#NAMEthatSUITOR to enter my Audiobook Giveaway for BY HELEN'S HAND!

I know guys, I know -- I'm the worst blogger these days. But you'll find more regular posts over at blog.amaliacarosella.com right now as I ramp up for the release of BY HELEN'S HAND on May 10th, including a giveaway for a copy of the audiobook edition AND an owl pendant to match the bracelet/necklace my fabulous cover artist gave Helen on both her covers!


Klikky Klikky to head over and check it out -- and please do enter to win! It's no fun playing #NAMEthatSUITOR by myself. :P There's also a link to the goodreads giveaway which is happening NOW and I hope you'll throw your hat in that ring as well!

In other news: I finally and at last wrapped the draft for The Manuscript of Doom, which will be an Amalia Carosella title, and I hope to have more information for you guys soon on that project. But readers of Amalia Dillin!me I think will be particularly interested! I'm destroying the developmental edits with the best editor in the world as we speak. (And when it gets closer to the big day, I'll definitely be talking about why that manuscript was such a beast to write!) I've also got another bronze age historical (my Hippodamia and Pirithous book) in the final stages of production, release date TBA! I'll let you know when I have it pinned down!

Next up is Orc 3, and I'll be throwing myself into that head-first as soon as the Manuscript of Doom edits are wrapped. Believe me, I want to get Orc 3 out to you guys as much as you guys want to read it. But be on the lookout for an HONOR AMONG ORCS promotion in June, around the release of Warcraft the movie. It just seemed fitting.

Finally: Do definitely subscribe to The Amaliad and I'll deliver behind the scenes book stuff as well as the most important updates about Authors!Me directly to your inbox!

I think that's a wrap for now!

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The Best Laid Plans For 2016

Have a completely unrelated Baldur-cat!
It's like he thinks it's his job to keep me from writing.

This year feels insanely busy. I'm not sure it actually is, but my work is front-loaded in the first 4-6 months, so it FEELS like I am being crushed under the weight of ALL THE THINGS. In reality, once I get to the other side of March, I'm sure I'll feel a lot better. In the meantime, expect it to stay relatively quiet on the blog. I'll try to update once a month, or more if there's something noteworthy or exciting to report, but mostly my nose is going to be firmly pressed against the grindstone until late spring!

HOWEVER, a promise is a promise, so here are my goals for 2016!

Writing
There are two big manuscripts that I need to draft, plus one for funsies:

• What I like to call The Mysterious Book Three (because for the life of me I have no idea what to title this yet) for Lake Union, to be published under my Amalia Carosella name. (I'm 62K words in and counting! huzzah!) 

• Orc 3. (Planning for a 2017 release!)

• The Dream is that I will finish both of these books and then have time to work on my random contemporary romance (Sully and Kate), just for the love of writing, once my biggest obligations are behind me! I am not 100% sure this will happen, but I hope it will! The Universe keeps putting this book back under my nose, and I'm dying to dive back into it.

You can also tack on all the writing stuff I said I wanted to do last year and didn't. I think that's just a couple of novellas -- Ullr's story, a Marcus short story for Fate of the Gods, and maybe someday Ra and Athena will get a chance at my attention again. Plus I have two more Bronze Age Greek Myth books I'd love to write, but I think it's totally unrealistic to put them on any docket before 2017/2018.


Editing

• Without question, I am sure I will be editing TMB3!
  
• Orc 3 (naturally)
  
• But before both of those: Hippodamia and Pirithous's book, TAMER OF HORSES. This is a book I am dying to wrap up and get out into the world. It'll also be published under my Amalia Carosella name when the time comes -- but that when is pretty up in the air right now, so while it's a priority for me, I don't now how that is going to translate in terms of release date, yet. Stay Tuned!

Other
This year, the first weekend in March, I'll be attending ALBACON as a guest! Albacon is going to be my only Con this year, so if you want to see me, this is your best bet until 2017! I'll be taking part in the Writers' Workshop pre-Con and hopefully maybe doing some panels and a signing, so I'll be full time at the con on Friday and Saturday, for sure. Hopefully I'll see (some of) you there!

And of course, BY HELEN'S HAND (Helen of Sparta #2) will be releasing May 10th!!

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Notes from the (Writing/Revision) Cave

I'm over half-way through drafting my first BRAND NEW BOOK of the year -- Historical Fiction set in the Bronze Age and it may or may not involve both Odysseus and Polypoetes, among others -- which made the revisions I was doing on TAMER OF HORSES (Hippodamia and Pirithous's book!) a lot easier to handle, since they're both in the same world. And you'd think that this being my THIRD manuscript set in Bronze Age Greece, I'd have the research part out of the way.

The Abduction of Hippodamia
(photo by me or possibly el husband.)

You'd be wrong, because every book has different research requirements and elements that maybe the previous one two three didn't. But you'd think that. Heck, sometimes even I think it. And then something like this happens and I am reminded of my place in the order of the universe.

Last month I got mightily derailed (many hours spent squinting at tiny text) in my revisions for TAMER by the researching of burial and funerary rites of Mycenaean Greece* since I realized hadn't dealt with mass numbers of dead before previously, and I should probably check my assumptions. Needless to say, they were totally wrong. So now I have to decide if I want to follow Homer (because my books are fundamentally related to and leading up to the Trojan War and the myths surrounding it, and if I follow Homer, I stay consistent), or if I want to stick to the archaeological record, at Homer's expense.

If this book were a stand alone one off (it's kind of a companion/prequel) then it would be a non-issue. I could go historical all the way. But because it isn't... the decision is maybe not so straightforward. Either way, though, I need to know what the archaeological record tells us about burials and funerary rites, and I need to be purposeful in either choosing to uphold that element, or sticking with Homer, instead. Purposeful changes, properly noted, explained, and/or justified in an author's note are far more forgivable than accidental-I-didn't-realize-my-assumptions-were-totally-wrong inclusions!

And before this particular revision-derailing-event? Aegean Bronze Age Medicine. Which. *I* was pretty surprised/impressed by, personally. There were definitely worse times to be alive.

*which contrary to what Homer would have you believe, do NOT involve cremation -- but I'll be posting more about that with some links to interesting articles on the topic over at blog.amaliacarosella.com in the nearish future (mid-April)! Posting has picked up over yonder. Because HELEN OF SPARTA!!!! 

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Available April 1, 2015 
Amazon | B&N | Goodreads

Long before she ran away with Paris to Troy, Helen of Sparta was haunted by nightmares of a burning city under siege. These dreams foretold impending war—a war that only Helen has the power to avert. To do so, she must defy her family and betray her betrothed by fleeing the palace in the dead of night. In need of protection, she finds shelter and comfort in the arms of Theseus, son of Poseidon. With Theseus at her side, she believes she can escape her destiny. But at every turn, new dangers—violence, betrayal, extortion, threat of war—thwart Helen’s plans and bar her path. Still, she refuses to bend to the will of the gods.

A new take on an ancient myth, Helen of Sparta is the story of one woman determined to decide her own fate.

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Wrapping TAMER OF HORSES

Theseus and Centaur (photo by Yair Haklai
[CC BY-SA 3.0  or GFDL], via Wiki Commons)

In January, I finally finished TAMER OF HORSES, a historical novel about Hippodamia's marriage to Pirithous, and the war with the Centaurs that followed. I started writing TAMER in 2012 -- prompted by an anthology call for ancient Greek themed romances. At the time I thought that turning a tragedy into a romance was just a question of picking the right end point in the story. There was no way I was going to turn the war with the centaurs into a happily ever after, if I included it in the novella. There was just too much death, too much destruction, and too much STORY to pack into anything with a 40,000 word limit.

So I wrote the romance novella and submitted it. Lucky for me (no, really!), I got the big R. Finally, I had the time and the words to turn that novella into a full length novel and cover the WHOLE story. And I am so stoked that I did. The more I wrote, the more I loved writing it. Hippodamia didn't have to be a typical Greek -- she'd been raised by Centaurs, after all. And with Pirithous came Theseus, and even better, his Amazon wife, Antiope. There is nothing not awesome about getting to write the four of these characters, particularly after I'd written HELEN OF SPARTA. I got to explore what Pirithous and Theseus were like in their glory days, and meet the women who had the strength not only to match them, but even to exceed them. Together, the daughter of the centaurs and the daughter of Ares make a very formidable team!

It was a stop and start struggle to figure out the path of the book and pull all the threads together. When I started during the summer of 2012, I never expected that it would be a two year journey. But I'm pretty proud of the nearly 110,000 words I ended up with! Hopefully my early readers will feel the same way, and after that... well, publishing is unpredictable at the best of times, but whether or not Hippodamia's story sells, I'll never regret having written it!

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Hippodamia (The Centauromachy and Art II)

(crossposted)  

I'm not sure why Hippodamia's abduction by Centaurs is such a popular motif for artists -- just like I'm not sure why Leda and the Swan is even more so -- but this particular sculpture (at the National Gallery of Art) is one of my favorites.

I love the contrast between the grace of Hippodamia's form, all smooth lines and curves, and the emphasis on the Centaur's pure muscle mass, brutish and physically powerful. His shoulders ripple, his flanks and forequarters dimpled and defined. In comparison to Hippodamia, he's massive!

Unlike the centaur in the previous bronze (which was far more Art Deco in style) there isn't anything elfin about his features. Hollow-cheeked and thick-nosed, this centaur is rawly human. A man lost to madness, made all the more clear by the fallen amphorae, spilling wine beneath his hooves.

Hippodamia on the other hand, seems either to have fainted from the shock of her abduction, or else she's flopping like a fish to make herself as awkward to carry as possible. Generally, she's portrayed as helpless -- a damsel in distress. But I can't help but think it must have been more than wine which provoked the centaurs to kidnap one of their own. And I really have a hard time believing that a woman referred to as "kin" to the centaurs and tamer of horses would just give up without a fight.

If the centaurs are uncivilized, brutish and barbaric, how civilized was Hippodamia herself? Why should she have been anything less than wild (by Greek standards), as well?

Maybe that's why I like the myth of Hippodamia -- because there's so much potential there, to build a strong woman from the bare-bones account of her life. What's more, it strikes me as something of an untold story, because the depictions of Hippodamia tend toward the hysterical woman, despairingly throwing herself about while waiting to be rescued by her pirate-hero-king husband, Pirithous.

After all, no "ordinary" woman could really hope to cope with such an outrageous personality as Pirithous possesses, and I'm willing to bet he wouldn't want to be saddled with just any woman for a wife. Hippodamia must be something more, something greater, than what we're given to understand by these works of art, and that is definitely a story worth telling.

Related: The Centauromachy and Art I

Where Centaurs Meet Pirithous, Character is Spawned

Pirithous, Son of Zeus, King of the Lapiths

Photography in this post © me.

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