“Quench to the Hilt” is now available to read on Amazon! For a limited time, you can download the anthology it’s in as part of Kindle Unlimited. You have only a couple months left to do so! Otherwise, you’ll need to buy the e-book or order the paperback. I may publish an epilogue later, so make sure you have read it before then!
“Quench to the Hilt” is the last story in the anthology. Go get your blacksmith hippo shifter x dark hero love! Extreme heat awaits.
Originally, this story was going to be contributed to an anthology this year. However, the anthology date has been pushed back past the end of the year, and the dragonfly story continues to evolve. It’s unclear whether this story will grow from novelette into novella length. If it becomes a novella, it may be queried to publishers instead.
Let this Bard and Dragon Rock You
We’ve seen plenty of fire-breathing dragons, but what about dragons of the other elements? Enter Theodyne, a rock dragon hybrid with a stony secret.
Don’t miss that there are two stories in this sequence, coming out back-to-back this fall!
Look for a Countdown to Part 1 at the End of August.
Get Yourself Snowed In
Ready for the sweaty weather to finally cool down? This winter, dig into a different kind of heat in the snowstorm with a yeti shifter. More info to come.
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 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.
I’m thinking of doing a mini series on writing tropes or sub-genres that have been underrepresented.
What do I mean by that?
Previously, I blogged about how difficult it was to find articles on writing revenge romance. Recently, another writer confided how difficult it is for her to research her niche of cozy fantasy. I replied with how difficult it has been for me to research what type of plot pattern a good mystery needs to have, for my mystery subplot. In addition, there is an entire taboo category of romance and dark romance that gets ignored unless you’re in the right reader Facebook group. Yet, these are obviously categories many readers camp in.
Which would be fine, if we were actually teaching people how to write these things. But who can I approach to teach me how to drop mystery hints when my protagonist is not a self-proclaimed sleuth, or how far is too far in rawness in an erotic romance scene? Who can teach me how to keep readers from hating my antihero who wants revenge on the heroine, when she does not want revenge on him? What about showing and not telling, when showing is graphic, or how to write in rich metaphor without overusing “like” and “as”?
You were going to answer, “Find a how-to writing book or article,” weren’t you. (Or use software to nitpick individual words.)
Except, we have a problem: How-to books these days aren’t even what university teachers are recommending. That’s because they are so general that they rarely help other than making a writer sometimes feel less alone in the process. Which is what writing community is for, by the way. Find a workshop. Find a Discord. Find a local group. Something. Anything. Use an online search engine before you say you can’t.
I have several how-to books on my shelf. The issue isn’t that how-to books exist. The issue is that people describe the same elements and repackage them with a different cover. Plot, dialogue, character, and setting are staples. You cannot promise me YA-specific content, or NA-specific content, and then tell me all the generalized content about stories that I already know, and place a line at the end saying, “You should read books in this category to see what’s the norm.” No. That’s why I bought your book. Tell me what I’m looking for. Tell me something other than how teenagers might call me out for trying to be hip. I live in real life; I’ve already seen that. I’ve been that teen. Tell me how to craft voice when I have a younger character. Don’t chicken out because you’re an adult and you’re winging it.
There is a deficit on our bookshelves and online and on our e-readers. The topics that we very clearly need sensitivity readers for are the topics that I have a 10% chance of getting in a workshop once in two years, and almost no chance of getting anywhere else. DEI is not the only thing that got buried.
If you’re like me, in that hole, trying to research and coming up empty, I can’t give you expert advice.
What I can do is start a blog where I share what actually helps me from my search, as I’m searching. Maybe that will jumpstart your own blocked search. Maybe it will spark someone who actually is an expert in one of these categories to do more than regurgitate how important it is to have a plot, have three sections, and save a cat. Those books have already been written. We need your help with new specifics, please. We need your techniques.
Don’t worry; our writing won’t come out like yours if we’re using your technique. We’ve got our own quirks to apply your techniques to.
We talk about “writers lifts” on social media, but isn’t a true lift when we give each other the tools we’re missing, so the rare manuscript gems that are challenging us the most actually get into readers’ hands?
Since when was the status quo fun to write for books?
Let’s write what needs to be written.
I want to pause and say to the many workshop and webinar instructors and speakers I’ve been sitting under for the past two years, and earlier than that: Thank you. Thank you for taking the time and covering the difficult topics, for providing the one-sentence takeaways that I’d been searching three years to find, for answering a dozen questions in a row, for not turning away our difficult and messy endeavors and our crayon-drawing-equivalents of addressing writing prompts and trying out your techniques. It took me a long time to find workshops like yours, and I recommend them to many other writers. I can’t say they all step up to try to tackle such big ideas, but I hope in the future they will.
Seriah Black 