The 4th Annual #NAMEthatBUTT Challenge BEGINS! (Round 1)

First, a refresh on this year's rules, because I've changed things up slightly to make things a little easier on all of us:

• I post a butt and clues, you guess who that butt belongs to in the comments. If you guess right, you get 5 points.  A New Butt will go up on each Tuesday, and I'll do the reveals on Friday. You only get ONE image from which to Name That Butt!
  
• If you CORRECTLY identify the artistic work (title/artist) in question, you earn a additional 5 points total: 2.5 for title, 2.5 for artist. (Provided of course, that it differs from the subject's name alone and the artist is known at all) There will be NO second opportunity to guess for fewer points.*
  
• There may or may not be bonus points up for grabs in addition on Wednesdays over at blog.amaliacarosella.com depending on the butt! When applicable they will be announced on Tuesday in the main post and instructions for how to bonus it up will be included in the bonus post!
  
• You'll have the whole #NameThatButt season to claim those bonus points when they're offered!!! So feel free to guess on the bonus offerings until the FINAL butt has been revealed.
  
• You may ONLY submit your guess as a blog comment on this blog (or the appropriate post on blog.amaliacarosella.com for bonus points**) -- I will not accept guesses via any other method!
  
• As always, comments will be MODERATED, so don't worry that your comment doesn't appear at the bottom of the post -- it isn't supposed to. (If you're afraid it didn't go through, feel free to check in with me via twitter or facebook and I will confirm that your guess arrived in my inbox.)
  
• As always, #NameThatButt is open INTERNATIONALLY! This year's prizes include a 10 pack of Santa Herc Butt holiday cards (suitable for the winter holiday of your choice) and a pack of Tamer of Horses playing cards (standard 52+Jokers deck.) Plus other authorly swag.

*For Olympians, Greek AND Roman names are acceptable for the subject guesses. For example, if the butt belongs to Mercury, I will also accept Hermes as a correct answer. Titles of works must be exact, however.

**You may opt to guess both the butt and the bonus in one comment, and that's fine. But you must name that butt during the regulation week, BEFORE the reveal on  Friday, or I cannot count it, for obvious reasons.

OKAY! ARE YOU READY?!

And we're starting off strong this year with a *very* famous butt from across the sea --

Clues:

• This Butt is NOT from the Greco-Roman pantheon.

• Despite being an underdog, you could say this Butt was carved to Biblical proportions. 

• This Butt was more accustomed to slaying beasts while protecting the flock than fighting warriors on the battlefield.

There will be no bonus for this week, but expect one in round two! (And expect it to be along the same lines as last year's bonus opportunities -- a related #NamethatBook companion.)

Let's NAME THAT BUTT!!!!

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Amazon | Barnes&Noble 

Amazon | Barnes&Noble

The 4th Annual #NAMEthatBUTT Adventure begins NOVEMBER 1st!

We're LESS THAN A WEEK away from the 4th Annual #NAMEthatBUTT Games! I hope you're practicing your mythic-butt-identification!

This year I'm going to be giving away a couple of fun prizes -- including a 10 pack of Santa Herc Butt holiday cards, suitable for any winter holiday you and your friends celebrate and a TAMER OF HORSES playing card (52 cards + jokers) deck, among other swag-esque items. And I'm going to be shipping internationally!

I'm going to be tweaking the gameplay a little bit this year so you only get ONE round to name each butt because this fall has been incredibly challenging for me and I want to make the fun part a little bit easier on all of us.

• A New Butt will go up on each Tuesday, and I'll do the reveals on Friday.
• There may or may not be bonus points up for grabs in addition on Wednesdays over at blog.amaliacarosella.com depending on the butt!
• You'll have the whole #NameThatButt season to claim those bonus points when they're offered!!! So feel free to guess on the bonus offerings until the FINAL butt has been revealed.
• You may ONLY submit your guess as a blog comment on this blog (or blog.amaliacarosella.com for bonus points) -- I will not accept guesses via any other method!
• As always, comments will be MODERATED, so don't worry that your comment doesn't appear at the bottom of the post -- it isn't supposed to.

If you're worried your comment didn't go through because some wonky business went on after you hit submit or whatever, do feel free to reach out to me via facebook or twitter or a follow-up comment that does NOT contain your guess and I'll check my inbox to confirm and reply in kind.

Any Questions? Comments? Enthusiastic Outburts!? Drop them below!

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Amazon | Barnes&Noble 

Amazon | Barnes&Noble

A Most Glorious Adventure (With Delicious Lobster Bisque and a Viking Ship)

The Draken was mostly put to bed for the winter when we went to see her at Mystic Seaport on Leif Erikson's Day, the deck cleared and the sail stowed and bits of the decking pulled up to allow them to get down into the hold and clean her thoroughly and pump the last of the water out -- but she was BEAUTIFUL, all the same.

Maybe in the spring before she sails on and away, I'll get to see her again all decked out properly for a voyage, and the day won't be quite so miserable and wet and rainy. But the wet and the rain did make the hot Lobster Bisque soup taste that much better going down after we'd gotten our tour and had a chance to get out of the spitting wind.

It seemed fitting though, somehow, to tour a viking ship on such a stormy day. And it sure offered some amazing perspective on those Norse and Icelandic voyages made during the Viking age. Voyages like the ones that Freydis and her brothers made, both with Eric the Red, their father, and apart from him.

In DAUGHTER OF A THOUSAND YEARS, Freydis doesn't encounter any storms on her journeys to Vinland, but she sailed through her share of them when she followed her father to Greenland -- half the ships who followed Eric the Red from Iceland to his new colony in Greenland never made it to the shore, after all, and one of Leif the Lucky's stories involves him fishing out the survivors of a wreck from the water on his way back home.

Going to see the Draken, talking to the crew who sailed her with a modern electrical pump to bail out the water that they took on along the way (because the deck isn't sealed, and any water that lands on it just ends up filling the hold),  who when I asked "what did the Vikings do about the water they took on?" replied "they sank!" was a poignant reminder of how dangerous it was to sail in those days. Heck, it's still dangerous to sail in ours!

Which is all to say that those Norsemen and Icelanders -- going exploring or a viking, either way -- they were stupid brave.

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Amazon | Barnes&Noble 

Amazon | Barnes&Noble

For Will

I remember countless study halls, our heads bent and close together over the desk while we pretended to do our work. I remember so many phone calls, so many afternoons and evenings spent on the phone, cord stretched around corners and shut in doors for privacy before we even had a cordless phone anywhere in the house, talking for hours together about everything (and nothing at all.) I remember promises made and never broken, confessions of friendship and love, discussions of how much white chocolate tastes like coca cola and boys I liked and you hated. I knew -- I knew -- my secrets were always safe. Even though my lunch never was.

I remember green hair, thick and curly and that headshake-spasm meant to push your glasses back up your nose and fix your hair at the same time. I remember dry, chapped hands, and a hundred middle fingers, because we were in middle school and high school, after all. And so much love. Above everything else, I remember the love.

Hugs and linked arms and hands on shoulders, we were never shy in showing our affection -- maybe we were too young to realize how reserved we should have been. Too young to know how much it would hurt if it were all taken away.

I have pages and pages of our lives together, my side of every story written and carefully preserved in journals, both digital and print, chronicling first dances and first phone calls and first fights. I have pictures of everything from the high school boy's bathroom urinals to our lunch table, all of us together in a group (we were always part of a group) -- but somehow, none of that is enough, now. None of it is you.

I would trade it all away to have you back, my friend. To have you living, and happy and fulfilled in this world, so we could be friends again, and reminisce about all those old times, all those firsts. Even the lasts, too.

But I will have to settle just for loving you, for remembering now for the both of us, and I am so, so grateful for even the smallest memories of our friendship that I have left. Because now that you're gone -- really gone -- I've lost a part of me, too.

Friends 4-EVER, Will. You and Me. Always.

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Orc Saga: Book Three

Those of you who are waiting patiently for Orc 3--I have the tiniest bread crumb of news to share! A title, at last!

And cover art is in progress, actually, though the book is still in its most beginning stages.

I'm going to be honest here and tell you that this book is giving me fits. Not because of anything to do with the book itself, really, or the story, or the characters. Just because my creative tanks are emptier than empty. (I don't even have fumes to coast on at this point.) It isn't writer's block or anything. I could force myself to get the words on the page and it would probably be fine enough, except for the hating myself. But right now, the idea of writing another book -- any book -- makes me want to run screaming into the woods, never to be seen or heard from again. And honestly, considering I haven't really given myself permission to take a break from writing since 2013, and I've been going non-stop since then jumping from one book to another with deadlines looming, this probably shouldn't be much of a surprise.

I *think* I have time to fill the tanks. I *think* I have time, still, to write and complete Orc 3 to keep the end of 2017 tentative/hopeful release date I've put out there. And I want to meet it -- I want to have this book done and in your hands and not have it hanging over me anymore. But I don't want to give you a third book that is just me "getting it out of the way" either. It won't be my best work if I do that, and I don't want this third installment to betray your faith in me, or betray Arianna and Bolthorn's characters, either.

So what I'm going to say is this: please, please understand that I'll try my best to deliver, but I need to make sure I don't burn myself out, and that means I need to take some time off from writing long form, and take some of this pressure off myself to produce. I need to rebuild and refill my creative reserves to give you the best book I can give you and keep myself from turning writing into a thing I hate. And if that means that Orc 3 does not arrive before the end of 2017 -- that's just how it will have to be. I'll try to write you some Orc Saga novella/short story type something to tide you over if it comes to that, but that's all I can promise right now -- all I feel comfortable promising.

I know some of you will be upset by this news, but I thought it would be fairer to put it out there now than to pretend like everything was on schedule and cruising along.

Thanks so much for your understanding! And don't forget that you still have two more releases from me as Amalia Carosella to look forward to -- TAMER OF HORSES this October, and DAUGHTER OF A THOUSAND YEARS in February 2017. I'm also hoping to put together a Fate of the Gods novella/short story collection for you all, so you can get all the small side stories together in one volume in print and ebook edition -- maybe with something new (short form) that you haven't seen before, too. I have a couple of completed novels in my back pocket, also, that I'm considering releasing for you (like maybe that Thairon book? If you might be interested?), but I don't have any firm ideas of when or IF that's something I can take on right now. I'll keep you posted, of course, when/if anything gets nailed down.

Take care of yourselves, my creative friends! Give yourself permission to take a break, and do what you need to do for you.

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Amazon | Barnes&Noble 

Amazon | Barnes&Noble