Confessions of the One and Only F.J.R. Titchenell (That I Know of)

Book Review: Caraval

9/26/2018

Book Review:

Caraval

Stephanie Garber

Flatiron Books, 2017

Grade: B

The Basics:

Scarlett and her sister, Tella, have always wanted to experience Caraval, a traveling show and game hosted by a mysterious entertainer known only as Legend. For years, Scarlett has written letters to Legend, imploring him to bring Caraval back to their island so that they can partake of its magic, as their grandmother claims she once did. On the year when Scarlett is set to escape her island, her father, and her childhood once and for all through a fashionable arranged marriage, Legend finally responds. Tella refuses to cast aside this long-awaited chance in the name of good sense, and throws herself so deeply into the game that Scarlett must not only play but win, if she wants to salvage any trace of her family, her marriage, or her desperately held ideas on the world.

The Downside:

The “nothing is as it seems” nature of Caraval sets it up for high expectations of twists and mind games. Those things exist here, and they’re fine and adequate, but not quite as satisfying as I was hoping for. There’s no moment where everything clicks and makes sense or does a complete one-eighty. It’s more of a gradual ninety degree curve, with plenty of time to adjust along the way. As a fan of interactive theater in real life, I also have to note how incredibly frustrating and disappointing Caraval would be as a game for the average non-main-character player who paid and traveled insane sums and distances to be there. That one’s more of a personal and silly gripe, but I couldn’t help thinking about how awful Legend’s Yelp score would be.

The Upside:

Garber seriously knows how to set up a story, and how to set a scene. I knew I had to buy the book after flipping through the first few pages, which introduce us to Scarlett and Tella, their wants and histories, and the wonder and menace of Caraval and Legend, all with a series of brief letters. It’s a demonstration of succinct show-don’t-tell that deserves to be studied.

Likewise, the visual beauty and allure of the Caraval arena is vividly rendered, to the point where I now have a crisper memory of it than I do of many real places I’ve actually been. There’s a palpable sense of magic emanating from every scene, and the forms that magic takes often have an unsettling mischief about them. The use of secrets as currency within the magical world of Caraval is a memorable touch that serves to drag character revelations to the surface and even add a touch of dark humor here and there.

My favorite scene of all might be the one in which Scarlett tries to buy a dress by taking a magical lie detector test and can’t figure out the answer to “What is your deepest desire?” Characters usually have their secrets neatly defined and waiting on the tips of their tongues to be revealed, but Scarlett, like many people, has as much difficulty knowing herself as she does sharing herself. This is not to say, of course, that Garber does not know her.

While I wasn’t able to get as invested in the relationships as I was hoping, Scarlett’s story is ultimately one of outgrowing fairytale love, and discovering the need for something more mutual and substantial, so the romance works well in that sense. Altogether a story with the power to linger.

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Book Review: Sunbolt (The Sunbolt Chronicles #1)

8/19/2018

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Book Review:

Sunbolt (The Sunbolt Chronicles #1)

Intisar Khanani

Purple Monkey Press, 2013

Grade: A

The Basics:

As an illegal Rogue Promise, Hitomi must conceal her magical aptitude, for fear of being forced to devote her abilities to exacting the will of the rich and powerful. By day, she hides among the struggling merchants of Karolene, but by night, she works with an outlaw legend known only as the Ghost, to protect the few dissenters who remain. When she’s captured by their enemies, she’ll have to cooperate with a Breather, a life-draining creature she once thought of as nothing but a nightmare monster, to survive. And even if they manage to escape, she might never make it back to the life she remembers.

The Downside:

Sunbolt is the first book of its series, but it feels structurally like the transitional middle of a trilogy. We meet Hitomi as an established member of the Shadow League, with its own internal personality conflicts and its work already in progress. All too soon, she’s separated from her allies and sent instead on a buddy road trip adventure, spending much of it unconscious or weakened from magic use.

I often found myself wishing I could go back and read a nonexistent previous book about her time in the Shadow League. Not because such a book is necessary to understand or appreciate this one, but because the taste we get of that story was my favorite part. I’m crossing my fingers that we get more of the League in future installments.

The Upside:

I read Khanani’s debut, Thorn, about a year ago and liked it a lot, so The Sunbolt Chronicles have been on my radar for a while, and I’m wishing I hadn’t dragged my feet so long. Sunbolt is the first series opener in quite a while that’s made me need to buy the next book right now.

Hitomi is an instant favorite, charmingly bumbling and resourceful at once. Nothing ever goes quite the way she plans, but she keeps on adapting on the fly until something works. She’s heroic and confident in her worthiness to be the one to tackle any given problem, but self-preservation still kicks in often enough to saddle her with some weighty moral grayness.

As was the case in Thorn, the fantasy world is drawn with efficient but vivid lines. The details are right where they need to be to make the story come alive, and invisible where they would get in the way. Scenes of magic are surprisingly dynamic. There are only so many ways authors can describe swirling patterns of light and psychic exhaustion, but Khanani manages to make even Hitomi’s spellcraft challenges interesting and different, especially when they involve conversations with birds.

There’s no love story in Sunbolt, and while I won’t be disappointed if there turns out to be one later in the series (Hitomi left a few interesting men back in Karolene that I’m hoping to meet again), it’s always refreshing to watch a heroine, especially of a YA fantasy, focus entirely on other things for a change.

All in all, though I’m hoping to get back to what the Shadow League’s up to eventually, I expect I’ll gladly follow Hitomi wherever she goes.

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Book Review: Daughters of Anarchy, Season 1

8/17/2018

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Book Review:

Daughters of Anarchy, Season 1

C.A. Hartman

5280 Press, 2016

Grade: B+

The Basics:

In the not too distant future, government surveillance is everywhere, from offices to streets to homes. Citizens hardly notice the intrusion anymore, yet crime remains rampant and often unpunished, especially among the irreproachable elite. Men are now the significant minority but no less the powerbrokers of the population, basking in an abundance of women desperate enough to rewrite their DNA for a chance at scoring a provider husband — a small chance, but not as small as breaking the glass ceiling. Armed with antique weaponry, professional access to the surveillance and its blind spots, and a mistress of disguise’s homegrown gene lab, Stevie sets out to right wrongs in the few untapped shadows that remain.

The Downside:

As the title suggests, the format is fairly episodic. Enjoyable as it is to watch self-satisfied bullies and predators get what’s coming to them, Stevie doesn’t vary her methods much, so there's a bit of a lull in the early middle, as her work becomes monotonous before the overarching plot catches up.

The biggest drawback for me came down to not liking the love interest all that much. Both Stevie and Seth are deeply damaged people, so there is a sort of “matched set” feeling to them. Still, after spending one of her side-adventures coaching another woman on how it’s better to be alone with her self-respect than to settle for catching a man who doesn’t respect her, it feels oddly as if Stevie wants to settle herself. She doesn’t see it that way, because she loves Seth for being the most decent man in the book, but that just means he regularly dismisses and underestimates her instead of trying to rape her. The bar isn’t high in her world.

The Upside:

While I didn’t ultimately find them shippable, the scenes between Stevie and Seth are gloriously, truthfully uncomfortable. Hartman infuses a potent blend of awkwardness, uncertainty, and hurt into Stevie's fondness for someone who doesn’t even realize he’s insulting her, when experience has taught her not to expect better. Their friendship walks the trembling tightrope of “should I just let this slide?” that lies between “should I walk away?” and “should I stick my neck out and try to explain things he couldn’t possibly know from his own experiences?”

I would have liked to see them fall off that tightrope one way or the other by the end, but then, there are more seasons to come.

The relationships between many of the women are excellent too, affectionate but imperfect and filled with chafing disagreements. Stevie's pity for her female neighbors, her long-term friendship with another woman from her former neighborhood, and her curiosity about the mysterious Daughters of Anarchy all highlight the differences that can exist between people who might be lumped together by an outside observer. Even the women who've had near-identical experiences in Stevie's city often come up with entirely different coping strategies, to the point where it becomes a challenge for them to trust or understand each other.

Probably the most compelling dynamic of all involves a character we never meet in person, Stevie’s mother, who remains the loving, well-intentioned voice of all of Stevie’s doubts long after her own death. Her echo in Stevie's head is a character unto itself, as well as a humanizing window into Stevie’s own nature.

Unlike many fictional dystopias, this futuristic city remains but a setting for the story, rather than its primary subject, which serves it well. It’s a lived-in backdrop with no chapter-long history course necessary to understand it, well-painted by the same polished prose that knits the whole book together.

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Pinnacle City: A Superhero Noir — Now Available!!!

8/14/2018

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It's here, it's here, it's here...

Matt and I are pleased and proud to announce that our latest dark sci-fi adventure, Pinnacle City: A Superhero Noir, is now available from Talos Press!

If you've already read Matt's Almost Infamous: A Supervillain Novel, you might notice that Pinnacle City takes place in the same universe, but the characters and story are entirely new. If you haven't read Almost Infamous, don't worry. You don't need any special knowledge going into this one.

What do you need to know about Pinnacle City? Read on.

What It's About:

To some people, Pinnacle City is a glittering metropolis, a symbol of prosperity watched over by the all-star superhero team, the Pinnacle City Guardians. But beneath the glitz and glamour is a gritty underbelly, one still feeling the physical and economic damage of the superhero-villain battles of generations past, where the lower class―immigrants, criminals, aliens, sorcerers, and non-humans alike―jostle and elbow for scraps to scrape by on.

Private investigator Eddie Enriquez is an ex-con and veteran with powers of his own who still bears the scars of his time as a minion for a low-level supervillain. Good work’s been hard to come by until a mysterious woman shows up at his office with a case the police and superheroes are ignoring: the suspicious death of a prominent non-human rights activist.

Meanwhile, superhero Kimberly Kline, a.k.a. Solar Flare, has just hit it big, graduating to the Pinnacle City Guardians. With good looks, incredible superpowers, and a family name that opens doors, the sky is the limit. But in trying to make the world a better place . . . she’ll discover Pinnacle City isn’t as black and white as it once seemed.

From the minds of Matt Carter and Fiona J. R. Titchenell, Pinnacle City is a pulpy, throwback noir of yesteryear, where two people from opposite sides of the track must team up to do good in a world full of bad.

What People Are Saying:

“In this skillfully constructed secondary-world noir novel, having superpowers isn’t always so super, and everyone has something to hide. . . . By allowing everyone to be a little morally grey, Carter and Titchenell spin a superhero story with staying power.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A rollicking take on the all-American superhero tale. It’s Stan Lee meets Dashiell Hammett, with just a little Clive Barker thrown in for good measure.”

—Scott Kenemore, author of The Grand Hotel and Zombie, Ohio

“Lively and endearing, funny and hip, Pinnacle City puts gumshoe to cape and in a fantastic adult alternate history throbbing with modern pop-cultural conflict and absurdities.”

—Johnny Worthen, award-winning author of The Finger Trap

Where can you get a copy? We're glad you asked...

Just about anywhere you'd like:

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

iBooks

Kobo

Google Play

Indigo

Books-a-Million

Indiebound

Or if you want to be especially retro-awesome, request it at your local bricks & mortar bookstore.

Happy reading!

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Out of the Pocket Is F-BOM's Summer Reading Pick!

7/1/2018

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Guys, I've been literally counting down the days to this announcement, and it's finally here.

My very own Out of the Pocket has been selected as F-BOM's summer read!

I'm so incredibly proud and honored to be included among authors like Intisar Khanani, LJ Cohen, and the club's amazing co-founder, Cecelia Isaac.

What's F-BOM, you ask?

It stands for Feminist Book of the Month. Basically, it's a tri-monthly book club featuring independent female sci-fi and fantasy authors. They particularly specialize in books that challenge the typical, gendered narratives you see over and over again.

In their own words, "The Feminist Book of the Month is more than just a book club. For as little as $5.00 a month members will be actively investing in the future of women in science fiction and fantasy."

So what does this mean, exactly?

It means that if you become an F-BOM member this summer, you'll get the F-BOM special edition of Out of the Pocket. It has an exclusive preface, in which I rant rather spectacularly (if I do say so myself) about the various sexist things publishers have said to me.

You'll also be able to order previous F-BOM special editions at a discount, and I can personally vouch for there being some delicious sci-fi and fantasy titles to choose from.

If you're not up for subscribing, you can just get a free membership to the forums, meet some cool people, and watch me answer questions about writing, gender, and genre tropes all summer long. I promise to bring my signature blend of awkward scintillation!

Can you tell I'm a teensy bit excited about this whole thing?

Hoping to see you there!

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Book Review: Turquoiseblood

6/7/2018

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Book Review:

Turquoiseblood

Cecilia Isaac

First Edition Design Publishing, 2016

A

The Basics:

When Kiri, a young woman from a backwoods mountain village, saves the life of Anya, a dragon suffering a fit of Turquoiseblood madness, the two embark on a quest to get to the bottom of what happened to her. The mystery runs deeper than either of them knows, leading them from the outlying villages, to the castle ruins of the once powerful League, to the heart of the royal court.

Long ago but not far away, Pristina Aikaterine, daughter of the League, tries to root out a traitor and quash the growing unrest over the League’s magic monopoly, unwittingly leaving the breadcrumbs Kiri and Anya will need in order to untangle the subterfuge of their own political era.

The Downside:

Apart from the usual Fantasy difficulties of keeping track of all the names (Tarik and Terricker are two important and completely unrelated characters, for example), the biggest drawbacks are a few hanging threads of untapped potential. The challenge Pristina faces in her timeline is essentially an energy crisis, and it’s thrillingly unclear whether she’s even on the right side of it, but that uncertainty leaves room for so much more exploration than we ever get. In fact, The villain monologues of both timelines are unnecessarily and unfortunately packed with metaphoric mustache-twirling, considering how nuanced and understandable the villains’ motivations otherwise are. There’s also some Fantasy trope-rebelling discussion of the meaninglessness of bloodlines, yet blood does end up tying Kiri to her end of the story, which is otherwise a bit impersonal for a hero’s plotline, driven mainly by curiosity.

The Upside:

The mystery at the center of the forestory is delightfully twisty, casting suspicion one way and then the next with sparse but satisfyingly sprinkled clues. Rather than a cookie-cutter plot, or a simple inversion of that plot that could be guessed by any savvy genre fan, there’s room for viable hypothesizing all over the place, and nobody is safe or above reproach.

Isaac pulls some other wonderful tricks along the way as well. More than once you’ll catch yourself flipping back to realize that no gendered pronoun was ever attached to that doctor or guard character in the background. It’s a shock to recognize how easy it is to make assumptions while reading, almost as much as it’s a relief to find yourself reading a book that, for once, doesn’t reinforce those assumptions.

No attention is ever drawn to it, but the story is full of such rejections of expectation, from the core of the plot to the smallest cosmetic details. Noble ladies have happy, healthy sex lives. Fathers support their daughters. Princesses rule while princes cloister themselves in delicate grief. Heroines charge into danger and take care of business while husbands nag and worry but never get in the way. Men and women both make terrible decisions in the throes of love, without requiring the deliberate manipulation of devilish fatales.

Every stitch in the fabric of Turquoiseblood quietly but insistently questions why the beaten path for female characters need exist, especially in, of all places, worlds of magic where dragons rule the skies.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)!

Want more Fiona J.R. Titchenell? Become a patron to gain access to exclusive extras. Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

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Book Review: Medieval Underpants and Other Blunders

5/30/2018

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Book Review:

Medieval Underpants and Other Blunders: A Writer's (and Editor’s) Guide to Keeping Historical Fiction Free of Common Anachronisms, Errors, and Myths

Susanne Alleyn

2012, Spyderwort Press

B-

The Basics:

A guide to common historical errors made and perpetuated by fiction writers, and how to avoid them.

The Downside:

One gets the clear and early impression that Alleyn has read How Not to Write a Novel (as should everyone, incidentally — it’s a useful and hilarious guide to fiction writing in general), and thought, “Hey, I’ll bet I can be even snarkier than that!”

Unfortunately, that snark does not come accompanied by all of Mittelmark & Newman’s wit or knack for helpful analysis. Instead of laugh-out-loud, over-the-top caricatures of a systematic list of general errors, followed by discussion on exactly what's going on and what could be done better, we get repetitive ramblings, calling out specific authors (often by name) for the very specific errors they’ve made that particularly annoyed Alleyn, usually related to the French Revolution.

There are many points when the whole book feels like an excuse to vent these annoyances, in better English but with comparable pomposity and unnecessary meanness to an Internet comments section, cloaked in a line or two of lip service to the cover’s promise of constructive advice. This constructive advice generally boils down to the true but unhelpful “do more research.”

The Upside:

Underneath the off-putting tone, there is some good general advice to be found here as well, particularly about common areas where errors are made, and therefore good targeted starting points for some of that research. There are sections on things like money, noble titling conventions, the availability of certain goods and technologies throughout time and space, origins of common phrases, and traditions (like permanent graves) that are newer and less ubiquitous than many people think.

Other advice — such as choosing time periods you’ll actually enjoy researching, anticipating the different mindsets of people with different experiences from your own, and distrusting the accuracy of movies and historical propaganda penned by the victors — should be fairly obvious to those with some existing background in either writing or history, but are certainly valuable pointers for brand new beginners.

For more seasoned writers/historians, the most useful part of this book will likely be the appendix, detailing rich and underutilized sources of historical information.

Altogether far from a comprehensive guide for beginners (or anyone else), but worth adding to a large stack of introductory books for a hopeful future historical fiction author.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)!

Want more Fiona J.R. Titchenell? Become a patron to gain access to exclusive extras. Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

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Cover Reveal! Pinnacle City: A Superhero Noir

5/16/2018

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Time to ooh and ahh over the unbelievably gorgeous cover of Matt's and my upcoming adult sci-fi title, Pinnacle City: A Superhero Noir!

This one's coming in August from Talos Press (pre-orderable now!), and you might or might not have heard Matt or me talking excitedly about it approximately a billion times by now.

It's chock-full of our signature dark humor, some affectionate riffing on comics tropes and history, plenty of social satire, and tons of gritty noir flavor. We're champing at the bit to share it.

And just look at this cover!

About Pinnacle City: A Superhero Noir

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Book Review: Derelict (Halcyone Space #1)

5/6/2018

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Book Review:

Derelict (Halcyone Space #1)

L.J. Cohen

A-

The Basics:

To most people, Halcyone is a derelict ship, relic of a bygone war, taking up space in the docks of Daedalus Station. To Ro, it might mean freedom from her father, if she can restore it well enough to impress the University boards. To Micah, it was, until lately, his secret lab, the place where he would find a way to break the cartel’s monopoly on medicinal marijuana. To brothers Jem and Barre, it's the wrong place, wrong time -- or maybe the right one, an escape from Barre’s impending forced brain surgery at the hands of their perfectionist parents.

The Downside:

An odd complaint from an odd reader: the flat, unvaried use of simple past tense robs the prose of the nuance and precision that some well-placed past perfect could add.

The intended subtext also sheds its sub a bit annoyingly often, with characters repeatedly stating out loud how important it is for them all to reject the mistakes of their parents and establish who they are independent of their last names, and hey, what a lot they all have in common! Then there’s the trouble of many of the critical adventure moments coming in the form of hacking, which is, for the most part, as crowd-pleasing as it sounds.

The Upside:

A group of very believably competent and determined teenage characters. Ro is the brusque, rough-around-the-edges, shell-like-a-tank-around-a-gooey-center type, for reasons that are understandable and plainly shown, and she has the skills to get away with it most of the time, but not too often. The whole accidental crew of the Halcyone hangs in the true-to-life adolescent in between, ready to take charge of their lives but doomed to flounder through the mistakes of inexperience that can only be cured by said floundering and mistakes. It’s the most terrifying state to exist in on a ship where mistakes mean explosive decompression, drifting for eternity through space, or execution by the mob, and that's why it works so well.

The antagonistic adults are not simply unreasonable, tyrannical, and condescending, as they might be in a more simplistic narrative, but deeply involved in their own fleshed-out agendas, and there are decent adults to be found too, just doing their jobs as best they can.

Futuristic aesthetics are well established but unobtrusive. The story is not an excuse for the author to wax on about how these future inventions are different, or about the minutiae of the history of a dozen alien worlds, but nor is it told in front of a verbal green screen that might as well be displaying a cafe in San Francisco as an industrial corridor through an endless star field. This future is lived-in and commonplace to its inhabitants but visible to us.

Shifting third person perspective is particularly effective here, for both scene setting and the story at hand. Rather than causing the plot slowdown that often comes with the juggling of several locations and subplots, it allows for special attention to each character within a very tight, interlocking situation, even when some of them are separated by the vacuum of space.

The surprising heart of the story comes in the form of Ro and Nomi, the beautiful and gregarious comms officer. Instead of having their first date as planned, the two women end up spending the duration of the book trying to find each other, and the result is stunningly affecting for a couple who have only about three scenes together.

Definitely worth a read for fans of grungy space opera and prickly, take-charge heroines.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)!

Want more Fiona J.R. Titchenell? Become a patron to gain access to exclusive extras. Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

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The Prospero Chronicles Announcement

4/2/2018

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Okay, looking at that headline, you’re probably asking yourself at least one of a few very specific questions, so I’ll do my best to answer them with all due haste.

Q: What are The Prospero Chronicles again?

A: Ha, ha. I know it’s been a long, bumpy road of publishing, unpublishing, republishing, re-planning, hiatuses, and all other manner of business and creative drama that can befall a story, but you guys still remember Mina and Ben pitting their mismatched friendship against the forces of the ancient interdimensional monsters they call Splinters, right?

Q: Oh, yeah. Wait… is there going to be a screen adaptation?

A: Not so far, but ten points for optimism.

Q: Is there finally a release date for book four?!?!?!

A: No, not quite, but more on that shortly.

Q: But the ending of Slivers…

A: I know, I know.

Q: You sadist! You can’t just bring this up again and keep us hanging on that ending! I have to know what happens to Ben, and Aldo, and…

A: You will.

Q: Sure, like I’ll someday find out the non-TV ending of A Song of Ice and Fire?

A: Ouch. No, really, you will.

Q: Is the series dead? Give it to me straight, doctor!

A: No! In fact that's the opposite of what this announcement is about.

Q: But no release date?

A: Not yet.

Q: Then what else could you possibly have to announce?

A: Here goes. Matt is going to be withdrawing from The Prospero Chronicles, and I’ll be writing the final installment solo.

Now some of you may be asking a different set of questions.

Q: What? But don’t you guys write separate characters? How can the series go on without him? Why isn’t he coming back? Is he okay? Aren’t you still an adorably married writing duo?!

A: Relax. Matt and I are fine, personally, professionally, medically, and in whatever other ways you might be thinking. In fact, we’ve got a superhero noir novel coming out in August from Talos Press, and a post-apocalyptic dieselpunk indie series we’ve been working on together for later in the year as well. It’s just The Prospero Chronicles specifically that Matt’s splitting away from.

Q: Wait, is this why, at the end of Slivers, Ben is-

A: Hush. No spoilers yet, in case anyone needs to catch up. And the answer is… not consciously? But it does make my job a little easier now. What luck!

Q: But why isn’t he writing it with you?

A: Matt’s been wanting to work on other projects for a long time. We’ve tried several times to schedule a period to work on the final Prospero book together, but it’s become clear that it’s not really a question of timing; it’s just not where his focus and passion are now.

Matt and I have both grown and developed a lot as writers since we first started working on The Prospero Chronicles together. I’ve always had a fair bit of room to stretch within The Prospero Chronicles, but Matt’s generally been stuck playing the straight man. He’s proud of what he put into the series, especially the world building and creature design, which were almost entirely his baby. He’s also going to go on helping me in a consulting capacity, so that I don’t get lost in the territories of Prospero that have only been charted in his head. But in terms of putting words on the page, he can’t stay. The voices of his other characters in other worlds are calling.

Q: Aren’t you going to feed us a line about how this is a good thing?

A: Believe it or not, it really is. As awesome a writer as Matt is and as great a team as we make, no story is going to benefit from being churned out while its creator’s heart is elsewhere, no matter the reasons or the talent involved.

We realized that either we could write a long-procrastinated final book with adequate skill but half the spark missing, or I could write a full-sparked final book in the course of a few months.

I believe we made the right choice not just for us but for The Prospero Chronicles themselves.

Q: Did you say a few months?

A: Well, yeah. That’s what I’m working on right now, and in spite of the way the book’s been restructured to play to my solo strengths and wrap things up in one installment instead of two, I’ve had the essential beats of how this story has to end bottled up for so long that they’re spilling out at NaNoWriMo speed. Editing, cover art, and release day scheduling and planning will take a bit longer, of course, but it’s looking like a 2018 finale might still be within the realm of possibility.

Q: Is that all we’re going to get now?

A: No! Just to whet your appetite, and maybe a little bit to prove that I’m serious, you get a preview from chapter one of Stitches, book 4 of The Prospero Chronicles.

Note of course that this is a draft in progress, subject to changes and corrections, and naturally filled with spoilers if you haven’t reached the end of Slivers yet.

Enjoy!

1. The Drip

Mina

It was Haley who told me.

There was a competitive cooking show playing on the TV that evening in my med center room, and one of the contestants was yelling about how the other team had ripped off his method for perfectly searing parsnips while I watched the Occupation guards out in the hallway pat her down for weapons. From the way she stood there with her arms spread, half impatient and half dreading the moment when she’d be allowed across the threshold to see me, I knew enough to make me dread it too.

The drugs wouldn’t let me feel the full, visceral twisting of that dread, but no doubt it was occurring anyway, somewhere in my distant-feeling innards.

One of the guards raised an eyebrow at the contents of Haley’s backpack but eventually returned it and waved her inside. She extended my brutal stay of enlightenment by treading the four feet to my bed as if they were a rickety balance beam.

She wasn’t crying, but her eyes were bloodshot, and her voice came out raw.

“There’s been an attack.”

I waited, and finally the blow came, in an economical croaking of syllables.

“Kevin’s dead, and Ben’s missing.”

My breath quickened, and I found that her raw, blunt voice was more than I could match.

Aldo replaced. Kevin dead. Ben missing.

Responding with words was like trying to slay a dragon with a toothpick.

Kevin. Kevin who never wanted to fight. Kevin who was going to Berkley and then into politics to save the world the other way. Kevin who forgave me for killing his brother, who’d saved my life at least twice over, who was there from the very beginning, even when I was too preoccupied to thank him, which was always.

One little jab of the toothpick.

“How?”

I didn’t want to hear the words, and Haley didn’t want to say them, but somehow, inevitably, the ritual of exchanging them demanded to be observed.

“Officially, hit-and-run.” This part came out in a sharp breath. “Unofficially, they beat him up and broke his neck.”

Her breath retreated back in just as sharply, and then started the cycle over again.

“And when his parents challenged the coroner’s report…”

“Dead or replaced?” I asked.

“Replaced, both of them. I mean, we didn’t capsaicin-test them or anything when they suddenly changed their minds two hours later, but-”

“I’ll take your word.”

“We found this next to him,” she reached into her backpack and pulled out a Ziploc full of stiff, bloodstained fabric, “but there was only one body.”

I had to turn the plastic-sealed bundle over twice in my hands before I recognized the shredded remains of Ben’s ‘3 of a Kind’ baseball cap. Something had clawed straight through it.

I grabbed my phone from the bedside table.

“Don’t,” said Haley.

I pushed send anyway. Ben’s number went straight to a voicemail message that wasn’t his. The sing-song recorded voice of Robbie York cut clean through the drug haze and squeezed my stomach up toward my throat.

“You’ve reached Ben Pastor’s phone. He belongs to the Queen now. What’cha gonna do about it, huh Mina?”

I hung up and threw the phone at the end of my bed, where Haley stopped it from falling off the end.

“We don’t know that it’s the Shard who replaced Robbie last time,” Haley said without conviction. “They could have given his body to a new Sliver, or even made the real Robbie record the message, just to hurt you-”

“It’s him,” I said.

It was, without a doubt. The Shard who had tried to make me kill myself last winter wielded Robbie’s vocal cords with a smug venom all his own. Besides, now that the local Splinter Council was down for the count, and with them the agreement we’d made to keep that Shard out of our dimension, his mind-altering powers would make him one of the first weapons the Slivers would want to put back on the table.

“I was going to warn you,” said Haley. “It was just-”

“Too much,” I finished.

Aldo replaced. Kevin dead. Ben missing. The nightmare Shard back in town.

It was all the very definition of too much.

“I kissed him,” said Haley.

I’d already charged the dragon the moment I opened my mouth, and there was nothing to do now but keep stabbing at the smallest, loosest scales I could wedge the verbal toothpick under. This one looked as likely as any other.

“You kissed Robbie?” I asked.

Haley shook her head.

“Kevin?” I guessed again, only half hoping. “Were you back together with him when-”

“Not Kevin,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

I pushed the morphine button.

“At the going away party, I kissed Ben, and I’m so sorry, not for the kiss, exactly, it was stupidly innocent, but-”

“I don’t care,” I lied, lowering my voice against the guards outside. “I just need to think. I need to make a plan.”

Never mind the fact that I’d spent the last week trying to think and plan and getting nowhere.

“I wanted it to be there,” she went on. “The spark, the magic, I wanted so much for it to be there, waiting to surprise us, but it just wasn’t.”

“Maybe you should talk to someone else about this.”

“It wasn’t there, and I think that might be why Ben and Kevin went off on their own afterward,” she persisted miserably. “I think it might be my fault they were alone when they were attacked.”

I shook my head. “Ben was only there in the first place because I told him to go.”

I felt like a dog snapping and yanking at scraps of culpability, but here in this bed, waiting for my bones to set around the new pins and plates, guilt was the only thing strong enough to drown out the helplessness. I couldn’t let Haley steal it all for herself.

They might not have been ambushed if she hadn’t kissed him.

And they might not have been ambushed if I’d kissed him instead.

“How much blood?” I asked.

“A lot, but not a certain death lot,” Haley answered readily. “I looked it up.”

“No trail?”

“No.”

That probably meant Ben had been taken away in a vehicle or wrapped in Splinter matter, for what little help that was.

“And it’s all Ben’s?” I asked.

“We don’t exactly have a forensics lab on our side here,” said Haley. “But Kevin wasn’t bleeding.”

And their attackers wouldn’t have bled real blood.

“No sign of a Sliver-Ben walking around?” I asked.

“Not yet,” said Haley. “Is that… good?”

“It’s not anything,” I said.

I wouldn’t have wished replication upon anyone, but if we could be sure it had happened to Ben, we’d at least know where he was. This hadn’t done much good for Aldo; we hadn’t been able to find his replication pod in our last invasion of the Sliver Warehouse, I’d landed myself here in the med center trying to take on the Queen, and now with so few of us left and the Occupation watching over everything, I didn’t know how we’d ever pull off another attempt, but it was almost worse, not knowing.

Ben might be in mid-replication right now, or he might have escaped and gone to hide in the woods until he could find a safe moment to make contact. The Slivers might be holding him for some other purpose more horrible than we could imagine, or he might already be dead.

I didn’t need to voice any of these possibilities to know that Haley had already gone over them all herself.

Haley stepped closer, past the foot of the bed. Her hurt was contagious, and maybe mine was too, and I found I had to roll away onto my side to break the feedback loop.

“Are you crying?” she asked.

“No.”

Her voice cracked. “May I join you?”

I scooted forward to the edge of the bed, leaving room for her to curl up behind me.

The sunflower and carnation bouquet on the table next to me was still as fresh and cheery as it had been when Ben had brought it to me in the morning on his way to Kevin’s party, when they had both been all right, and for a moment I hoped to see it grow fangs or tentacles or the faces of dead people, or some other surreal nightmare manifestation oozing with the Shard-Robbie’s personal style.

Having him tampering with my thoughts again would be bad enough on its own, but I could almost have welcomed it if it meant hoping that the rest of this day, this week, and this news, might all just be part of another cruel illusion.

The flowers, the room, and Haley’s weight on the mattress next to me remained mercilessly unembellished reality.

On TV, a frantic man with a neck tattoo was grating a piece of ginger into a pan of simmering soy sauce.

I pushed the morphine button again.

I should have said that Haley was the first one who told me.

Before the night was out, Mom called to check on me, and refrained from saying “I told you so” about the fact that, after three years, I’d finally finished destroying the Brundle family.

Then Julie texted, with a few hollow words about how none of the fallen would want us to give up.

Then Courtney sent me the new password to a dropbox she’d set up for the undiscovered surveillance feeds she’d been able to salvage.

Sometime around ten at night, after Haley had gone home, Patrick arrived and stood in the doorway for eight minutes before asking if there was anything he could do for me, and then for another three before going away.

They all flickered by, like tides coming in and out over a pier, while I lay there watching the flowers.

That night, I exceeded my drip’s programmed dosage limit for the first time since all my surgeries, no longer bothering to self-moderate for the sake of maintaining any mental clarity, and when I ran out of drugs, I took hits of guilt instead, running a fine-toothed comb over every move I’d ever made to bring us all to where we were.

The tines always came away full, making me wonder why I’d bothered fighting Haley for a few traces.

My guilt drip turned out to be unlimited, and yet my tolerance for it, already founded on a lifelong habit for the stuff, spiked even more sharply than my tolerance for the morphine, until even my newfound cocktail of the two became an inadequate masking agent for the absence of action.

So when the morning came, I sat up, shoved the morphine button over the side of the bed, picked up the vase in the less broken of my two arms, and threw it at a guard’s head.

Want more sneak previews? Titchenell & Carter patrons at the Telepath level get early access and behind-the-scenes peeks at all our upcoming indie projects, currently including the full first chapter of Stitches and a complete download of my upcoming YA Paranormal title: Out of the Pocket.

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