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Nothing gets me hooked faster than a fully envisioned urban fantasy world with a societal structure outside the human norm. J.P. Jackson’s soon-to-be-published novel SUMMONED has just that. SUMMONED is slated to be published on Monday, April 19th by NineStar Press and we were lucky enough to grab ourselves an ARC while we could.

SUMMONED follows the magical awakening of one Devid Khandelwal, a frankly exhausted university student who is just weeks away from graduation. Devid, Dev for short, is obsessed with the occult and the Shadow Realm. His only wish in his world is to be a part of the Shadow Realm. He has spent thousands of his hard-earned wages working for his parents on crystals, tarot cards, and the like. Dev though has had his eye on a Desire summoning board for quite some time until the start of the story when he finally has saved up enough for it. After performing the summoning spell with his best friend Cam, Dev will soon begin to realize just how in over his head he truly is when witches, werewolves, and Fae alike come a-knocking.

Add in a full cast of extremely attractive men, great worldbuilding, and well fleshed out characters and you’ve got a great M/M paranormal romance novel.

From start to finish this book delivers exactly what it promises to; a great urban fantasy story and a lot of great erotica and lust. If this is your genre, it’s definitely worth picking up. It’s an enjoyable read that after the first chapter or two is extremely well-paced to the point you could plow through about 60 pages without really noticing. Just one chapter does not happen here so I caution all to not read it before bed. In bed yes, before, not so much.

The first two chapters are a little shaky with pacing while trying to establish the main character and best friend and it would have honestly, in my opinion, been better with one last revision aimed at just those first two chapters but even without it, the rest of the book completely makes up for the slow start. Even so, the beginning like the rest of the book is an extremely easy read. The language is witty but still accessible. It read like it knew exactly the type of book it was. The explanations of the world were simple yet fascinating enough that even exhausted I did not miss any information being thrown at me. Not too common that a book can say that when it’s not the third or more book in a series.

Jackson does a great job of interweaving all the supernatural races that are introduced and present in this world. All are straight from myth but have great and interesting twists that are strictly from the mind of Jackson himself that really keeps a reader going. It’s a rich and well-thought-out world, one of the better ones I’ve come across in recent years. If you find no love for any of the characters there is still a good chance you’ll devour this book just to learn about the world of the Shadow Realm.

That being said, we should talk about the characters. From the start, each character stands solidly on their own. The interactions are extremely fluid all except for a few instances. When Dev interacts with his family, it’s a bit too much for me. I get that he’s supposed to be at the end of his rope with them for various believable reasons but as a reader and having that happen extremely early, it feels sort of sudden and over the top. Other than that though, I loved almost every character within this book but that being said, I would have liked to see a bit more of a rounded outcast. Almost every character is of the same make, an extremely attractive Bear. It works for the story but I feel like the world would have felt more whole with a few characters dropped in that weren’t of the same variety. For the characters present, no complaints, and maybe, if Jackson wanted to, he could write a sequel of sorts and explore this world in even more depth. I for one would not be angry at a sequel like that.

When it comes to the romance and erotica aspect of this book, it hits just right for those that love Bears of all kinds. For those of us who don’t share in the love of Bears, it’s still very enjoyable. Well-written consensual sex is always welcomed here. None of the sex scenes felt forced in, having just remembered that it’s supposed to also be erotica nor are there any ‘porn just for porn sake’ sort of scenes. This book is equal parts urban fantasy and erotica.

Overall, a great read and definitely worth the price of the eBook. We’d probably rate this a rounded up 4/5. Jackson, you can have your other points if you promise to write a sequel.

You can pre-order SUMMONED now from Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and more.

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April is right around the corner and with that Spring. Officially Spring was the 20th of March but here at VeL live in New England. We’re lucky if it shows itself at all before May. With the changing of the seasons comes a slew of new releases in the book world. No longer do we need our comfortable stories to carry us through the cold harsh winters. Spring is the best time for some adventures. Here are the top four* titles we’re most excited to devour this spring.

DIAL A FOR AUNTIES by Jesse Q. Sutanto

We don’t usually stray from the SciFi/Fantasy genre but this book, by title alone, hooked us. It’s a murder mystery and rom-com all in one with a deep dive into Chinese-Indonesian culture. This book is about what happens when one accidentally kills their blind date like Meddelin Chan does at the beginning of DIAL A FOR AUNTIES, who then calls her meddlesome mom who in turns called Meddelin’s even more meddlesome aunties all to get rid of the body. Sound interesting enough right there but author Sutanto then goes on to add even more chaos to the mix with the dead body accidentally being shipped in a cake cooler to a billionaire’s two thousand guest wedding. 

Then Meddelin’s long-lost love from college shows up in the middle of the wedding fiasco.

The chaos and hilarity this novel promises to bring have us counting the days down until it’s on shelves. DIAL A FOR AUNTIES will be released on April 27th. 

Amazon
Barnes&Noble
Bookshop .org

THE INFINITY COURTS by Akemi Dawn Bowman

What if Siri or Alexa even grew to full sentience and took over our afterlife? That’s kind of what happens in Bowman’s THE INFINITY COURTS. 

Eighteen-year-old Nami Miyamoto is suddenly murdered on her way to a party. A very important party that her whole recently graduated class is planning on attending. Most importantly, the boy she’s been in love with for years is planning on attending. Once dead, she finds herself in a place called Infinity. Infinity is where the human consciousness goes when their physical bodies die. Sounds pretty cool, all except the fact that Ophelia, a virtual assistant widely used on Earth, has taken over Infinity and declared herself queen. Ophelia, if Alexa and GLaDOS had an AI love child. My guess is the cake would still be a lie in Infinity. 

Like GLaDOS, Ophelia has grand plans of eradicating human existence one and for all. 

Nami soon joins a team of rebels aimed at bringing Ophelia down, saving the humans imprisoned under her, and forcing her to reckon with her past. That line right there is so intriguing. What past does an AI need to reckon with? We’re hooked! THE INFINITY COURTS #1 will hit shelves on April 6th.

Amazon
Barnes&Noble
Bookshop .org

IN DEEPER WATERS by F.T. Lukens

IN DEEPER WATERS what happens when someone asks the question, “Could Pirates of the Caribbean could be gayer?” and the answer is yes. 

A young prince relies on a mysterious stranger to save him when he gets kidnapped during his coming-of-age tour. Prince Tal is a sheltered prince with forbidden magic that hasn’t been allowed to see the kingdom until now. All he wanted was a bit of adventure and two days into the tour, adventure finds them in the form of a mysterious prisoner on a burning derelict vessel. This mysterious prisoner, Athlen, forges a fast bond with the prince before leaping overboard and disappearing into the water of the open ocean. Tal thought that was the end of that but days later runs into Athlen on dry land right before Prince Tal finds himself kidnapped. His captors are held for ransom with the idea to reveal his rumored powers and start a war. Tal, with the help of Athlen, must escape in hopes of saving his family and the kingdom.

IN DEEPER WATERS is set to be published on the 20th of April and we can not wait to devour this one. 

Amazon
Barnes&Noble
Bookshop .org

WITCHES STEEPED IN GOLD by Ciannon Smart

First, the cover of Smart’s debut novel is downright gorgeous. It’s both eye-catching and breathtaking all in one. It is the perfect cover for this Jamaican-inspired YA Fantasy novel about two enemy witches who must enter into a deadly alliance to take down a common enemy. Iraya and Jazmyne are exact opposites. Iraya has spent her whole life in a cell while Jazmyne is the Queen’s daughter. One dreams of freedom and vengeance while the other is dead set on not giving her life to strengthen her mother’s power. Like her sister had done. They band together to eliminate a mutual threat but soon find that the power is intoxicating.

Judging from all the great reviews on Goodreads from those who were lucky enough to get advanced reader copies, Smarts does an amazing job from start to finish. We can not wait to get our hands on a copy of this and devour it ourselves.

Come for the cover. Stay for the amazing world and characters of Smart’s debut novel WITCHES STEEPED IN GOLD, released April 20th. Between this and IN DEEPER WATERS, it might be a good idea to take the 21st off because there’s a high chance of binge-reading until dawn with both these books.

Amazon
Barnes&Noble
Bookshop .org

If any of these titles interest you, remember to get your preordering game on. 

*In lieu of recent news about one of the authors, we have decided to no longer endorse their books and themselves in any way.

All links within are affiliate links and all proceeds generated from sales are used to pay authors, guest bloggers included, and to grow the company.

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Lately, I’ve been talking a lot about the stuff around my writing and not so much about my writing itself. I think at 14 weeks, it’s about time I give another update on each project and the whole #onemillionwords 2021 thing as a whole.

Overall, the whole challenge has been a great experience. I’m sitting at just over 120k words which, unfortunately, is about 90k short of where I need to be right now.

A few of my projects have almost completely come to a grinding halt. The reason other than general writer’s block is because I need to take some time to write up some proper outlines and figure out some plots, especially for my Keeper Chronicle series which is a series of short stories, novellas, and the like. The other is my book CLOAKED RITES. I thought this one would be easy since I’ve rewritten it at least three times before this year but now, I think that is exactly my problem. I’ve rewritten it so many times that I’m unsure how I want it all to fold out. I have so many options in front of me from past drafts but none of them are fitting right.

Another project that I haven’t been keeping up with is this very blog. I am behind on the weekly updates but have been working on catching up and hopefully will soon. Every week is half or a quarter written and they just need to be finished off, edited, and reorganized. I have a habit of writing posts out of order in a sort of stream of consciousness and then have to reorder it later on so others even have a hope of following along. The same goes for a handful of book reviews.

Dangerous Lies of a Perpetually Single Werewolf, or DLPSW for short, has been a bit of a yo-yo. Sometimes I can bang out 2-3 thousand works on this story in one sitting and other times I struggled to add 100 words. I knew this one might be a little difficult going into it since romance isn’t my normal genre but I love the story, concept, and characters. Besides, experimenting with other genres is never a bad idea. Good romance is really hard to write and I am always in awe at the numerous authors that pull it off book after book after book.

From there we have my two mostly golden children, so to speak. CHAINED HEAVENS and The Stormbloods Saga, TSS, have overall been easy writes. Neither are where they are supposed to be word count wise but they are the closest to their goals. CHAINED HEAVENS is about 30k away from the daily goal of about 100k as of this week and TSS is about 3k away. Like any project, they have their ups and downs but so far, all the downs have been easily overcome through random D&D quest prompts and/or talking things out with my husband. Both have been extremely effective.

We’re about 3 and a half months in and I am starting to see a few things I need to do differently for 2022. Going into this challenge, I didn’t give it much thought and planning past the whole buy bullet journal and copy example given. Well, for one that bullet journal hasn’t been updated at all this month but I hope to find some time to change that. It has been my best attempt at using an agenda-type thing thus far in my life and I’d like to keep trying. I am sort of happy my husband talked me out of the 24 ultra-fine colored pens made specifically for bullet journals that were about $50. They would just be collecting dust right now.

Along the same lines of the bullet journal, I haven’t been the best at updating my NaNoWriMo projects which have resulted in a few times of playing catch up with the updates. I’m doing better about it than I would have thought so it’s a tool I want to keep using. I just have to get better at using it. My goal going forward is to set weekly check-ins on all my projects. Whether that means my writing projects for this challenge or future projects and anthologies for VeL or even house chores that need to be done. This will be a scheduled time to actually sit and go through my list. It’s part giving myself a sort of pat on the back for being productive and part making sure I don’t forget about what still needs to be done. Getting on a self-imposed schedule is always hard, especially for those of us with ADHD, but it’s the only thing that works. That is when it works. I just have to keep trying until it works.

One thing I know I will be doing differently in 2022 is not working on six different projects at once. It would have been a better idea if I had split everything up even more and set out to work on only two, maybe three projects at once. The blog posts are a year-round thing but I would have changed out the other project(s) to give myself a break. Think of it as rotating fields. I’ve been trying to super grow from all fields and sucking the nutrients out of the soil. Next year I plan on doing a rotation to keep the nutrients intact. Hopefully, that metaphor made sense to anyone else.

I knew going into these six projects was a lot but in all my years, I’ve never learned from the downfalls of ‘going big or going home.’ My common mode of operation is running full steam until the crash and burn. I’ve learned more over the years on how to pick up and keep going after. It’s been far easier to learn than the alternative but maybe one day I’ll learn not to go full force 200% of the time. I don’t expect it to be next year though. Maybe 2023. Maybe.

To sum it up, my word count might not be where it should be for this challenge. I do spend some days only writing the minimum amount needed to keep my streak going in 4thewords. Some days, I do nothing because I have so many projects on my plate right now that I freeze with indecision. Been watching a lot of ghost-hunting YouTube videos lately because of that. These are all things I have time to work on. In this challenge, the year isn’t even halfway finished. There is still a chance. With organizing my work? Every time I build my structure and schedule there’s an even greater chance of it all staying around for longer than a day or two.

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Hard to believe it’s already March. It doesn’t look all that different from March last year for some of us.

For anyone curious as to what #onemillionwords is click here for the week 1 update which explains it all.

After spending a year stuck inside a 860 sq ft box of an apartment, I’ve come to some decisions. First, decision was made last May when I had decided to launch VeL to the best of my current ability. Not long after we published our first anthology, Graveyard Visits Vol 1, and for the first few weeks it was in Amazon’s top 1,000 titles for Horror Anthologies. Not bad for our first book. Next we’ve gotten a few dozen submissions which we’re still going through because we’re a small team here but it still blows me away anyone would look twice at us. Let alone, trust us with their manuscript.

It’s been a wild start but while this was all happening I was trying to find ways to better my work habits. We tried scheduling but that fell through after a week. Whiteboards, alarms, everything you could think of. It all came back to the fact that I am ADHD and I have executive disfunction and it had gotten worse during lockdown. Without concrete deadlines, I have been finding it harder and harder to get stuff out in a timely manner.

After talking it out with my husband, I called a mental health clinic and started seeing a therapist to get me back on some well needed Adderall. This time I won’t randomly decide I’m good without it, shooting myself in the foot for another ten years like I did right after college. Not everyone with ADHD needs to be medicate. I’ve learned over this past decade that I do. Think about what I’ve already accomplished without it and then double or even triple that. That’s how I am on Adderall. 

Why did I take myself off of it? It’s a long story but shortened version is I was 20, lost my pills for almost two weeks – they rolled off my desk and got lodged between my dorm room bedframe and mattress – and still did great in my classes. Figured, I didn’t need them anymore. Didn’t take into account just how structured college was, especially when you were taking 8-9 classes a semester because overachieving was the only thing to do in that dinky town.

That being said, I haven’t started on it yet and probably won’t until at least the end of April. For those who are not aware, Adderall is a very regulated med because of it’s ‘street value’. What this means is college students used to sell them all the time because for neurotypical brains, it’s like a massive energy drink straight to your heart. For people with ADHD, it’s the opposite. Because of this insurance might fight us for a few months just to fill it.

That all being said, my week of writing wasn’t as fruitful as I would have hoped. A good chunk of time and my brain power was focused on getting back into actually managing my ADHD again. Still, I wrote words. This is up on time. I’ve been able to accomplish some of my smaller goals, still wrote every day, and started outlining. That combined with still making sure I are three meals every day, showering and basic hygiene was still met, and I found time to cuddle both my cats separately. The week wasn’t 100% a success but it was more than enough for me right now.

Quick project update.

CHAINED HEAVENS – This project has been the easiest for me this whole week, which I am extremely thankful for. CH has the highest word count of all my project so being able to play a little catch up has been great. I am nowhere near where I should be in terms of word count but I’ve been slowly lessening that divide. As of today, I should be around 71k words but as of right now, I’m only at 43k. The goal is to make up the difference by end of April. By doing that I should have exactly what I need to start compiling the first volume of short stories which I will then have to find the time to edit and rewrite what needs to be before sending it off to the editor. Kind of an exciting thought to be that close to having something to show for all of this.

VeL – Like always, these are still hit or miss but I’m starting to see the curve of it getting easier. I had been lucky enough to get three posts completed with two of them going live this week and the third going live next week. If we have any downtime this weekend, I hope to get a few more pre-written and scheduled ahead of time. Trying to get better at that whole not leaving things until the last minute habit us with ADHD are known for. 

The word count, as of today, for where I’m supposed to be is just under 27k. I am at least well over halfway there with almost 16k words written. I’ll count that as a win. 

CLOAKED RITES – This project has been in a sort of stopping and starting pattern all week. It’ll probably stay like this until I can find the time to sit down and really plot it all out. I really am interested in trying the Snowflake Method but it seems like it’d take a full day to do from start to finish which needs to be scheduled for one of the days my husband is home since it’ll probably be best done with a sounding board at the ready. So, for this upcoming Monday, I have put it on my schedule to spend the day doing this instead of writing. No matter how caught up I am at that point. There’s been almost no progress to report.

The Stormbloods Saga – This is my only project that has exceeded the actual word count goal for the day. My aim for each installment when finished to be no less than 30k words and no more than 40k. I’m already at almost 18k words into the first installment and a thousand words over the daily goal. There’s at least 2k of filler in there that needs to be cut but I still feel really pleased about my progress. Also, thanks to this story I really want diner food again. It’s been too long.

DLPSW – Just over 12k in and I’ve finally gotten to the big trope in my first romance novel, the fake relationship. I’m a little behind where I should be but since I’ve passed all the setup and info dumps I have a feeling this story will start to write itself. The word count goal for today is just a touch over 17.5k which means if I really hustle in the next few weeks I could have two projects back on track or even ahead. I will say one of the hardest parts of the set up was finding a believable, more or less, way for the Werewolf pack to ‘by accident’ find out these two have been ‘dating’ and just didn’t tell anyone because of reasons. I had mapped out five possible reveals but ended up poking holes in all of them.

Finally, I just said screw it and started writing. If I write it odd or wrong, it can just be fixed with my editor at a later date. The most important thing was to just to keep the story flow going, to get words to page. Not sure who said it but a quote I try to remember often is ‘you can’t edit a blank page.’ Cliché but true.

I’ve also gotten into the habit of just glossing over scenes that I can’t get to work in the moment with a line in all caps telling me to work on this during revisions. I also try to put in a random word that I know probably won’t be written anywhere else in the project like for example, mopery. Mopery means a violation of an imaginary or trivial law. Nowhere in my manuscript will I ever actually use mopery so I put it there. That way later I can use ctrl-F and search for it.

If you think you’d like to use this method but don’t know what random obscure words to use, try wordnik.com. It’s very useful in that regard.

The Keepers Chronicles – This project is the furthest behind for many reasons. The first being, that even though I loved the characters from the first story I wrote, it was supposed to be a standalone horror short story. Now, I’m expanding and haven’t had to time to fully sit down with that idea. I’m aware now that this was short-sighted on my part when I set this all up. Next year I plan on structuring my projects very differently, having none but the major ones spanning the whole year. I’m over 10k short for this project and probably will be for a little bit until I can straighten out some of the larger word count projects.

To everyone else participating in #onemillionwords or just trying to do better this year, how’s it going? Let me know in the comments below

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