GIVEAWAY CLOSED! As promised last Saturday, here is the audiobook giveaway for I See You (Oracle 2)!!
Cover design by Elizabeth Mackey. Narrated by Jennifer Grace.
Okay! As before, this is a first-come, first-win deal. The giveaway remains open until all the download codes have been claimed. I’ll give away codes for book 3 next Saturday.
Do you want to listen to I See You (Oracle 2) on audiobook?
Yes?
Okay then!
GIVEAWAY CLOSED!!
Reviews are always welcomed and appreciated!!
Did you miss this giveaway? Don’t worry, free codes for book two will go live on Saturday, August 1 at 3pm!
So, looking back on my more recent blog posts, I just realized that I never blogged about the release of I See Me (Oracle 1) in audiobook format. And now I See You (Oracle 2) is also available.
That is terribly pathetic ‘marketing’ on my part. Geez.
So! Book 1 and Book 2, narrated by the epically talented Jennifer Grace, are very much available. Book three is due in January 2019. Jennifer’s narration made me seriously fall for Rochelle and Beau all over again. Okay … I admit to having a full on crush on Beau after listening.
Oh, and full disclosure, the audible links are ‘bounty’ links, so if you aren’t an audible member and you sign up for a membership via one of my links I get a kickback. Just FYI.
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.
WARNING: THE FOLLOWING EXCERPT MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR I SEE ME, ORACLE 1
Book cover by Irene Langholm and Elizabeth Mackey
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.
If magic was real, then what? Was it simply a form of energy? The energy I felt when I touched Beau, Chi Wen, and Blackwell? Energy from where? From some divine providence? From the very earth?
If magic came from somewhere godly, then why come to me? Why communicate through me? What purpose did the visions have?
Could I actually change the future? And if yes, would I change it for better or for worse?
Over a year and a half had passed since Jade Godfrey — aka the dowser — fixed my mother’s necklace. Since I’d thwarted the vision of the death of love. Since I’d made a deal with a devil and acquired a demigod for a mentor.
I still didn’t understand or control my power, my magic, but it had been a great year. A year of rest. A year of love and light.
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.
So I wrote up a blog post some time ago about writing lead characters who can’t actually kick ass but who must still resolve the main conflict in order for the story to function properly, but I never finished it. I figured that yammering on about my writing process was a rather boring blog post.
However, this came in the mail last Thursday. And this – I think – is interesting, because it’s part of teaching Rochelle to kick ass when she has no other choice.
Yep, that’s a Smith&Wesson Tactical Pen. I bought it on Amazon. I thought it was a great idea for Rochelle. Or rather, Beau thought it was a good thing for Rochelle to have. And I wouldn’t mind tucking it into my own satchel after I’m done working through Oracle 2.
I couldn’t just give Rochelle a knife. She’d probably just end up stabbing herself with it. Ha.
Back to talking about writing and structure and audience expectations for a second … if the Oracle series is a trilogy (as I believe it is) then book two is technically the second act, which means it’s all about confrontation – inner and exterior conflict. Rochelle is not only learning who she is, but how she functions within the Adept world.
I woke up feeling slightly rudderless this morning. This happens pretty reliably when I’m not deep in a story, when I’m just scratching around the edges of an idea but I haven’t found the hook into the plot. If I entertain it, this feeling can easily lead to fretting over the time it takes me to bring a novel to market, and then being daunted by the sheer amount of words between me and a completed first draft.
So I usually beat it back by blaring music through headphones – a specific playlist for each novel – and digging into character bios and building settings.
Fast forward six hours later, and I’ve written twelve hundred words of the final confrontation and know exactly were the novel is going … as well as the twists that get the characters there.
I love that.
This cracks Oracle 2 wide open for me. I’ll play around with the guts for a couple more days, sorting through scenes, turning points, and putting everything in its place. Then I get to dig deep into the first draft, inciting incident to the denouement.
I thought you might find it interesting to see what a story looks like to me in this stage, so I snapped a picture of my paradigm before I filled out too many spoilers. Please ignore the spelling errors.
This paradigm – or skeleton – of the plot is heavily influenced by Syd Field‘s structure of a screenplay, which I used to follow rather religiously when I wrote the first draft of a screenplay and saw no reason to drop when I transitioned to novels. I add my own bits, most likely cribbed from other sources, such as Save the Cat! and the like, but really it’s just an amalgamation of how story functions for me.
This will be a novel in approx. 70K more words.
One word, sentence, and paragraph at a time.
A breath, a look, and a sigh.
A kiss, a touch, and a smile.
The brave, family, and blood. Always blood and tears. Courage and fear.
Destiny.
Rochelle and Beau, beyond the skeleton of an idea and the smear of a pen.
