romantic plot arc and the regular plot arc being inseparable; one cannot exist without the other, or the story would fall apart. But because most of what was revealed were the classic Beauty and the Beast storyline and the extent of Tamlin’s shapeshifting capabilities (full-body and partial-transformation), the main character and I were both left completely in the dark as to what was going on until it was time to go save Tamlin. I knew dark things were happening behind the scenes, but I had NO IDEA about what was truly going on. It would have been nice to feel like Tamlin was at least trying to help Feyre guess. If I hadn’t been gifted such a spectacular breakup sex scene right about the time I was getting mega frustrated, I don’t know if I would have finished the book. Kudos to Maas for the perfect timing, delivering on long-built sexual tension throughout the story.

The end, I admit, is a little troubling. It’s a great finale, and a great ending, make no mistake. I was riveted the whole way through the ending sequence. I just don’t know how I feel about Feyre’s aftermath.

Consensus:
It’s obvious why this book came highly recommended, and I recommend it as well. It bridges well that gap between just-out-of-high-school Young Adult and adult Fantasy, so well that I’m surprised it’s not openly classified as New Adult. The narrative style is engaging, there are no blackout scenes, Tamlin on summer bonfire night is electric, I almost fell on myself when I first saw the High Lord of Night, and the villainess absolutely dominates everything that a stereotypical male villain can do (and yes, you can take all the dominating implications there) without feeling like you’re watching a catfight.

I did figure out the answer to the riddle way before the end of the trials, because I have experience with the answer. If you don’t have that kind of personal experience yet, or overthink things, you might have a hard time guessing it. But it doesn’t matter either way, because what you really want to see—why you keep reading—is to find out whether Feyre will have a self-reflective epiphany moment in time to save the ones she cares about. So in terms of character development, Feyre gets a gold star.

If you’re one of those people who likes to piece together everything, like a detective novel, throughout the story, you’re going to get a little frustrated. It’d be better if you just tried to figure out and enjoy the fey creatures instead. There will be payout, I promise. You just have to make it through 2/3 of the book first.

I did order the second book; I heard the second book is phenomenal, so I’m looking forward to it. I’m also hoping to see more of Rhysand in Book 2, but I’m hoping Rhys and Feyre’s little “arrangement” doesn’t make Feyre a cheater.

View all my reviews

Disclaimer / Side Note: I read this book 14 years after I started writing my own Beauty and the Beast series, BeastKing Chronicles, and was alarmed to discover that Maas and I have similar ideas as to what a beast character should look like and what kind of partial-shifting body modifications should be prevalent. One of my ideas was inspired by a particular painting I came across on Pinterest, and of course I mutated what I saw into a new idea, but apparently Maas had the same one—and I had told nobody about that mutation idea. They say “there is nothing new under the sun,” but this one struck too close to home. Though Maas and I were FictionPress contemporaries, there is no way we would have copied this from one another. I even tried researching mythology to see if we might be referencing a known mythological creature, but no such luck. I am, of course, not writing about fey in BeastKing Chronicles. But I will be seriously reconsidering some of Rome’s beast characteristics before pursuing any form of traditional publication, for the sake of original design and trademark uniqueness.