With Honor Intact

It’s always a bittersweet moment when a goal is completed.

I’ve spent so long living, breathing, and dreaming the second tale from my Virtue Inn series that I feel a little wistful seeing it finally move out into the world.

But it’s here.

With Honor Intact, second book in the “Tales from the Virtue Inn series”,  is now available on Amazon. When publishing this book, I wanted to thank the people who have supported me and provided me with their thoughts on the series. Therefore, both the first book in the series, The Guests of Honor, and the newly published sequel, With Honor Intact, will be on sale for 99 cents before returning to their regular price of $2.99.

So, thank you.

You can see The Guests of Honor here.

With Honor Intact is now available here.

When the Cat’s away…

Honor Desry hadn’t applied to be the Innkeeper of a sentient Inn with magical guests, but her sisters and her right-hand fox-man are making the job a lot sweeter.

Unfortunately, the supreme Cat God has disappeared on Honor’s watch and Honor’s old life is about to interfere with her new life in a major way.

The Naked Glassblower’s Association has booked a holiday vacation at the Virtue Inn, and Honor’s old boss and his partner are coming along to chaperone. Honor needs to find the Cat, keep the strange guests away from the supernatural guests, and somehow hold family and mind together.

But the Virtue Inn hasn’t revealed all of its secrets and Honor will need to summon every last piece of her courage and cunning to save the day With Honor Intact.

Warning: Contains some violence, profanity, innuendo, and homicidal cardigans.

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With Honor Intact is available here. To read the first book in the series, you can find The Guests of Honor here.

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Tuesday Tidbits: Singing Without the Music

I come from a cultural and familial tradition of oral storytelling. Singing without the music is how I thought of it, listening to the rise and fall of the stories of my grandmother.

Within this tradition, there is an understanding that some stories are for sharing and others are private. There is an understanding that to share with the larger world means finding your own stories to play out on the page or the stage.

I took these lessons to heart, found some of the stories I wished to tell-

-And found myself instantly in trouble.

It is not so obvious when writing poetry.

There is an understanding, in traditional and not-so-traditional forms, of rhythm and meter.

There is an understanding of the music beneath the words and the demand to arrange the words to meet the music.

My poetry has always had a direct line to the spoken, is meant to be read and shared as songs without music.

In a longer form, it is easy to lose that rhythm, the heartbeat that sits beneath the flow of a spoken story.

I thought about what I wanted to accomplish, what I was trying to do and say.

I wanted to write a story that was meant to be read.

So I read it.

All 92,000 words of With Honor Intact were read aloud, listening for the tempo, the dynamics, the stuttering of rhythms.

It is not the story my grandmother would have told, but it is my story.

I like to think that she would have enjoyed it.

I hope that you do too.

I translate to the page the rhythm of the telling and hope you hear it beneath the words

The joining of the oral and the written has been a major piece of my work with the Virtue Inn series. I can only hope that I have succeeded.

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With Honor Intact will be available digitally from all Amazon sites on April 23, 2015. To read the first book in the series, you can find The Guests of Honor here.

Tuesday Tidbits: A Shared Humour

All jokes are in-jokes. The humour that appeals the most to me is the humour that makes sure that everyone is in on the joke.

As I draw closer to the release of my second novel, With Honor Intact, I’ve decided to do a series of weekly posts about some of my thoughts about writing this novel and its larger series, “Tales from the Virtue Inn” (spoilers will be minimal to non-existent). This week, I want to touch on one of the fundamental aspects of this series – humour and how it is written.

Humour can be wielded as a sledgehammer or a stiletto, but the direction it aims can do more to bring people in or push them away than the jokes themselves. While there is a lot of strange humour in With Honor Intact, the core motivation behind most of its jokes is that life itself can be ridiculous. The fantasy world that the Virtue Inn inhabits often seems wildly over the top, although it has its own internal logic. The humour in the story is meant to be grounding, a reminder that even the most awe-inspiring or madly strange things can have roots in the familiar, in a shared experience of a ridiculous world.

It would be easy, I think, to make my heroine, Honor Desry, the butt of the jokes. She doesn’t understand the world she has entered and is frequently at the center of situations that should make it easy to mock her. Instead, I have tried to allow those experiencing her adventures to laugh with her – at the perils of doing laundry, at having awkward conversations with family members, at discovering that, grand cosmic power or not, cats will still be cats.

Above all else, I tried to root the humour of With Honour Intact in empathy. We may not be able to meet the supernatural Guests of the Virtue Inn in our day to day lives, but I hope that shared moments of laughter will bring understanding and commonalities to even the strangest and most fantastical of characters.

I value humour as a celebration of our shared humanity, our shared experiences of the often ridiculous business of living.

I hope that the humour of With Honor Intact will not only amuse but also bring shared moments of understanding, of brief glimpses of other worlds through foreign eyes.

Coming April Twenty-Third!

Honor Desry hadn’t applied to be the Innkeeper of a magical Inn with magical guests, but her sisters and her right-hand fox-man are making the job a lot sweeter.

Unfortunately, the supreme Cat God has disappeared on Honor’s watch and Honor’s old life is about to interfere with her new life in a major way.

The Naked Glassblower’s Association has booked a holiday vacation at the Virtue Inn, and Honor’s old boss and his partner are coming along to chaperone. Honor needs to find the Cat, keep the strange guests away from the supernatural guests, and somehow hold family and mind together.

But the Virtue Inn hasn’t revealed all of its secrets and Honor will need to summon every last piece of her courage and cunning to save the day With Honor Intact.

Warning: Contains some violence, profanity, innuendo, and homicidal cardigans.

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With Honor Intact will be available digitally from all Amazon sites on April 23, 2015. To read the first book in the series, you can find The Guests of Honor here.