Celtic Bard: Blog

I know some of you were rather irritated by the brevity of the first posting for In the Darkness Falling and for that I apologize but I posted the Prologue when it was available. Thusly, I have now submitted Chapter One of Enter the Darkness' sequel and it should be up some time later today or tomorrow. Fair warning, the next chapter will follow the posting schedule I laid out when I posted the Prologue, meaning next month around this time is when you can expect another chapter. If the writing on the story goes more smoothly than I anticipate then I may increase the frequency of new chapters, but don't count on it. I am hoping to wrap up the entire book this year and if that happens, fans of Alice/Alexa might get a mass posting as a Christmas or New Year's present. Until then, please be patient and enjoy In the Darkness Falling as it comes.

Happy New Year everyone! I decided to start the new year off with a new posting. For a while now I have been talking about the sequel to Enter the Darkness. Well, I have decided to start posting what I have on that story. I will submit the Prologue to In the Darkness Falling today and probably a new chapter every few weeks to a month. The novel is not finished but I am about a fifth of the way into the book and I will probably try to focus on that and volume four of Chronicles of The Samuelson, my quartet that I have been publishing through Kindle and trade paperback, this year. Given how my brain works, I will probably work on other things throughout that time but it will be those two books that I am going to try to finish by this time next year.

A caveat to that is that I have been trying to finish Rage IV in the past week or so and I will probably have that finished soon. For those reading this on SOL, you will get the full, uncensored version. For those of you on Finestories, I will be heavily editing the first part of the story because it is a rather explicit sequence that won't pass the Webmaster's rules for Finestories.com. I don't usually write things like that (small parts of Future Distorted notwithstanding) generally because it usually doesn't advance the story overmuch but the beginning of Rage IV came to me out of nowhere and I went with it. It sort of encapsulates Candy's little obsession with Mike and leads to other things in the series' storyline.

So that is what I am hoping to accomplish with this new year. Try not to get too depressed about having to wait for new Anomaly of the Fates or Future Distorted because I know my brain will not stop thinking about them simply because I wish to focus on something else. And new stuff will inevitably occur to me as well. So enjoy the Prologue of In the Darkness Falling (short as it is) and try not to get too impatient for more. I am trying to space out the chapters enough to let me really work on the rest of it in between regular postings so you won't languish while I am trying to figure out where things are going to go.

Merry Christmas to all! Try not to overindulge through the New Year and may your holidays be as enjoyable as humanly possible.

OK, greetings out of the way, on to announcements. As I stated a post or two ago, I have been working on my third book in the Chronicles of The Samuelson quartet and I reached my goal of having it ready by Christmas. Reign of Prophesy should be available in the Kindle Store sometime Christmas Day. This one was a lot more wrenching to write and turned out longer than the first two books. I am hoping it is not a sign of what will happen when I sit down and finish the final book (Reign of Avatars).

I want to thank those who helped me out in fixing my translations and German grammar while working on Reign of Prophesy. I truly appreciated it. Any mistakes you might find in the book are solely mine and not yours.

As for writing that will be posted here, I haven't had the chance to work on things lately due mainly to holiday nuttiness and trying to get Reign of Prophesy formatted and submitted for publishing. I still have to get the book ready for the trade paperback edition, but that should not take too long. That is a long-winded way of saying that once the Christmas crazies are over and relatives stop impinging upon my writing chi, I might get some writing done. Until then, enjoy Reign of Prophesy on Kindle, enjoy Christmas, and have a Happy New Year!

Since I was asked for them, the following are the translations of the German lines for the snippet of Reign of Prophesy.

"Wollen Sie flüchten?"-Do you wish to escape?

"Ja, ich muss sofort gehen!"-Yes, I must go now!

"Sie werden mit mir sicher sein, Fraulein Samuelson. Komm!"-You will be safe with me, Ms. Samuelson. Come!

Note that these are approximate translations because not everything translates directly between the two languages and my German is very, very rusty so I had to check myself with mechanical support. I want to thank the person who wrote to ask for these because I had not planned on supplying translations when I publish the book. I know I find it very annoying when reading or watching some thing and subtitles are not provided, so now my plans have changed on that score.

Since it is part of what I have been working on lately instead of new chapters of Anomaly of the Fates and Future Distorted, I decided to give you guys a taste of the new book I have been working on. This bit is the beginning of the Prologue, introducing a new character that plays a small but important part of the overall story. I hope to finish something for posting soon. Enjoy!

Reign of Prophesy
Prologue
The streets of Itzehoe, Germany were nearly deserted. Few Europeans dared walk the streets at night since the Federated States of the Americas invaded the Confederated European Union. FSA soldiers and members of the Paranormal Apprehension Squad used the night to conduct their searches and investigate the activities of the CEU's resistance movement; a movement heavily supported by Europe's shrinking "paranormal" community. Tonight in Itzehoe, however, the streets were silent. The small city at the base of the Jutland Peninsula seemed to be holding its breath, hoping against hope that for just one night the citizens of the broken municipality could go to sleep without being disturbed by their conquerors.

That was not to be, however. Itzehoe had been the last bastion of Confederate resistance in northern Europe, necessitating a large FSA occupation force to put down the flare-ups perpetrated by resistance fighters gone underground. That was not what tonight's disturbance was, however. A lone woman ran through the narrow, cobblestoned streets of the old city districts, wheezing with the effort to stay ahead of the PAS agents pursuing her. Her name was Anika Samuelson-Niebuhr and she was in serious trouble.

Six days ago, she and her loving husband Volkmar, a prominent literature and philology professor at the University of Hamburg, were happily celebrating the sixth month of their twin daughters' births. She had met Volkmar Niebuhr when they were students at the University of Stockholm. They were slowly falling in love when the FSA invaded Norway. Knowing that there were several practicing wizards and seers in the family and how the FSA viewed such people, Volkmar asked her to marry him and move with him back to Germany. With the wholehearted support of her parents living in Thörshammer, Sweden, Anika happily married the handsome academic, settling down to blissful domesticity in Hamburg. When the war came to Germany nearly two years ago, they quickly moved out of the big city and into the smaller town of Itzehoe, hoping Anika and the children she was carrying would be safer there. Shortly thereafter, word from New Philadelphia reached the Samuelson family in Sweden; the Samuelson branch that had gone to North America nearly two decades ago had been slaughtered, the last member disappearing after PAS agents chased him into a parking garage on Manhattan Island.

Eight days ago, PAS agents in Itzehoe began asking questions about her. Where was she from? How long had she lived in Itzehoe? Has anyone ever seen her do anything unusual? Are there any other Swedish nationals living in the district with the name Samuelson?

Anika had just brought out the twins' cake when the front door of their old fashioned cottage was kicked in, red-and-black-garbed men with guns storming through, shooting indiscriminately. Tears flowed down Anika's pale cheeks as she remembered the spray of red that filled her vision when she watched as her beautiful babies were killed right in front of her eyes. Volkmar tried to push her out the back door, but he went down as well, bellowing for her to run with his last breath, eyes glazing with death even as Anika fled.

And run was what she had been doing for two days now. Slowly but surely, Anika had made her way to this outlying district of Itzehoe, hoping against hope that she could find a way to escape her home and get back to her family in Thörshammer. But the PAS had spotted her running past a surveillance camera behind a bank. She led them on a merry chase through the twisted streets of the ancient cobblestoned district lined with the tall, narrow houses that had stood in Itzehoe for centuries; only to lead them back to where it all began hours ago. There was the blasted bank!

"Psst!"

Anika whirled, her heart in her throat, sweat drenching her skin despite the chill Autumn night. Out of the shadows of a butcher shop flared the end of a cigarette illuminating the dirty face of a frightening man. Anika cringed back as a meaty hand extended towards her.

"Wollen Sie flüchten?" a deep, harsh voice from the shadows asked.

"Ja, ich muss sofort gehen!" Anika gasped hopefully, tears welling in her eyes as she took the proffered hand and stepped into a shadowy alcove.

A dozen PAS troopers trotted by just then, causing Anika to hold her breath fearfully. "Sie werden mit mir sicher sein, Fraulein Samuelson. Komm!"