Book review: Lawless by Janeen Ippolito

I’m excited to review Lawless on my blog today–and what do you know, it’s officially releasing today! What a coinikidink!

Here’s what it’s about:

The salvation of humans and dragons lies within a convicted murderer.

Dragonshifter Kesia Ironfire has one goal—to redeem her past by serving the cruel dragon Pinnacle as a soldier in the dragon-human war.

Then a rogue mission to spy on a new airship explodes into sickening green smoke. The same mysterious green smoke that was present the night of Kesia’s crime. When her dragon overlords deny any involvement, she and her tactical partner Zephryn Nightstalker try to investigate–and are sentenced to death.

Still searching for answers, Kesia and Zephryn flee to the human military capital, where Captain Shance Windkeeper has been furloughed after the destruction of his airship. Eager to discover what–and who–blew up his vessel, he agrees to help Kesia and Zephryn infiltrate High Command. In exchange, Kesia must pretend to be his betrothed so Shance can escape an arranged marriage. If only she knew what ‘betrothed’ and ‘arranged marriage’ meant.

But human social customs are the least of her worries. Dark secrets surface as Kesia delves deeper–secrets that challenge the facts of her crime and undermine the war itself.

A steampunk fantasy adventure with a side of snark and quirky romance.

Grab it on Amazon!

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I was a tad skeptical when I started reading this book. I mean, sure, I like shapeshifters, especially dragon shifters. And it’s pretty fun when they get involved with airships, specifically, crashing them (thanks, Aranya!). But a few things struck me as odd, such as the way Kesia and Zephyrn have no words for love or romance. This is taken to almost a ludicrous extreme, such as when Shance starts crushing on Kesia and she doesn’t understand when he calls her “beautiful”.

But I kept going, and I’m glad I did. The dragon history has such a terrible twist in it that all those words were expunged from their vocabulary. Very fascinating. This is also a story about what happens when you let people have too much Science in with their magical creatures. It echoed some of the themes in Patricia Briggs’s Alpha and Omega series, with the shapeshifter and their forms being tampered with. Whether magically or through science, it’s still a Bad Thing.

There are some steamy kissing scenes, but nothing more over the top than your average YA novel. The characters here are all adults and adult behavior is discussed, but nothing is shown. I would only recommend this book for mature teens and up.

Overall, I enjoyed this book very much. Not all the secrets are revealed, so I expect this to be a trilogy at least, if not a longer series. It’ll be great fun as a boxed set. Four stars!

Grab it on Amazon!

Finally old enough to write fanfic

Yesterday I finally finished writing a fanfic trilogy. Good grief, I am so fried.

I wrote the first story a few years ago as an experiment with a new world. I had tentatively planned it as a trilogy (three is such a nice number), but I didn’t expect a lot of feedback on it. After a while, comments trickled in. Very positive comments. So earlier this year, I wrote story #2. The comments on that were even more positive.

So I just finished writing the third story. I took the conflict deep. I was laughing at it, though. The big finale is basically everyone standing around talking about all the things they’ve been hiding from each other. And it’s massively intense. Yes, it’s Sonic the Hedgehog fanfic. You can find the trilogy in order here.

(That’s why my poor blog has been neglected this month. Every spare second of writing time has gone into that story.)

As I was cooling down from the final intense writing session, I got to thinking about the difference between my old stories and these three new ones.

As a teen, writing my Sonic stories, I tended to come up against things that I didn’t know how to write. Like romance. The depth of love between friends. The true meaning of sacrifice. I knew all these things in a theoretical way, but I had never experienced them. So I wrote about them as best as I could and hoped nobody noticed that I had no idea what I was talking about.

Fast forward eleven years. I got married, had five kids, moved across country. I experienced joy, grief, homesickness, poverty, plenty, you name it. A lot of furious living in those eleven years.

So, this time when I sat down to write about love and sacrifice, I was able to handle it in a completely different way. These characters feel it, man. Especially in this final story, when the conflicts of the whole trilogy come to a head. Here’s one of my artworks and the scene that it’s from:

Perfect Chaos Confrontation by me

The island settled beneath Knuckles, touching down in the sea with a light shock. Now he was lower than Chaos, looking up at the huge, rippling head in the morning light. It was impossibly blue, turquoise at the edges, indigo in the middle. Could it really eat him? Did it have a stomach? It didn’t seem to have any organs at all, aside from the suggestion of a brain between its eyes.
Knuckles drew quick, panicked breaths, the floating feeling of unreality settling over him again. “I want to negotiate the outcome of this sacrifice,” he heard himself say.
In his headset, the AI Ramussan said slowly, “What did you just say?”
Chaos studied Knuckles, the huge head swinging closer. “I will hear your terms.”
Knuckles drew a deep breath, trying to speak without screaming. “Lift the blood curse from the line of Solaris.”
“Guardian, no!” Ramussan screamed. “Someone stop him! He’s about to throw himself to Chaos!”
His friends’ voices broke into a panicked clamor. Knuckles ignored them. He gazed into the monster’s nearest eye, which was focused on him intently.
“Much depends on you,” Chaos replied. “I will draw power from your death. If you contain enough, I can, perhaps, lift the curse. It was laid with the power of my beloved’s death. Perhaps you can match that. Perhaps not.”
It was a good a bargain as he was likely to get. “And you’ll keep your word?” Knuckles said, his voice faltering. Annihilation stared him in the face. His entire being wanted to turn and run for his life.
“I can’t find him!” Sonic was yelling. “Shadow, where is he?”
The black hedgehog teleported to the path up the hill from Knuckles, a hand pressed to his headset. He and Knuckles exchanged a long look.
“He’s not at the dock,” Shadow said coolly.
Chaos lifted his head higher, stretching upward on a thick neck made of water. “I always keep my word.”
The huge head curved over Knuckles, the jaws opening. Teeth made of water lined the jaws, clear as icicles. Knuckles looked up into the maw, detached, terrified, and saw there was no throat. It was all just a shape made of water with no real body.
Then the shape fell apart into a crashing waterfall. It struck Knuckles like a tidal wave, sweeping him off the rock and into the sea with the speed of a rip tide.
Shadow watched. “We’re too late,” he said into the headset. “There was nothing I could do. Chaos took him.”

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I feel like I’m finally old enough to write fan fiction properly. Isn’t that funny? Most people who write it are young people, like teens. Maybe most teens don’t try to write the grand epic stuff like I wanted to.

Tell you what, though, it’ll be so nice to dive into editing Malicious for the next few weeks. In the the meantime, I’ll be catching up on my reading. Got to fill the creativity tank!

A strange history: search history, that is

I was tagged by H.L. Burke in a sort-of blog hop. Basically, you have to post some of the weird things you’ve searched for and explain what in the world was going through your head at the time. I thought, well, I search for weird stuff. Let’s see what Google has learned about me.

The Rules:

• Access your browser history
• Pick at least 5 of your strangest searches you’ve had to look up as a writer
• List them below with an explanation as to why you had to look them up
• Tag 2-5 other bloggers

I do most of my searches on my ipod, and it doesn’t give up search history easily. I had to go to my search tab and start typing in letters to see what it spit out. So here they are, more or less alphabetically.

Accuweather hurricane: I was following Hurricane Irma pretty closely last week.

Bugs Bunny vs. opera singer episode: I wanted the title so I could show the kids. Incidentally, the title is The Longhaired Hare.

Bidoof: To show the kids how dorky-looking it is.

Daz3d victorian dress: To see if they had any in their shop so I could put actual clothing on my 3d models. Yes, they exist. No, they don’t fit any models I actually have. *shakes fist*

Heist movie formula: I needed the formula for heists because all heists follow them and I was writing one.

Jami Gold romance. I was looking up Jami Gold’s fabulous Romance Beat Sheet to send to a friend.

Key West after Irma. Yeah, I was having a morbid day.

Tallest termite mound Kenya. The kids wanted to see it. It’s tall.

I guess most of that didn’t really pertain to writing. I mean, some of it did. I just search for things I’m curious about.

I was going to tag other bloggers, but everybody I know who blogs has already done this one. So … do it if you want to?