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Author Roberta Trahan

~ Murder, Mayhem, and Mystical Mystery

Author Roberta Trahan

Category Archives: 47North Authors

Color me JILO!

20 Wednesday Apr 2016

Posted by robertatrahan in 47North Authors, Miscellaneous

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Contest, JD Horn, Jilo, Kindle Fire, Paranormal Romance, Southern Gothic Horror, Witching Savannah

My good friend and fellow author JD Horn is sponsoring a fab giveaway in celebration of the release of the fourth book in his WITCHING SAVANNAH series! JILO is out next week, and if you haven’t discovered his southern gothic paranormal saga, get to it!! And while you’re at it, download this weeks coloring sheet and enter to win a Kindle Fire.

To make it easy for you, click on the coloring sheet to go to JD’s FB page for guidelines on how to enter:
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jd header.PNG

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Black Friday? Bah, Humbug.

27 Friday Nov 2015

Posted by robertatrahan in 47North Authors, Book News

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Akiko, anne charnock, Black Friday Book Deal, Free Book, J.D. Horn, Jason Kirk, Jodi McIsaac, Kate Maruyama, Phantasma, Pitch, Pro Patria Mori, Short Stories, The Adoption, The Guardian From The Sea, Undercurrents

I am not a fan of the post-festive economic feeding frenzy that erupts in the wake of Thanksgiving. So, for those of you who would rather read than shop today, I give you ‪#‎PHANTASMA‬ !

Like, I’m literally giving it to you. Seriously. It’s free. All weekend.

Click, and ye shall receive:

An eclectic collection of speculative short fiction by authors Anne Charnock, Jodi McIsaac, Kate Maruyama, Roberta Trahan, J.D. Horn, and award-winning poet Jason Kirk.

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Phantasma Cover

Warning: May Include Vampires

14 Monday Sep 2015

Posted by robertatrahan in 47North Authors

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47North, Dark Fantasy, Giveaway, Jodi McIsaac, Melissa F. Olson, Shannon Mayer, Urban Fantasy, Vampires

My author buddy and uber-talented urban fantasy author Melissa F. Olson is celebrating the upcoming release of BOUNDARY LINES – the second book in her Boundary Magic series – with a huge giveaway!

For a chance to win some spellbinding swag, including books by Shannon Mayer and Jodi McIsaac (and me), just click the image below to like and share Melissa’s FB photo.

Better hurry – giveaway ends on 9/16/15!

MFO Boundary Lines FB Giveaway

Something Witchy This Way Comes – THE VOID is out today!

18 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by robertatrahan in 47North Authors

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47North, Amazon Publishing, Gothic, JD Horn, Occult, Paranormal, The Line, The Source, The Void, Thriller, Witches, Witching Savannah

A big shout out today to my friend and fellow author JD Horn, whose Witching Savannah Trilogy wraps up today with the release of THE VOID ! If you love dark, magical mystery and sinister intrigue, you’ll love this series.

An otherworldly energy runs through te city of Savannah, betraying its sleepy, moss-cradled charm. The old, beguiling streets look welcoming to most…but certain families know what lurks under their genteel surfaces. Families like Mercy Taylor’s, which has the most powerful lineage of witches in the South, know this all too well.

Mercy and her husband, Peter, are happily preparing to welcome baby Colin into their lives. But their excitement quickly becomes overshadowed by a gruesome discovery: someone has scattered severed limbs throughout the city. After a troubling visit from an old foe, Mercy learns dark magic is at play, and someone—or something—wants her and her unborn child out of the picture. To uncover the shocking reason why, the amateur witch must face a force beyond her power…or risk losing everything.

The third book in J.D. Horn’s Witching Savannah series, The Void is a gripping adventure about the enchantment—and evil—that can lie just beyond sight.

     



Goodreads Readers Choice Awards 2014

10 Monday Nov 2014

Posted by robertatrahan in 47North Authors

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47North, Amazon Publishing, Goodreads, Goodreads Readers Choice Awards, JD Horn, Paranormal Fantasy, Roberta Trahan, Southern Gothic Horror, The Line, Urban Fantasy, Witching Savannah

Voting in the semi-final round of this year’s Goodreads Reader’s Choice Awards has begun, and I am so excited to share that my dear friend and fellow author JD Horn has been nominated in the Best Debut Author category!

JD’s Witching Savannah series has received a lot of critical acclaim from readers and reviewers, and if you haven’t read THE LINE yet, I highly recommend it! JD is a very talented writer and his debut novel is only the beginning of what I have no doubt is going to be a long and successful creative career!

I just love it when good things happen to good people :).

GR Readers Choic JD

 

Zombies, and Knights, and Zombies, and Swordplay, and Zombies…

05 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by robertatrahan in 47North Authors

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47North, Author Event, Book Event, Emaculum, Horror, Medieval Fantasy, Medieval history, Roberta Trahan, Roberto Calas, The Black Plague, The Scourge, Zombie Plague, Zombies

One of my favorite reads of 2013 was a little known serial novel called THE SCOURGE – which is the first of a series of historical fantasy/horror novels by my author friend Roberto Rodriguez Calas.

In THE SCOURGE, a mysterious plague has descended upon 14th century England, ravaging the country and trapping the souls of the afflicted in eternal madness. Sir Edward of Bodiam has been separated from his wife, and with two of his knights, sets out to find her. The knights encounter unspeakable horror, violence, and sorrow on their quest, but nothing on heaven or earth can keep Edward from the woman he loves.

THE SCOURGE is a clever, witty twist on some familiar themes like honor, nobility, and true love – with characters you can’t help but love. The quest continues in Roberto’s next book, THE SCOURGE: EMACULUM.

Today I’ll be hanging out on Facebook with a bunch of seriously cool authors and readers, in celebration of Roberto’s new release. There will be zombies, and swordplay, and zombies, and prizes, and zombies, and knights in shining armor, and zombies…

The fun starts at 5:00 pm EST / 2:00 pm PST. Click the image below to be taken to the event page. Hope to see you there!

Scourge Lauch Party 8.5.14

Guest Post ~ Urban Fantasy Author Melissa Olson

27 Monday Jan 2014

Posted by robertatrahan in 47North Authors, Guest Blogs

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Tags

47North, Amazon Publishing, Dead Spots, Fantasy, Magic, Melissa F. Olson, Scarlett Bernard, Trail of Dead, Urban Fantasy

Greetings, readers of Roberta! A big thank-you to my host for letting me take over her blog today. I write urban fantasies about a young woman who has –and I’m quoting from the Amazon page here – “a rare ability to counteract the supernatural by instantly neutralizing spells and magical forces.” In other words, when a vampire or werewolf steps within range of her, they become human again until they move away. I call someone with this ability a null. Roberta asked me to share how I came up with this concept and built the system of magic in my novels.

I don’t know whether other fantasy writers come up with their worlds first and then their protagonists, but for in my case, the null idea came first. It began with my interest in a few different things: crime scenes, how the supernatural could ever stay hidden in a modern world, and of course, the movie Hellboy 2. No, seriously. There’s a sequence in that film where the characters wear special goggles that let them see the supernatural, all the things that are usually hidden from human eyes. I was fascinated by the idea of someone who could see hidden things, and for a while I worked on a main character who was a crime scene photographer.

I played with the idea for ages, but whenever I got into all the real mythology questions, I kept running into problems. More importantly, the more I developed the character, the less I was able to connect with her. Runa was a little too squeaky-clean and cheerful for me to spend a whole book inside her head. I had hit a wall. Back to the drawing board.

While I was researching crime scenes, however, there was another set of images that kept popping into my head: scenes from the short-lived 2007 television show Moonlight. Within that show’s mythology, whenever there was supernatural evidence, you could call a phone number and this group of uber-tough women would show up to clean it for you. As I remember them (granted, this was six years ago) those cleaners were classic screen badasses: black catsuits, leather, dangerously high ponytails, eyeliner to kill, the works. I thought they were a bit cartoonish, but I was very taken with the idea of the crime scene cleaner. Who were these women? I wondered. How did they get the gig cleaning up after other people’s messes? Why would they be invested in it? And why would they wear black leather catsuits?

I don’t remember the exact light bulb moment, but at some point it all came together for me. What if instead of seeing the supernatural, my protagonist undid it? And what if she used that odd skill set to clean up after the smarmy-ass vampires who ran around doing whatever they wanted?

And as soon as I put those ideas together, it was like a switch had flipped. Scarlett was born, fully-formed in my mind. She wasn’t a classic screen badass, or a cartoon, or cheerfully optimistic about life. She was moody and withdrawn and sarcastic. She was frozen in place, underappreciated, apathetic, and deeply, deeply noble. She had a lot of growing up to do, and more than anything, she needed someone to give her the chance to do it.

(Fun fact: I didn’t give up on Runa the crime scene photographer. I brought her back in book two as a romantic foil for Scarlett. She ended up having a much bigger part in the story than I’d first planned, and she’ll even make an appearance in book 3.)

But when I decided who Scarlett was, and what she could do, I was really just getting started. I still had to figure out the rules of the world around her, and guys, that is hard. Worldbuilding is hard. But I needed to work out how magic worked, and why nulls could undo it. I spent a long time considering where Scarlett’s powers might come from, and what would set my world apart from other urban fantasies. Then I had to make it all fit together in a way that made some kind of logical sense. (This process mostly involved explaining my ideas to my husband, who has a knack for immediately poking a hole in a plot problem. Then I’d try to fix that hole, take it back to him, and he’d poke another. Repeat.)  Here are the rules that I eventually came up with for Scarlett’s universe:

1. There is no other place. No Never-never, no alternate dimensions, no Heaven or Hell. There is only here.

2. To that end, there are no angels or demons. They do not exist – or at least, they don’t exist any more than they do in reality.

3. Magic is everywhere; a component of nature, a force of life. It’s not exactly the same, but if I had to compare it to an existing mythology, the one that comes closest is probably The Force.

4. Because magic is a force (small letter f), it has interacted with and affected evolution for millions of years. Evolution in general is a huge part of my mythology. (There’s more about this in A Brief History of Magic, which you can find on my website.)

5. There is something wrong with magic. For the last few hundred years or so, it had begun to fade, to die. (I know why, but I’m not telling you. That’s a mystery for later.) Around the time that magic began to fade, nulls began to appear on the supernatural scene.

6. There is no ruling leader, group, or organization for the supernatural world, which I call the Old World in my books. Although we live in a digital age, the world of magic is still stuck in a mindset that’s similar to the one used for settling the American West: you stake out an area and try to hold it. You have your own rules for within that area, and your own way of doing things. The world is too big, and the supernatural is too secret, for global or even national leadership.

7. There is only one law that applies globally to all of the Old World: thou shall never tell humans about the Old World. Humans who find out have to be either killed or converted. Since there is now something wrong with magic, which makes it less likely for someone to be able to become a vampire or werewolf, this rule has occasionally been relaxed a tiny bit when a human is particularly useful – but only for whoever’s in charge of that region.

There are, of course, a hundred other details about how things work, but these were the laws that I started with when I began Dead Spots. And they’re working for me – after the third book, Hunter’s Trail (fall 2014), I’ll be writing another book set in Scarlett’s universe, but with a different protagonist. I hope she’ll be every bit as fun to write as Scarlett has been.

~~~

Melissa F. Olson was born and raised in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, and studied film and literature at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. After graduation, and a brief stint bouncing around the Hollywood studio system, Melissa moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where she eventually acquired a master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, a husband, a mortgage, two kids, and two comically oversize dogs—not at all in that order. She is the author of Dead Spots, Trail of Dead, and the upcoming Hunter’s Trail.

To learn more about Melissa and her books, visit her website: http://www.MelissaFOlson.com

 

 

Hellequin for the Holidays

20 Friday Dec 2013

Posted by robertatrahan in 47North Authors

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

47North, Amazon Publishing, fantasy fiction, Hellequin Chronicles, historical fiction, Infamous Reign, King Richard III, Merlin, Steve McHugh

My 47North author friend Steve McHugh recently published a novella in his Hellequin Chronicles series. Just in time for the holiday gift giving. For the historical fantasy lover in your life (who already has MY book, of course), I give you Infamous Reign :

Infamous Reign Cover

In late 15th century England, two young princes are given over by Merlin to the protection of their uncle, King Richard III. They soon vanish from sight, igniting tales of their demise at Richard’s hand and breeding unrest throughout the land. 

Nathanial Garrett, also known as Hellequin, is sent to London to decipher fact from rumor and uncovers a plot to replace the king. But his investigation quickly becomes personal when he learns that an old nemesis is involved. He soon finds himself racing against time to rescue the boys before their fate, and the fate of all England, is sealed in blood. 

Infamous Reign is a novella in the bestselling Hellequin Chronicles series, mixing gritty and action-packed historical fantasy with ancient mythology.

~~~

Steve McHugh photoSteve McHugh has been writing from an early age, his first completed story an English lesson. Unfortunately, he had to have a chat with the head of the year about the violent content and bad language. The follow up ‘One boy and his frog’ was less concerning to his teachers. A decade that he started work on his first publishable novel – the action-packed Urban Fantasy, Crimes Against Magic.

Steve lives in Southampton on the south coast of England with his wife and three young daughters. When not writing or spending time with his kids, he enjoys watching movies, reading books and comics, and playing video games.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hellequinchronicles

Twitter: https://twitter.com/StevejMchugh

Website: http://stevejmchugh.wordpress.com/

My (Slightly) Schizophrenic Life – Guest Post by author Jason Sheehan

07 Saturday Dec 2013

Posted by robertatrahan in 47North Authors

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47North, A Private Little War, Amazon Publishing, Diesel Punk, Food Writer, Jason Sheehan, Ray Guns, S, Science Fiction, Spaceships, Steam Punk, Tales From the Radiation Age

My name is Jason Sheehan and I am a science fiction writer. It hasn’t always been this way. I didn’t come to it by any normal path. And even to this day, actually saying out loud that I make up stories for a living is not an easy thing for me—mostly because of what I did before I became a professional nerd.

I’ve been an investigative journalist and a crime reporter. I covered the 2008 Democratic National Convention (mostly from the bars where the politicians and celebrities gathered after the day’s politicking was done) and almost lost a hand unwisely trying to feed a hippopotamus while reporting a story on the kitchen at the Denver zoo. I wanted to be a war correspondent like Michael Herr or Sebastian Junger, but ended up as a food writer, a restaurant critic and a food editor. I’m not complaining—getting paid to eat tacos for a living ain’t a bad way to make a buck—but the one thing that all of these things have in common is that they’re all journalism jobs. And journalists, first and foremost, are supposed to tell the truth.

And in my day job, I do. Always and without fail. But among journalists, admitting to writing fiction can be…weird. That you have it in you—the capability to tell a lie, to make up a quote, to write about a city being destroyed by giant robots which has not, in fact, been provably stomped flat by 100-foot-tall Kill-O-Bots (with cell phone video and on-the-record sources to back you up)—is, in some cases, taken as evidence of worse proclivities practiced in private. Admit it to the wrong old-school scribbler and they’ll look at you like you’ve just copped to being a serial masturbator or, worse, an untrustworthy voice. But the most common reaction is plain disbelief.

“How can you do it?” is the question I get asked most often when someone in the office puts two and two together and finally figures out that I really am the same Jason Sheehan putting out these widely unread books about robots and dinosaurs and spaceships. And what they really mean is, where do the stories come from? The people and their words? And how can you imagine things that aren’t really there?

Catch a journo in a talkative mood and, nearly to a man, they’ll tell you that the best thing about writing news stories is that it’s already all there—all the words, all the action, all the consequences. The job is not telling the story, but finding out the truth of what happened—the best and purest version of it. After that, it’s all just putting the words in the right order. The primary reason journalists don’t invent scenes or make up quotes is because it’s wrong, of course. Ethically and morally bankrupt in the worst kind of way. But the secret, secondary reason is that telling the truth is just easier. Get enough quotes from a source and the story is 80% written before you ever sit back down at your desk.

Anyway, writing about food, though a long walk from writing about crime or politics or other serious topics, is still journalism. And the reason I got into it (other than the obvious reason of having been a working chef for many years before I got my first writing job) is because writing about food really allows me to write about anything I want. With food as a frame or a lens, I can write about politics if the urge strikes me. I can easily write about crime. I can write about history and science and culture and hippopotamuses, all without going too far off the reservation. None of that is foreign to me. I can range wide, and often do.

But none of this really explains how
I ended up as the guy who can play by the rules in daylight, write honestly and forthrightly about foie gras and bourbon whiskey, and then, come nightfall, shed the guise of the mild-mannered food editor and get down to the dirty business of telling lies for money.

Is it that, as a boy, I fell hard for the pulp paperbacks that my dad used to keep on his bedside table? That I read some of the best and all of the worst science fiction of the 70’s and 80’s in a kind of fever because my dad was a big fan of ray guns and the local library and chose his reading material purely on the basis of the number of flaming spaceships, giant monsters and rock-jawed heroes displayed on the covers of the books he brought home? Absolutely. I caught the germ young and never shook it. That’s surely a part of it.

Is it that, as a young man, I started writing because I was lonely and then kept writing because I liked the worlds in my head better than the one I found myself in? Totally. I’m not sure there’s any writer out there who’d say different. My fiction predates my non-fiction by decades. I got a lot of practice on a lot of long nights and, later, used my black addiction to drown a couple other addictions I’d developed along the way, so that’s a piece of it, too.

But, strangely, I didn’t become serious about writing fiction until I became a journalist. My buddy Dave was a music writer in Denver. We were hired by the same paper around the same time and came up together. Neither of us had the credentials to be doing what we were doing professionally, so we both had a certain unease about our positions. He told me once that he kept himself sharp by reading everything but other music writers—lifting tricks and little bits of cleverness from sportswriters mostly, or national magazine pieces. Getting outside his own head and his own little world of rock shows and CD releases kept him sane and kept him fresh. Because I couldn’t stand reading most other food writers (we’re all a very precious and obsessive lot, and most days I can barely stand myself), I thought that was genius.

Around the same time, our boss—the paper’s editor-in-chief—admitted to me that she went home most nights and read “real literature” after a day of babysitting her flock of journos. She did it, she explained, to burn the gunk of journalism out of her head. To fill herself with beautiful words from the finest writers who ever lived to prove that not everything in the world was stories of city council elections and local weed busts.

This, too, seemed like wise counsel—a way to keep one’s self from getting bogged down in the mundane. And from those two pieces of disparate and sideways advice, I developed a habit of finishing my writing day with a bracing shot of the fantastic—of clearing out the pipes with something that was the dead opposite of what I did all day and getting as far outside my own head as I could by visiting other planets in my downtime.

Only instead of just reading science fiction, I wrote it. I considered it exercise. Staying strong against the daily grind of dinners and deadlines. When I scored my first book contract (for a memoir, of all things, about my life as a cook-turned-food-writer), I just added that to my plate. I’d work all day as a restaurant critic and editor, then turn to the book and then write about spaceships when everything else was said and done. Even if it was only a page or a paragraph, it was enough. It was a method for forcing myself to think orthogonally about words and voice and turns of phrase (which, to this day, makes me a better journalist and non-fiction writer), and a link back to the days when I would stay up all night reading Bradbury in my bed by the light of the streetlamp outside my bedroom window. When I read and wrote purely for the love of it, without any expectation of anyone but me ever inhabiting the worlds I was creating.

The first science fiction book I ever sold? It was the book I was writing, a paragraph at a time, while I was working on that memoir. It was the world I carried with me through Denver, to Seattle and, eventually, to Philadelphia—bouncing around the country, following the newspaper and magazine jobs wherever they took me and carving out an hour here and there for the breaking of rules and the telling of made-up stories. The second sci-fi book I sold came out of the same habit (and was mostly written while I was working on my second food book). And I’m sure the third will go the same way someday soon.

As it always has been, science fiction writing is my escape and my daily workout. It is my first love and my perfect retreat. I am a journalist by trade, but a liar by vocation. And as tough as it might be for some of my daylight colleagues to understand, I couldn’t do the one without the other.

∞

Jason Sheehan is a former dishwasher, fry cook, saucier, chef, restaurant critic, food editor, reporter, and porn store employee. As a young nerd, he fell hard for Star Wars, Doctor Who, William Gibson, Roger Zelazny and the spaceships-and-rayguns novels his father would leave on his bedside table. He dreamed of someday befriending a robot, stealing a spaceship and wandering off across the stars in search of alien ladies and high adventure. Since that hasn’t happened (yet…), he now writes about it instead–which is almost as good.

 

 

Going Medieval – A Guest Post

02 Saturday Nov 2013

Posted by robertatrahan in 47North Authors, Guest Blogs

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47North, Amazon Publishing, historical fantasy, Linda Pearce, Medieval history, Michael Tinker Pearce, Roberta Trahan, The Shield Maiden, The Well of Tears

Join me and fellow 47North epic fantasy authors Michael Tinker Pearce & Linda Pearce on their blog, where I tell the story of how I fell in love with history – medieval history, that is. Naturally, there is a book involved:

Going Medieval – by Roberta Trahan (www.michaeltinkerpearce.com)

And then be sure to check out their contribution to the epic Foreworld Saga

Shield

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Best-selling author of the quasi-historical epic fantasy and post-apocalyptic science fiction. Dragon Seeker, Myth Maker, Coffeechocoholic & Antique Jewelry Hoarder.

THE KEYS TO THE REALMS (The Dream Stewards #2)

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