Tara Maya's Tales

  There's nothing wrong with a good Dystopia, but I love positive, optimistic Science Fiction. The great thing about being an author is that if you don't see the genre you want to read more of, you can write it yourself.  I said to myself, "I want to see some SF that has a bright future. Not a utopia, but not, 'we're all going to live in a grungy, grey, overpopulated world, eating bugs, ruled by a 'Corporation' that acts more like the CCP where the only hope is to run away or overthrow the government.'" In the interests of full disclosure, I started a Dystopian series one year during NaNoWriMo, which was a science fiction retelling of Persephone and Hades. I found that story on my hard drive -- 50,000 words of a novel -- and thought, "Hey, this is good, why didn't I write the rest?" So I might still publish a Dysopia!  But, ahem, back to the non-dystopia idea... Rachel Huffmire has a post on " Hopepunk " which isn't too ...

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...

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 ...

Wing, Book 5 of the Unfinished Song, is finished. I'll be announcing the release date next week. The manuscript is with the editor and the alpha readers. It's about 90,000 words. If anyone would like to be a Beta reader to proofread and help us hunt down typos, email me and let me know. Ideally, you'd receive a copy sometime be able to read it and get it back to me within a week.  I might not be able to take everyone who asks, but it's worth a try if you are interested. I already have a few people on the list. I can't post too long an excerpt from Blood, The Unfinished Song, Book 6, without giving away spoilers for both Wing and Blood, but here's a scene from the Prologue in which we see Vessia back in the days when she was War Leader of the Aelfae. For the first time, we meet some Aelfae and see things from their point of view during the last stages of the generations-long War with humans. Remember, there is still time to sign up for the Newsletter ...