Category: Shades and Shadows

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introducing Mila and Maddie Hines

Like Raven, we first meet Mila and Maddie in Through Shade and Shadow, though they are largely relegated to the background.  When we first meet them, Alaric and his friends, following a vision, help them escape from the 8th Battalion along with Sahara.

Mila is nineteen. Maddie has just turned sixteen.  Through that first encounter we learn that Shifters go through a change with puberty, and before the start of puberty they can not shift into animal form.  During this period, the Shifter is not fully in control of their shifting, and strong emotion or pain can cause unexpected shifts.

It is this problematic effect that leads to the girls getting caught by the 8th Battalion.  We don’t know a lot about what they went through while they were prisoners, but we can be fairly certain that pain was involved.

In In Gathering Shade, the girls get a chance to come out of the background a little bit.  Unlike Sahara, who’s cat is a lioness, Mila and Maddie are black jaguars.  While living in the camp where Alaric brought them after their rescue, the girls help out by hunting large game to feed the growing population of their hideaway.

Mila is a leader, and she struggles under the rules of the camp and the impression that Sahara speaks for the sisters simply because she’s older.  Maddie is the more sensitive of the two, seeing herself as a freak who just wants to be normal.  This feeling is not surprising, considering that she is both a Shifter and a teenage girl.

Both girls were fairly sheltered growing up, and their understanding of the world is somewhat skewed by that, but they will have to find their feet fast if they are going to survive the war that is coming.

 

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free on kindle

I almost forgot to let you know that Through Shade and Shadow is currently free for kindle, now (well, starting yesterday) through September 3rd!

through-shade-and-shadow-reders-favYou read that right!  FREE!

Just in time to be ready for In Gathering Shade, get Through Shade and Shadow for your kindle, and if you’re up for it, write a review.

Remember that any NEW reviews will be entered for a chance to win a copy of In Gathering Shade!

 

Once-Upon-A-Broken-Dream-Main-File

 

And while you’re at it, you should pick up a copy of Once Upon a Broken Dream too!  Just $.99 for your Kindle!

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introducing Raven Ivany

We met Raven briefly in Through Shade and Shadow, as one of the agents that Mason Jerah works with at the unnamed government agency, but in the next book, In Gathering Shade, Raven comes to the foreground.

We first meet her when she is helping an instructor teach hand to hand skills to a group of new recruits, before Adam Darvin pulls her aside with a job hunting down a killer that might be a Shade.

We learn a good amount about Raven in that short scene.  She’s a decent fighter, hand to hand.  She’s smart, worried about Mason, despite the fact that she doesn’t really know him and she is wary of working with others after being betrayed by her previous handler.

Raven is in her early thirties, and her family background is not entirely clear.  In the course of the story we learn about a sister who died, a father who is clearly no longer around and a grandfather who helped to raise her.  She learned what a Shade was capable of from a young age, unlike Mason, and is well trained in using those skills, both to heal and to harm.

Also, unlike Mason, Raven isn’t afraid of those darker skills when the occasion calls for it, and while it’s never stated outright, she has used those skills to kill at least once.  We get the sense that through Darvin’s influence, she is probably more educated on the other tribes than many others.

There is also some history hinted at between Raven and Darvin, a friendship that extends back before she came to work for him, which might be something interesting to explore some time.

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and that’s a wrap

I spent my evenings last week working through the edits sent to me by my amazing Editor and by Saturday morning it was time for a final read through to make sure I had carried some changes all the way through.

Sunday at around noon, I was done and all that was left was sending it to my publisher, Creativia.  It is now off in the capable hands of our team there where it will go through a final edit, cover design, formatting, etc….

Now that it’s come this far, I can start introducing you to some of the new characters and situations!  I’ll start this Wednesday with character introductions and I’ll bring you a new character every Wednesday until the book is out.  On Saturdays, I’ll be recapping some of the background story to help get you up to speed.

And don’t forget to leave a review for either Forever or Through Shade and Shadow and you might win a free copy of the new book, In Gathering Shade, when it comes out!

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want to win a book?

I got my manuscript back from the editor this week, which means evenings and this weekend are made for editing.  It’s always reassuring when the editor comments throughout with kudos along with the editing.

I’m fortunate to have a pretty awesome editor who never fails to help my work be better.  She’s worth every penny I spend (and then some).

I hope to have the polish finished this weekend so I can get it in to Creativia.  Hopefully, that means a release date in September.  In the lead up to that release, you can win a free copy (ebook or paperback, your choice) of the new book!

How, you ask?  All you have to do is write a simple review on any of the Amazon sites (US, UK, CA, etc) or Goodreads for either of my current releases (Forever or Through Shade and Shadow) and email me at natalie@nataliejcase.com with the link to the review.  I will pull one name from all of those reviewers to win the new book (and probably a few surprise goodies as well!).

But wait! There’s more!  For every site that you post your review on, you get another entry for the prize!  Post it to Amazon US and Amazon UK and Goodreads? You get three chances to win!  Post a review of both books to Amazon US and you get two entries.  See how this works?

But wait, there is still more!

Review BOTH books on TWO Amazon sites AND Goodreads, and you will automatically get the new book for free.  No strings attached (though a review once you’ve read it would be awesome…not required).

**Only new reviews (8/23/17 and later)**

How’s that for a contest?

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othering others

When I first started writing the story that would become the Shades and Shadows series, I began with the idea that as a nation, the United States had a tendency to not only other people, but to foist our fears and anger onto those others and I followed it through to what I thought could be the outcome, if ever it were discovered that there were people who could heal and kill with some kind of power that we normal folk didn’t have.

But once I’d gotten the story written, albeit in a much shorter form than it exists today, I looked at where the political aspect of the story had gone as a result of that original premise and I considered it to be too unbelievable.  I looked at where we were at the time, where we had a person of color in our highest office and we had abolished (in theory at least) the othering of LGBT people and women were making gains politically and otherwise.  I thought to myself, who is going to believe a story that takes all of that away now, shoves it into a dark corner and returns us to the darkness of our own past?

I set the story aside, and went on to work on other things.

It wasn’t until the election in 2016 that I realized I was wrong, and that the othering hadn’t stopped at all, in fact for some of our US citizens, othering was still the lens through which they saw the world and those others were where they laid the blame for everything that they thought was wrong with their lives.

Since the release of Through Shade and Shadow, so much has happened that makes the politics in this series nearly pale in comparison.  This saddens me in many ways.

I hope we, as a nation, can navigate our way through this hurricane and come out stronger and better on the other side.

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the hard work of writing

I used to think that writing a book was a big accomplishment.  Then it became writing a good book was the hard part.  Of course, both don’t begin to compare to the work that comes after the writing is done.

You have to find a way to summarize the entire plot of your 300+ pages into a single paragraph, then a single sentence.  They have to tell enough of the plot to hook people, but not so much to give the whole thing away.  They have to be intriguing, exciting even.  Here you’ve spent a year or more of your life telling this story in detail, and now you’re expected to sum it all up in a as few words as possible in order to get an agent or a publisher (or if you’re lucky both).

I’m fortunate to have a publisher for In Gathering Shade already, but I still need to summarize the story for the back cover of the book.  Generally, this takes quite a few attempts for me.  This will be my third book with Creativia, my seventh book overall (I have four under a pen name in the M/M Romance genre), and it doesn’t get easier.

The blurb on the back cover of  Forever took something like 10 different iterations to get right. Through Shade and Shadow took at least that much work.  So, now as I anticipate getting In Gathering Shade back from my editor, I’m filled with an icy dread at the thought that once again, I need to distill my story down into a paragraph that will invite readers to come into my world.

But, I’ve never been brief.  I spent the better part of my junior year of high school learning how to cut my essays down to size for the Regents exam at the end of the year.  My pre-test saw essays between 1000 and 2500 words, and I was required to cut that to 500 words.  It was a year filled with tears and frustration, but I did it and when my exam was done, I had turned in two essays of 500 words (almost exactly), though I was convinced they were crap.  I scored 95% on the exam overall, and got full marks on the essays.

I learned then how to boil sentences down to their bare essences and use precise words, but that isn’t as easy when working with creative work.  *sigh*  I suppose there is no cure for it, I should just get on with the work of it.

But maybe a cup of coffee first.  For strength.

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stillness

There is a stillness in the woods.  It isn’t something you can find in the hustle-bustle of a city.  It is something unique to the woods.  Step off the paved road and onto a carpet of grass, fallen leaves, pine needles, step between the trees.  You don’t have to go far to feel it.  Just enough that you can’t see the road, can’t hear the cars.

The hush settles over you and that stillness sinks deep into you.  Here, you are connected to the earth beneath your feet, to the years stretching back into the ancient past and forward into the unknown future.

This is one of the places I am home.  All of the anxiety flushes away.  All the worries and needs and concerns drift off and I am at peace.

I took the picture above on my mini vacation earlier this month.  It’s the type of place I imagine Mason feeling quite at home.  I imagine I would live quite happily in some little cabin out there, surrounded by trees older than our country and that stillness.

Of course, only if I had a good internet connection!  I may love that stillness, but I was raised on modern conveniences and I love my internet.

It was something like this I had in mind as I settled Mason Jerah into his childhood home…a place where magic doesn’t seem so much of a stretch, where life teems and the very air seems to vibrate with a feeling of home.

It’s nice this morning, with another busy day stretched out ahead of me, to take a moment and close my eyes to try to recapture that peace, that stillness…before deadlines and emails and to-do lists fill up my attention.

Have a great Tuesday, Readers!

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in gathering shade

I am very excited this morning, Readers!  I have just sent book 2 in the Shades and Shadows series to my editor!  I am excited to introduce you to some new characters as well as to continue telling the story of Alaric and Mason.

In Gathering Shade picks up right where Through Shade and Shadow left off, with Mason and Alaric prisoners of the 8th Battalion and thrusts you immediately into a world that is tipping off it’s axis and into war.

We follow Shades and Shifters, Shadows and Sages through the growing minefield of fear and deception as they struggle to find a way to survive in a world that wants to destroy them.

In the coming weeks, here on this blog, I will introduce you to the new characters, as well as give you previews of things to come.

I hope you’re as excited as I am!