biancadarc.com Blog

Writing Update: New Sale!

Vampire fans may be interested to know that I’ve just sent in the new contract for One & Only to Samhain Publishing! It will most likely be releasing toward the end of this year, which I think will make more than a few people happy.

For those of you who don’t know, One & Only was the very first vampire story I ever wrote. It’s first incarnation was as a very short 3,500 word short story, but it spawned a whole series of increasingly longer novellas and novels. It first came out in 2006 and was quickly followed by Rare Vintage and Phantom Desires, both from the same, now-defunct publisher. The series moved over to Samhain in 2007 with Forever Valentine and then Sweeter Than Wine (which will be out in print this October).

One & Only is the story of Lissa and Atticus, both of whom make cameo appearances in subsequent stories. This book has been expanded from that original very short story to a full-fledged novella, coming in at over 23,000 words as it stands now, before edits. (We’re going to be expanding another scene, so it’s not finished growing yet!) As you can tell from the numbers, the story is vastly improved, over six times its original size. I hope all of those who’ve been asking me where it’s been for the past year or so will enjoy it!

Stay tuned for more news as it comes in, such as the anticipated release date and more news on the other currently out-of-print vampire stories.

Creature Feature: Selkies

Selkies are a mythological race of seals who shed their skin to take human form. According to one website, they are gentle creatures, with the ability to transform from seals into beautiful, lithe humans. Some tales say they could transform only once a year, usually Midsummer’s Eve, while others state it could be “every ninth night” or “every seventh stream”.

One thing common in most of the legends is the power of their seal skins. If the skins were stolen or lost, the selkie could never return to the sea. The hansome selkie males were blamed for dallying with mortal maids and were said to be very handsome indeed. Selkie women were often the tragic figures of trickery where a mortal man would steal her seal skin and force her to marry him. Often those legends ended sadly when one of her children would return the stolen skin and either return with her to the sea or stay with the human father on land forevermore.

Either way, selkies in human form were said to be beautiful and almost irresistable to the opposite sex. Maybe that’s why there have been a few romance novels with selkie heroes of late. Writers looking for new kinds of shapeshifters to write about have rediscovered the selkie and all the magic they possess.

Vid: Dolphins Blowing Air Rings

I think this is absolutely beautiful… A nice image for a relaxing end of the week. Enjoy!

Cute Puppies Vid

This is really the cutest video! Check it out! (And thanks to Charlee Boyett-Compo for passing along the link.) I hope this works!

Yay! I finally got it to work! So you know what this means… I’ll be posting a lot of videos!  

Wallpaper Wednesdays

Some of you know I dabble in all kinds of artforms from sculpture to painting to digital art. I’m still what I’d consider a novice at computer art, but I do love to play with the 3d dolls, clothing, armor, creatures, etc, that I’ve bought for my DAZ|Studio program. The program is free, but you can buy creatures, people, structures, clothes, hair, etc, so you can go as crazy or as sane as you like. Guess which direction I’ve gone in?

I also like to change up what I put on my blog from day to day. I was doing the “Wordless Wednesday” Meme for a while, but I’m not technically savvy enough to figure out how to get the auto-link plugin to work on my new blog, so Meme’s are kind of hard to participate in unless I’m online all day. My new blog allows me to schedule content in advance, which really helps. So for the next few Wednesdays, I’ll be posting links to some of my newest FREEBIE desktop wallpapers.

Some are fun, some are serious. Some depict scenes from my books. Some are character portraits. Some are just cover drool. Hopefully there’s something for everyone. I usually give away a new wallpaper in every issue of my monthly newsletter but over the next few Wednesdays I’ll be posting even MORE new wallpapers here on the blog. So check back and let me know what you think!

Without further ado… today’s brand spankin’ new wallpaper…

Dragon Isle I
640 x 480 – 800 x 600 – 1024 x 768

HOW TO USE: Click on the size you want, then right-click to “Set as Background” on most systems.

Writing Update

I got a lot of work done over the long holiday weekend. For one thing, I managed to get my newest dragon book off and running – the first three chapters are “in the can” and need to be cleaned up a bit before I can send them out – hopefully sometime this week. This book is not the “next” one. By that I mean, it’s not the book that will follow directly after FireDrake. It’s not even the one after that. This book is an entirely new series. A “spin-off” if you will.

There are dragon scouts, dragon guards, royal guards a blind king and a new enclave of fair folk in this book. It’s really capturing my imagination! This is one of those projects that just begged to be written, even though my plate is very full with other projects. But when the muse speaks, it is best to listen.

Right now, I’m also working to get my publication schedule for the next year or so in order. It’s slow going, but I hope to have some concrete news for you all in the coming weeks. It looks like the next thing to come out after Jaci’s Experiment (August 5th) will be one of the re-written vampire tales later in the year. But until I have all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed I can’t give any specifics. More news as it becomes available.

H2O on the Moon?

I came accross this interesting story about a plan to beat up the moon that sounds pretty interesting. Check this out:

Scientists are priming two spacecraft to slam into the moon’s South Pole to see if the lunar double whammy reveals hidden water ice.

The Earth-on-moon violence may raise eyebrows, but NASA’s history shows that such missions can yield extremely useful scientific observations.

“I think that people are apprehensive about it because it seems violent or crude, but it’s very economical,” said Tony Colaprete, the principal investigator for the mission at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.

NASA‘s previous Lunar Prospector mission detected large amounts of hydrogen at the moon’s poles before crashing itself into a crater at the lunar South Pole. Now the much larger Lunar Crater and Observation Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission, set for a February 2009 moon crash, will take aim and discover whether some of that hydrogen is locked away in the form of frozen water.

LCROSS will piggyback on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission for an Oct. 28 launch atop an Atlas 5 rocket equipped with a Centaur upper stage. While the launch will ferry LRO to the moon in about four days, LCROSS is in for a three-month journey to reach its proper moon smashing position. Once within range, the Centaur upper stage doubles as the main 4,400 pound (2,000 kg) impactor spacecraft for LCROSS.

The smaller Shepherding Spacecraft will guide Centaur towards its target crater, before dropping back to watch – and later fly through – the plume of moon dust and debris kicked up by Centaur’s impact. The shepherding vehicle is packed with a light photometer, a visible light camera and four infrared cameras to study the Centaur’s lunar plume before it turns itself into a second impactor and strikes a different crater about four minutes later.

…

This comes as the latest mission to apply brute force to science.

The Deep Impact mission made history in 2005 by sending a probe crashing into comet Tempel 1. Besides Lunar Prospector’s grazing strike on the moon in 1999, the European Space Agency‘s Smart-1 satellite dove more recently into the lunar surface in 2006.

LCROSS will take a much more head-on approach than either Lunar Prospector or Smart-1, slamming into the moon’s craters at a steep angle while traveling with greater mass at 1.6 miles per second (2.5 km/s). The overall energy of the impact will equal 100 times that of Lunar Prospector and kick up 1,102 tons of debris and dust.

Creature Feature: Wyvern

What is a wyvern? Looks like a dragon, right? But it’s not.

A wyvern has two limbs and two wings. Note that many Western dragons have four limbs and two wings, while Eastern dragons often have no wings, and four limbs. Wyverns also seem a bit more reptilian than dragons to me. Sometimes they have fish tails or barbed tails, and their limbs are more bird-like than a dragon’s.

They figure prominently in heraldry, as do dragons and unicorns. Sometimes they are described as having the head of a dragon and the tail of a snake. Personally, I may have plans for some fictional wyverns I can’t divulge just yet. For sure I’ve got dragons of all kinds in my books, but no wyverns… yet.

Happy 4th!

July 4th & Fantasy

Tomorrow is the Fourth of July, and so I feel the need to go just a little off-topic and wander through some of the mythology that has arisen around the founding of the United States. One of the ideas made popular by recent works of fiction is that Freemasonry played a pivotal role in the birth of the United States. I have an interest in this because my own dear ol’ dad is a Master Mason and we’ve always talked about the various Masonic symbols that crop up in everyday life – like the all-seeing eye on the dollar bill, for example. I also saw a really interesting engraving of George Washington on exhibit during a visit to the New York Public Library where our first President was shown surrounded by Masonic symbols, wearing his apron. Fascinating stuff! 

But it’s really hard for us to know in this day and age just how much of an impact Masonry had on the founders of our country. Like the mythology surrounding the Knights Templar, it’s intriguing for those of us who write fiction, but it’s a fine line between fiction and fact.

One interesting site I found stated: “Benjamin Franklin was a Freemason whose unique socializing skills included attending gatherings of the English Hell Fire Club, a secret society focused on sex, pornography and politics.” (Darn, talk of the Hell Fire Club gives me ideas! But I digress.) So, according to legend, one of our best-known founding fathers was not only a pious Freemason and serious student of the sciences, but also a bit of a bad boy. Interesting. (Thanks to the Unencyclopedia for the hilarious image.)

Now I have to admit to not having read the Da Vinci Code. Mea culpa. I figure I’ll catch the movie someday on cable. (LOL) But I did read Two Crowns for America by Katherine Kurtz a long time ago. She’s not the first, nor the last I’m sure, to intermix real history with interesting ideas that came from the writer’s imagination. I think some of the best fantasy mixes real history – or ideas from it – with fantastical ideas straight out of the imagination. Hence the success of things like the Da Vinci Code, Kurtz’s Adept series (which I love) and so many other works of fiction including the popular National Treasure movies with Nicholas Cage.

So in that spirit of mysticism and adventure, Happy Birthday America!