Tara Maya's Tales

Hey everyone! It's Tara's assistant, Katie, here to let you know that Tara has some big news to share about The Unfinished Song (Book 6) Blood tomorrow to all of the newsletter subscribers. Everyone else will have to wait until Thursday. Subscribe today if you want to be among the first to find out! Click here to sign up.   (Of course we will not sell your email address (No matter how much we're offered!) or use them for shady purposes. In addition to information about new releases, we're working on a regular monthly newsletter, so it shouldn't be too much extra coming to your inbox.) 

It's tricky to find excerpts from Blood I can share with you that don't contain too many spoilers! This is a nice scene for October, since the autumn pixies show up to pester Dindi.... "The slender girls wore crunchy skirts of fall leaves..." (Art by Anne Stokes ) At night’s tail, just before dawn, pixies jumped up and down on Dindi’s head until she had a headache, and kept jumping, until she woke up to shoo them off. “You have got to be kidding me,” she groaned. “What is wrong with you fae? Have you never heard of sleep ?”   She rubbed her eyes, fighting déjà vu. Hadn’t she just been poked awake by pixies a few hours ago?  Once again finger-sized pixies thronged around her sleeping mat, but this time instead of flori, they were all foli, autumnal pixies, mostly Orange, Yellow and Red. The slender girls wore crunchy skirts of fall leaves, and the boys caps and shields made from acorn tops and walnut shells. Kinnaras, bird-winged sprites, feathere...

"I think you've mistaken me for someone else. I'm not that man." Subtext is the art of saying the unsaid and thinking the unthinkable. There are several techniques that authors use to convey this. Among others: 1. Secret dialogue. 2. Actions speak louder than words. 3. Catch phrase or repetition. In this post, I'll discuss the first, possibly most common technique, secret dialogue. Secret Dialogue In the Fever series , by Karen Marie Moning , feisty heroine Mac and sexy antihero Jericho Barrons have to work together to defeat the Unseelie before they take over the world, starting with Dublin. Unfortunately, they don't trust each other--and they don't communicate very well. At least not openly. They have whole "non-conversations" however, through silent understandings, exchanged through glances and conveyed to the reader through italics. This one is from Faefever , the third book: We looked at each other and for a moment those ...

Wing is coming out in ten days; sign up for my newsletter if you want a chance at a free copy. I haven't done WiP (Work in Progress) Wednesday before, but I'm going to give it a try. Here's a scene from the next book after Wing, the book I'm working on now--Blood, Book 6 of The Unfinished Song. Not Umbral, but another villain, even more vile, sees Dindi: A new taste touched his tongue. He coiled the thread of light around his pinkie and licked his finger. The magic was… fresh. Whose? He did not move; only his eyes followed the thread backward from whence it had darted from the maze of dancers. The familiar bodies, the expected strands of light, in monochrome and polychrome, nothing out of place, nothing in excess of his plan…until his gaze came to rest on the human girl. The human girl had magic . How had he not seen it before? How had he looked her in the face and not seen her before? She was young, almost a child, and far too pretty ...