Articles
Guest post by Elizabeth Vaughan
- Written by Seregil of Rhiminee
Risingshadow has the honour of publishing a guest post by Elizabeth Vaughan.
About the author:
Elizabeth Vaughan is the USA TODAY Bestselling Author of Warprize, the first volume of The Chronicles of the Warlands. Her father introduced her to sci/fi and fantasy, and she’s never looked back. She loves fantasy and romance novels, and has played Dungeons and Dragons since 1981, both table-top and the online game. The Chronicles of the Warlands stretches over eight books, with more to come. The latest in the series is Warsong, 2018. Beth also has a number of short stories published in various anthologies.
Beth is owned by incredibly spoiled cats and lives in the Northwest Territory, on the outskirts of the Black Swamp, along Mad Anthony's Trail, on the banks of the Maumee River.
Click here to visit her official website.
About Warsong:
The magic has come back to the Plains. The Warrior Priests are no more. The traditions are changing - too quickly for some.
Joden has only ever wanted to be a Singer, to know all of the songs. When the time comes for his Trials, he is challenged to take the old paths - and it ends in disaster. But his broken heart and broken body are found by Amyu... and she knows what it is to live with pain.
Amyu should have gone to the snows long ago, but instead chose to live in shame. Cast out of her tribe, she now serves Queen Xylara and the Kingdom of Xy. Her new mission is to find the key to defeating the wyverns who attack from the sky - but can a girl from the Plains control beasts who soar in the air?
She knows that Joden has been brought to her by the winds, and they do what they will. Their love is forbidden by the Plains, and their dreams pull them in different directions - but together they heal each other. If only they could heal their people, who are struggling with the ultimate goal:
Who will be WarKing?
GUEST POST BY ELIZABETH VAUGHAN
Read more: Guest post by Elizabeth Vaughan
A review of Katrina Mountfort's The Ghost in You
- Written by Seregil of Rhiminee
Katrina Mountfort's The Ghost in You was published by Elsewhen Press in a digital edition in February 2018 and will be published in paperback in May 2018.
Information about Katrina Mountfort:
Katrina was born in Leeds. After a degree in Biochemistry and a PhD in Food Science, she started work as a scientist. Since then, she’s had a varied career. Her philosophy of life is that we only regret the things we don’t try, and she’s been a homeopath, performed forensic science research and currently works as a freelance medical writer. She now lives in Saffron Walden with her husband and two dogs. When she hit forty, she decided it was time to fulfil her childhood dream of writing a novel. Future Perfect was her debut novel and the first book in the Blueprint trilogy. Forbidden Alliance and Freedom’s Prisoners completed the trilogy. Her latest novel is The Ghost in You.
Click here to visit her official website.
Information about The Ghost in You:
A first-hand account from beyond the grave
What do you do if you’re dead but haven’t ‘moved on’?
You keep finding yourself back where you died, with very little control over when; sometimes you can be away for days, weeks or even months, and then you’re back. Between times, when you’re ‘away’, where do you go, what do you do? You’ve seen some other ghosts asleep at their graves, but you don’t even know where your own grave is.
The living shiver if they walk through you, but they can neither see nor hear you. With practice you can pass through walls and doors, but curiously you can sit on a park bench without falling through it, climb stairs, even lie on a bed. You’re stuck in the clothes you were wearing when you died, at the age you died. Waiting.
Then, after years of this intermittent existence, you realise what you have been waiting for, what it is that you have to do in order to finally move on. Just as you have found the best reason to stay.
That’s what happened to Rowena...
A ghost story told from the perspective of the ghost herself, The Ghost in You is a first-hand account, from beyond the grave, by an innocent girl who dies before her time and tries to make sense of what is happening to her, while helping her friends and discovering her purpose.
A REVIEW OF KATRINA MOUNTFORT'S THE GHOST IN YOU
Read more: A review of Katrina Mountfort's The Ghost in You
A review of Terry Grimwood's There is a Way to Live Forever
- Written by Seregil of Rhiminee
Terry Grimwood's There is a Way to Live Forever was published by Black Shuck Books in February/March 2018.
Information about Terry Grimwood:
As well as writing, Terry teaches, acts and directs, and is a regular harmonica player and vocalist at “Aint Nothin’ But The Blues” open mic Sunday afternoon jams in London. He is the author of five novels and novellas: Shadow Waltz: Soul Masque Parts 1 and 2, The Places Between, Axe, Bloody War and Deadside Revolution. His short stories have appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies over the years. He has also written and directed three plays: The Bayonet, Tattletale Mary and The Friends of Mike Santini, and contributed to and co-written a number of engineering and electrical text books. He runs theEXAGGERATEDpress and Wordland magazine.
Click here to visit his official website.
Information about There is a Way to Live Forever:
THERE IS A WAY TO LIVE FOREVER
Only pick up a stranger if you can face your demons... and hers
Only stay with your lover if you can give yourself body and soul
Only sell your flesh is you can bear humiliation, pain and the deepest darkness
Only play God is you can endure the unutterable loneliness of the Divine
THERE IS A WAY TO LIVE FOREVER
Thirteen excursions into the shadowlands that border the known and the terrors that lie beyond
A REVIEW OF TERRY GRIMWOOD'S THERE IS A WAY TO LIVE FOREVER
Read more: A review of Terry Grimwood's There is a Way to Live Forever
A review of Mike French's Fictional Alignment
- Written by Seregil of Rhiminee
Mike French's Fictional Alignment was published by Elsewhen Press in a digital edition in February 2018 and in paperback in April 2018.
Information about Mike French:
Mike French was the owner and senior editor of the prestigious literary magazine, The View From Here during its life from 2007 to 2014. Mike’s debut novel, The Ascent of Isaac Steward, the first book of the Dandelion Trilogy, was published in 2011 and nominated for a Galaxy National Book Award which, presumably due to an unfortunate clerical error, was awarded to Dawn French. Elsewhen Press published the second book in the trilogy, the satirical Blue Friday, in 2012, and the third, Convergence, in 2013, along with a new edition of the first book.
Born in Cornwall in 1967, Mike spent his childhood flipping between England and Scotland with a few years in between in Singapore. Splitting his time between his own writing, editing the magazine, running author workshops and working with atp media in Luton, Mike is married with three children and a growing number of pets. He currently lives in Luton in the UK and when not working watches Formula 1, eats Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food and listens to Noah and the Whale.
Information about Fictional Alignment:
The sequel to An Android Awakes.
It’s ten years after Android Writer PD121928 from An Android Awakes was fed into a sink grinder by its replacement PD121929.
The human prostitute Sapphira, believing PD121929 to be PD121928 for all that time, has tried and failed to save PD121929 from being destroyed for selling fewer than a hundred copies of its novel.
Sapphira herself has written the bestselling novel Humans (An Arrangement of Minor Defects) based on the stories PD121928 told her on the night they first met.
It has been marketed by Altostratus as the “first work of fiction by a human for over a hundred years”.
Unhappy, a handful of zealot androids massacre the senate and a new regime is formed fuelled with a passion to eradicate the evil of fiction from android society.
This message has been approved by The Bureau for Fictional Alignment
A REVIEW OF MIKE FRENCH'S FICTIONAL ALIGNMENT
Read more: A review of Mike French's Fictional Alignment
A review of Jon B. Dalvy's The Ballad of Titha Mae
- Written by Seregil of Rhiminee
Jon B. Dalvy's The Ballad of Titha Mae was published in January 2018.
Information about Jon B. Dalvy:
Jon is a Nashville, TN-based author and illustrator, his work spanning from creative writing as a profession to fantasy literature. He’s told tales as a published playwright with The Nashville Repertory Theatre, a pop-culture writer for Skreeonk.com, and led several creative ventures during his four-year career as head writer of Playbuzz.com: crafting content for Disney, TIME, People, MTV, and many others. His heart, however, has never held a tale so dear as it does The Ballad of Titha Mae, a children’s fantasy novel crafted from his own life and love of the genre. It is his sincerest hope that your heart, too, will carve out a Luna-shaped spot for Titha and her companions in the near future!
Click here to visit his official website.
Information about The Ballad of Titha Mae:
Titha loves her father, Theole, with all her excitable heart. The two are indigo-skinned Lunas: a spritely people forbidden to leave the treehalls of Yythengrey. So when their once friendly Dawnfather, the twisted dragon Vulduun, desecrates their homeland and kidnaps Theole, no one is willing to risk saving him - except his daughter, Titha Mae. Such a brash gesture leads the little Luna and her Bear-brother, Paw, on a fantastical journey far beyond the only foliage-filled mountains she’s ever known.
Raised beneath the Great Smoky Mountains in Knoxville, Tennessee, Jon B. Dalvy crafted The Ballad of Titha Mae from his adventurous Appalachian youth, historical mythology, and his Celtic heritage. Titha Mae was born from these passions, as well as bedtime stories created for his three little sisters and two younger brothers. The brothers having plenty of classical male heroes to choose from growing up, 'The Ballad' is dedicated to (and based upon) Jon's three little sisters "and the light they hold", in hopes of bringing more lionhearted young heroines to the forefront of fantasy literature.
The result is an epic adventure featuring a brand new world ripe with its own rich mythology and eclectic characters, all born of fantastical races both new and old! Join Titha and her companions on a journey you'll never want to end, and will surely never forget!
A REVIEW OF JON B. DALVY'S THE BALLAD OF TITHA MAE
Read more: A review of Jon B. Dalvy's The Ballad of Titha Mae