Dowser 6: excerpt #1

*SPOILERS**SPOILERS**SPOILERS**SPOILERS**SPOILERS**SPOILERS**SPOILERS*

CHAPTER ONE

I massaged the pineapple-and-coconut-scented shampoo through my hair, enjoying the steaming hot water pounding against my shoulder blades. That morning’s baking session had felt longer than normal. Every year, the holiday craze felt as though it hit earlier and earlier, then lasted longer and longer. Usually, business in the bakery was quiet through the end of December and into the new year, with just a slight bump around New Year’s Eve. But it was three weeks into January already, and I’d had to bake extra Hug in a Cup — a buttercream-topped dark-chocolate cake — and Lift in a Cup — a delicate white cake with coffee buttercream — when we’d sold out an hour after opening.

I’d also had to explain why I didn’t have a pumpkin-spiced, latte-flavored cupcake to fourteen different people throughout the day. At the end of January. And by people, I meant thirtysomethings on their way to midweek brunch, sipping from their personalized Starbucks mugs and —

A formal summons from the treasure keeper interrupted my thoughts when it materialized before me with a puff of smoky dragon magic. I squeaked at the appearance of a golden envelope in the steamy air, flinching harshly enough that the sudsy curls I’d piled on top of my head toppled down into my face. I might be half-witch/half-dragon, but shampoo in my eyes still stung.

“Son of a freaking hell.” I spun away, evading the envelope as I lifted my eyes and face to the showerhead. The summons remained suspended behind me, patiently waiting for me to pluck it out of the air. It was the fourth such missive I’d received in the last three months, and I still couldn’t figure out how they were getting through the magical blood wards on my apartment.

And speaking of brunch, I had dim sum with Warner on my mind, and was therefore in no way interested in ‘freeing the magic of Shailaja, daughter of the mountain,’ which had been the gist of the last three missives from the treasure keeper. The summons that had appeared two weeks ago had actually been signed ‘By order of the Guardian Council.’ A year or so ago, that single sentence would have had me quaking in my boots. But I knew there was no way the Guardian Council had gathered over anything as mundane as a rogue dragon — even one who’d been a bad girl over five hundred years ago, and who’d wound up with her magic locked away because of it.

You had to drag a greater demon into the dragon nexus to rouse all nine guardians at once. Trust me, I knew.

The simple remembrance of all that power gathered in one room still made my bones ache. The combined might of the guardians had obliterated every taste, sound, and sight, overwhelming my dowser senses and scrambling my brain.

Shailaja was beneath their combined notice. Whether she was the treasure keeper’s new pet or not.

TO BE CONTINUED …

– DOWSER 6 PREORDER NOW AVAILABLE –

Release date: May 5, 2016

Preorders currently available on Amazon, Kobo, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.

Dowser 6: Warner and Jade chat over dim sum

I stared at Warner, mouth agape. “You knocked on the door of the big bad of London because I was concerned?”

Warner shrugged. “It’s good to keep them a little shaken up.”

“How shaken?”

Warner grinned wickedly. “Well, he’s going to have to rebuild a tower that was probably seismically substandard anyway.”

“You … destroyed the big bad’s … castle?”

“Destroyed is such a harsh word.”

Chapter 1, Dowser 6 – [unedited] second draft

Release date TBA [Spring 2016]

Dowser 1: a sneak ‘listen’ of the audiobook

Tantor Media has just released a preview of the Cupcakes, Trinkets, and Other Deadly Magic (Dowser 1) audiobook. Yay! So, so fun.

Pop over here to listen to the mp3 file. Caitlin Davies is effervescent narrating Jade.

The audiobook will be released on Jan 26, 2016. The preorders for all five Dowser books are up on Audible, Amazon, B&N, and Tantor Media.

Day. Made.

So this was waiting in my inbox for me this morning.

Screen Shot 2016-01-04 at 11.09.37 AM

How freaking cool is that?

Here is part of the scene from Shadows, Maps, and Other Ancient Magic (Dowser 4).

The single-storey buildings and homes of Hope Town were all painted in bright colors, dominated by seashell pink. Kandy cut up between buildings toward the red-and-white-striped lighthouse that towered easily five storeys higher than any other building in the village. I spotted a few people dressed in bright colors, most of them shopping or hanging around a local coffee hut, but no one gave us a second glance. Kandy had outfitted us perfectly for what was obviously a tourist destination. The sparse population of three hundred — according to Kandy’s brochures — appeared to be a mix of Caucasian and people of African ancestry, but the village didn’t feel desolate. More like everyone was elsewhere — perhaps the cluster of taller buildings on the edge of town that the golf cart was zooming toward. A hotel, maybe.

My stomach grumbled, but I ignored it.

The lighthouse was before us. A pink rope hung across the entrance, which I took to mean it was normally open to the public. Just beyond and down a slight hill, the ocean lapped against a grassy shore. Tiny seaside houses on that shore had boats tied to individual wharves. The low buildings surrounding the lighthouse were painted pink with white-trimmed windows and balconies, which was an odd contrast to the thick red-and-white stripes of the lighthouse tower. We’d left the pine forest behind us. A few palm trees were mixed with the low buildings, but nothing as dense as where we’d come through.

Population of 300!! [wiki link]

What are the freaking odds? Yes, I’m totally jazzed!!

Thanks for making my morning, Jade Mackey! Oh, and I <3 your first name!! 😉

Oracle 2: Excerpt 3 of 3

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING EXCERPT MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR I SEE ME, ORACLE 1

Click here for the OPENING 500 words of Chapter One

Click here for the second 500 words of Chapter One

I See You, Oracle 2 - eBook cover — Book cover by Irene Langholm and Elizabeth Mackey

CHAPTER ONE CONTINUES (2):

I glanced over at the cash counter. Sid and Lina were still wrapped up in their electronic devices. The laundromat was otherwise empty.

I looked back. The butterfly was gone.

No. It had flitted away to dance over top of the grubby glass entrance.

“Ah, geez.” Sid spoke from behind me.

My stomach bottomed out as I turned to look back at the counter. Could Sid see the butterfly? How the hell was I going to explain my tattoo flitting around the storefront windows?

“That old guy is back,” he said.

“What guy?” Lina didn’t look up from her iPad.

“The Chinese guy who just wanted to watch the dryers last week and kept asking for Oreos.”

I snapped my head back to the front door, actually hurting my neck with the sudden movement.

An ancient-looking Asian man was grinning at me from the sidewalk beyond the door of the laundromat.

Chi Wen, the far seer of the guardian dragons and my old-as-ass mentor, had apparently decided that his typical gold-embroidered white robes and sandals would stand out too much in Yachats. So he was now clothed in a baby blue, oversized short-sleeved T-shirt emblazoned with a fuchsia pink Cake in a Cup — Taste the Magic logo. The shirt hung almost to his knees, his cargo pants ended at his lower calves, and he was wearing black combat boots to complete the ensemble.

“Don’t call him Chinese like that,” Lina snapped as she stood to cross back to the dryers she was manning. “You don’t like people calling us Indian.”

“He’s homeless.”

“How does that make any difference?”

Chi Wen opened the glass door, triggering the bell as well as allowing a warm gust of the sunny day inside.

The chime of the bell mystified him, and he paused — still grinning madly — as he looked around for the source of the sound. Instead, he saw my butterfly tattoo fluttering over his head. He lifted his hand and the butterfly landed in his palm.

“No, no!” Sid called out from behind the counter. “No sit here. No watch. Go. Go!” For some reason, his previously perfectly-articulate-though-accented English broke down as he confronted one of the nine most powerful beings in the world.

“Wait,” I said. “That’s my … grandfather.”

Sid eyed me distrustfully. He was wearing a canary-yellow turban today. I was fairly certain it had been tangerine orange last week. I wondered if there was a religious significance to the color. I’d been coming to the laundromat for a few weeks now, and Sid and Lina accepted my business but didn’t particularly like me. It might have been my full arm-sleeve tattoos, or the weird white streak that wouldn’t take the jet-black dye with which I colored my hair, or maybe they didn’t trust anyone under twenty-five. Which was cool, because remove ‘under twenty-five’ from that misgiving and neither did I.

To be continued …

I SEE YOU (ORACLE 2) IS NOW AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER.

RELEASING DECEMBER 17, 2015

Oracle 2: Excerpt 1 of 3

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING EXCERPT MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR I SEE ME, ORACLE 1

CHAPTER ONE

“There are zombies in Florida.”

I looked up from ironing butterfly patches onto my well-worn blue jeans just as Lina, the owner of the laundromat, plugged another quarter into one of the dryers in the bank she’d commandeered for the day. She was crazily talented at reading off her iPad and doing laundry at the same time.

We called it “the laundromat” because it didn’t appear to go by any other name. It was situated in the middle of Yachats, Oregon, though the coastal town was so tiny that there really wasn’t much of a middle to it at all. The underutilized laundromat got my business every Friday. I’d been going there weekly since Beau and I got into town. Today, I’d rented an old iron and an ironing board for an extra two dollars.

“Did you hear me, Sid?” Lina called out to her husband, who was doing some sort of paperwork behind the cash counter to my right. “Zombies in Florida?”

“That’s drugs,” he replied. “Weird drugs making people eat other people’s faces.” Normally Sid suffered from selective hearing, but apparently zombie-related topics were interesting enough to pull him away from his bowl of cheese puffs.

I dropped my gaze to the butterfly patches I was applying to the tear in the left thigh of my jeans. I’d already loosely darned and interfaced the rip from the inside. Beau had bought me the fuchsia, electric blue, and deep purple butterfly patches from Etsy because they were reminiscent of the butterfly tattoo on my left inner wrist. Also, money was tight, so patching jeans was way cheaper than buying a new pair right now. Not that I minded. I wasn’t big on the accumulation of clothing — or anything else, really. I was going to hand stitch the patches after I ironed them on, just to be extra careful. I didn’t want them peeling off.

“Drugs,” Lina scoffed as she crossed behind me and around the peeling laminate counter that held the squat cash register and not much else. She stole a handful of cheese puffs and settled back into her folding beach chair. “Who’d want to take something that makes them want to eat people?”

Zombies, huh? I knew that shapeshifters, werewolves, sorcerers, witches — and whatever Jade Godfrey was — existed. So why not zombies? Except, of course, it would be difficult for the Adept community — aka magical peeps — to keep flesh-eating zombies on the down-low. Yeah, I had figured out pretty quickly the Adept were big on secrets. Which made sense, since they were massively outnumbered by nonmagical people and all their pitchforks.

Sid didn’t answer. I could never figure out what he was working on all day. Yachats boasted a full-time population of six hundred and ninety people, all of whom probably owned their own washers and dryers. Even with the seasonal influx of tourists, the laundromat certainly didn’t do so much business that Sid needed to pore over the receipts with such attention.

I doubted, however, that he was the local pot dealer or anything. First, he just wasn’t the type — meticulous records or not. And second, weed was now legal in Oregon.

To be continued …

I SEE YOU (ORACLE 2) IS NOW AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER.

RELEASING DECEMBER 17, 2015

Oracle 2: a second glimpse of a WIP

Warning: the following excerpt is unedited and unproofed.

A black butterfly flitted through my peripheral vision.

My stomach bottomed out even as I raised my head to follow the butterfly’s flight path. It danced along the eaves of the garage, then up over Beau’s shoulder. He didn’t seem to notice as it stopped to kiss his ear.

In fact, he was standing awfully still, staring at something ahead or maybe across the road. I couldn’t see beyond his broad shoulders.

I glanced down at my left wrist. Yep, it was bare, now tattoo-free.

I stepped forward, just until I could see the huge black SUV with dark-tinted windows parked across the street. Beau was gripping the salad Tupperware so tensely I was fairly sure he was going to permanently dent the plastic.

The butterfly flitted across the road as someone turned off the idling SUV and the driver’s side door opened.

Beau was holding his breath.

A slight, tautly-muscled woman in green capris and a goldenrod printed T-shirt stepped out from the vehicle. The butterfly danced about three inches over her green-dyed, shag-cut hair. She lifted her face as if tracking its movements.

No, she was sniffing the air. And possibly smelling the magic of the butterfly?

Kandy, Jade Godfrey’s werewolf bodyguard, was in Yachats, Oregon.

That couldn’t be good. – I See You, Oracle 2, Chapter 2, second draft

Oracle 2: A glimpse of a WIP

The muttering and fretting of the crowd grew, but it was just a wash of useless noise. Beau had drilled me with contingency plans, over and over again. I was supposed to call Audrey if we got separated. I was supposed to make it back to the pack if anything ever happened to him.

I cleared the crush of the crowd, but stayed nearby on the grass in the shadow of the brick building. I dug my phone out of my satchel and pulled up Audrey’s contact info.

Except … if I went to Portland that meant I had to just let whatever was happening here happen.

Beau would be pissed. But how long would it even take Audrey to get here? And then what?

I scrolled from the As to the Bs. It was a short scroll. A shallow flick of my thumb. I had a dozen entries total, at most.

I stared down at the contact I’d selected.

Blackwell.

– I See You, Oracle 2, Chapter 6, First Draft

Dowser 5: sneak peek

Something bit me in the ass.

I shrieked like a toddler deprived of her ice cream cone, whirled around with my jade knife poised to gut the offender, and found myself staring at yet another endless wall of musty old books.

This wasn’t the first time I’d been ambushed in the nexus library — the books were damn ornery — but it had been getting worse since I’d admitted to myself that I was lost.

Yes, I — a dowser of some skill — was lost in a library full of magic. I could taste, but not pinpoint, the spiced magic of the dragonskin map that I’d left at the table I was camped out at doing research today. I just couldn’t seem to follow that taste back through the shelves and the random stacks of books.

Tomes, not books. That was the proper word to use when the book was leather-bound and handwritten in foreign, dead, or runed languages.

The problem — according to Branson — was that the librarian hadn’t been seen in a few centuries. So, organization had crumbled into disarray verging on chaos. Though I had an inkling that the sword master was joking or exaggerating, because there weren’t so many dragons in the world that one could go missing for centuries and have no one looking for him.

I sighed and craned my neck in the opposite direction, seeing only an endless row of dusty, haphazardly piled books. I had purposefully made sure I could see the library entrance from my table so that I wouldn’t get lost. Except now I couldn’t find the entrance or the table.

Something shifted in my peripheral vision and I spun to jab my knife at it.

Nothing was there.

“We’ll see who has the last laugh if I get my hands on you,” I said. “I’m an alchemist, you know!”

Right. Now I was declaring my magical prowess to a bookshelf. It was childish, but I had a lingering suspicion that the books were only disrespectful because I wasn’t a full-blooded dragon.

Dragon prejudice permeated the nexus, and I was the only half-witch walking the halls … or, at least, currently trying to walk the aisles of the library.

I felt as if I’d been trapped in this damn room since September. And maybe I had. Time moved oddly in the nexus — sometimes incredibly slowly, and what would feel like hours of training turned out to only be thirty minutes when I returned to the bakery. And sometimes — say, if there were any guardians around — minutes turned into hours when I walked back through a portal. My study sessions in the library were usually pretty bang-on in real-world time, though.

And I remembered Christmas, so I couldn’t have been stuck here since autumn. It only felt like that because I was getting nothing accomplished but moving the dust around and being a plaything for the books.

Actually, I had accomplished one thing. My outfit rocked. I was wearing the black cashmere and silk sweater dress that my mother, Scarlett, had given me for Christmas. Today I’d paired the midthigh-length sweater with thick black tights and my wine-colored Bondgirl Fluevog boots — a gift from Gran. The sturdy but still stylish boots dressed down the outfit, but I wasn’t stupid enough to wear heels anywhere near the nexus anymore, even on my nontraining days.

I’d left my blond curls loose and reapplied my rosy lip gloss frequently to compensate for the lack of heels.

Yeah, I was hoping to run into Warner.

___________________________________

Maps, Artifacts, and Other Arcane Magic (Dowser 5) ebook will be available THURSDAY, JULY 23, 2015 on Amazon, Kobo, iTunes, B&N, and Smashwords. The paperback will follow about two weeks later. Pre-orders are going up this week.

To help celebrate there will be two large giveaways. One the week before (July 15 – 18) and one the week of the release (July 20 – 23).

Don’t want to miss the release day? Please make sure you are signed up for my mailing list.

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I See Me (Oracle 1): Chapter 1 – Author-Read-Along

Okay – as I mentioned here – I’m rereading I See Me, Oracle 1 in preparation for writing Oracle 2. I’ve written and released Dowser 4 as well as written Dowser 5 since having Rochelle and Beau in my head, so I wanted to acquaint myself with their voices before really digging into the next book (though I already know the plot, the players, and the locations). I’m going to pin this post for awhile and link all the read-a-long posts at the bottom for easier navigation. Please feel free to comment, ask questions, discuss things with each other, etc. below.

*SPOILERS* *SPOILERS* *SPOILERS* *SPOILERS* *SPOILERS* *SPOILERS*

I See Me (Oracle 1) is an origin story. I adore writing origin stories. But it’s also a love story. The scene where Rochelle and Beau first meet haunted me for over a year before I gave in and wrote their story. I’d taken a lot of notes and sketched out a few scenes, but it wasn’t until I was halfway through the first draft of Dowser 4 that I See Me demanded to be written, needed to be written then – for timeline reasons – so I set Dowser 4 aside and devoted a few months to R&B. So … an Origin story. I loved the idea of an adept growing up not know anything about magic – how would that be possible? Under what circumstances? What would the ‘human’ world think magic was? Who would be the first to understand/find/interact with that person? And … a pure romance. Under what circumstances could two people come together and bond so completely that they began to believe in ‘true love’ and ‘love at first sight’? Ideas that almost anyone who hasn’t experienced the phenomena sneers at these days. Anyway, more on that later. CHAPTER ONE – thoughts/notes/quotes: Opening line: I wanted the book to immediately begin with a hint of the conflict to come. In the first draft of I See Me every chapter began with dialogue, each scene opened somewhere in the middle of the action to continually drive the plot and story forward. In later drafts I tweaked that setup somewhat for clarity and grounding (adding setting, etc, upfront). I worried about the possible slow start and build of this book for readers who were coming into this universe for the first time through this book (and didn’t understand that magic was at play). But I hoped that readers of the Dowser Series would figure out pretty quickly who the ‘bad guys’ were and be intrigued by their interaction with Rochelle in these early chapters. Notes

Colours, shades of grey, and black/white. Rochelle views the world in a VERY specific way – for her almost everything is perceived as some shade of grey. It’s important to note what she sees in colour, and what she renders in B&W.
Names: only people of some importance have actual names. This is another way Rochelle keeps herself distanced from people.

Favourite Quotes

Other people wanted to be haunted by my imaginary friends so much that they willing paid hundreds of dollars per sketch. My shrink would point that out as a silver-lining, but I’d prefer working at McDonald’s over delusions, any day. – I See Me (Oracle 1), Chapter One Today was my birthday. Today I would be free … well, as free as my mind would let me be. If I could just render the shading of the blade’s edge perfectly. – I See Me (Oracle 1), Chapter One

I See Me (Oracle 1) read-a-long

Chapter One (above)

Chapter Two & Three

Chapter Four and Five

Chapter Six and Seven

What were your thoughts, comments, and/or questions on Chapter One?