Category: Through Shade and Shadow

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early morning coffee

Lately, the pain from this pinched nerve gets me up and out of bed around 3am every morning.  Today it’s the tightness in my shoulder muscles and my forearm muscles.  Some mornings it’s the searing, stabbing pain in my neck and shoulder joint.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s much better than it was a week ago.

I’ll wake up, possibly needing to go to the bathroom around 1 or 2 am.  I’ll shift around, take the middle of the night pain pills, then toss and turn and doze a bit until I give up because I just can’t get comfortable.  That’s almost always right around 3am.

I get up, get the cats their morning treats and start a pot of coffee.  Then I sit and play silly Facebook games with my left hand working the mouse while I let gravity help loosen up my right arm.  Usually by the end of the first pot of coffee, I’m mostly functional, though typing isn’t usually on the agenda this early.

Because I’m on limited duty for work, and am largely working from home, this means I have a little time to kill before I start my work day.  Yesterday that meant working on my short story for the second anthology, and that’s probably what I’ll do today too.  Either that or I work on the third book in the Shades and Shadows series.

Speaking of which, have you gone to get your copy of In Gathering Shade yet?  The kindle version is available now.  Paperbacks coming soon!

You can also get Through Shade and Shadow and In Gathering Shade together as a bundle on Kindle.

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Once you’ve read them, I’d really appreciate a review.  It only takes a minute.  You don’t have to say much.  I really hate how much we rely on them to get our books into recommendations, but we do.

I’m putting together a giveaway package that I’ll probably award in December.  It will include autographed copies of both books in the series, as well as some fun things you’re going to love, so stay tuned!

On that note, my coffee cup needs refilling and my arm needs a rest.  Happy Tuesday, Readers!

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in search of…

Are you a book reviewer?  A reader who loves books?  I’m looking for folks who will provide honest reviews of my books.  I can provide electronic ARCs if you are a book blogger or reviewer.

forever-complete_tcc-readers-favorite

 

I know my work isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, but if you’re interested in vampire stories that go beyond the modern teenage love story, you might enjoy Forever, the story of Amara: born to a vampire mother and raised in a clan of killers, Amara finds herself at odds with her family and drawn toward the world of man.

 

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

 

Once Upon a Broken Dream is an anthology of short stories that all emerged from a single prompt.  Two of my own stories are in there and I edited the overall anthology.  The stories cover a broad spectrum of genres.  My two offerings are an introduction to a sci-fi story I hope to introduce next year, Jericho Jordan and a fairy-tale fantasy called Red-Belly about a world once governed by dragons.

 

Through Shade and Shadow

Through Shade and Shadow is the opening salvo in a series filled with danger, secret government agencies, psychics, healers and shape-shifters and a world on the brink of war. Meet Mason Jerah, a Shade, who we meet as his world dies, goes from a backwoods, sheltered boy to government agent at the focal point of the coming civil war and Alaric Lambrecht, a Shadow who just wants to keep his people safe.  When they finally come together, it could signal the beginning of the end.

 

In-Gathering-Shade-Main-FileIn Gathering Shade picks up where Through Shade and Shadow left off, joining Mason and Alaric on a daring escape and meeting a few new players.  Raven Ivany is a government agent, working for the same agency as Mason.  She too is a Shade, and while investigating what seems to be a Shade serial killer, she happens across Zero, a teenager with the abilities of a Sage and a Shadow, together with Evan Chayton, they find themselves caught up in the machinations of a Shadow who has been manipulating things from behind the scenes.

 

Anyone interested in reviewing any of these, please reach out to me at natalie@nataliejcase.com.

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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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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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where the sun shines through

Ah, that feeling of a well deserved and well executed vacation.  Is there anything better?

My mother and I took advantage of the long holiday weekend to visit north of the Bay Area, traipsing through the Avenue of the Giants, up to Eureka, over to a Pioneer Cemetery in Ferndale, CA, down to the Humboldt Bay Wildlife Refuge and out to the Lost Coast.

It was four days of history, nature and photography.  I would have like to have included more hiking, but these days, my mother isn’t up to two mile round trips anymore.

Everywhere we went though, particularly in the forest, I would imagine my characters there, among the trees.  I could see Mason hiking through on a mission, or Sahara hunting in the underbrush.  It was truly inspiring.

I took a lot of pictures, as expected.  I’m still sorting through them all.

But now, it’s back to work!  I’m in the office today and the weekend will see me compiling the anthology of short stories I’m working through and hopefully getting some edit time in on my own next book.

Hope you all have a great weekend!

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radio silence

Wow, it’s been a while.  Sorry about that!  It turns out that working a full time job, working a consulting gig for Pride, editing an anthology and writing a book all at the same time can keep a person ridiculously busy.

Who knew?

It also makes a person forgetful.

 

But, Pride weekend is upon us and soon my life will go back to it’s normal breakneck speed, at least until the following weekend when I will be utilizing the long holiday weekend to escape the heat of the East Bay and head up into redwood country with my mother on a photography trip.

There will also be a fair amount of people watching and character collecting.  I look forward to the smell of nature and the cool shelter of the trees.

But when I come back I’ll have story ideas and pictures to share!