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Liars and Thieves: Book Launch for Diana Wallace Peach

Steven Baird22 Comments

Welcome to the launch! Today, I’m proud to present the newest book — Liars and Thieves — by my friend Diana Wallace Peach, an extremely prolific and gifted author of dark fantasy, and a great supporter of independent writers. She’s written a new series, Unraveling the Veil, and I’m happy to shout it out.

Book One: Liars and Thieves

Behind the Veil, the hordes gather, eager to savage the world. But Kalann il Drakk, First of Chaos, is untroubled by the shimmering wall that holds his beasts at bay. For if he cannot cleanse the land of life, the races will do it for him. All he needs is a spark to light the fire.

Three unlikely allies stand in his way.

A misfit elf plagued by failure—

When Elanalue Windthorn abandons her soldiers to hunt a goblin, she strays into forbidden territory.

A changeling who betrays his home—

Talin Raska is a talented liar, thief, and spy. He makes a fatal mistake—he falls for his mark.

A halfbreed goblin with deadly secrets—

Naj’ar is a loner with a talent he doesn’t understand and cannot control, one that threatens all he holds dear.

When the spark of Chaos ignites, miners go missing. But they won’t be the last to vanish. As the cycles of blame whirl through the Borderland, old animosities flare, accusations break bonds, and war looms.

Three outcasts, thrust into an alliance by fate, by oaths, and the churning gears of calamity, must learn the truth. For they hold the future of their world in their hands.

Unraveling the Veil series

Three outcasts, thrust into an alliance by fate, by oaths, and the churning gears of calamity, must learn the truth. For they hold the future of their world in their hands.

Diana, how do you define success?

In all parts of my life: Happiness. We only get this one life; there are no second chances, no do-overs. We are each miracles, here through the perfect alignment of billions of years of evolution, choices, and chance. It’s not a gift to be wasted. Happiness means different things to different people, but for me it’s choosing an attitude of kindness, care, and compassion and acting on that choice. Writing is something that brings me joy, no strings attached.

Diana’s very creative trailer, well worth watching:

Author Biography

D. Wallace Peach

D. Wallace Peach started writing later in life after the kids were grown and a move left her with hours to fill. Years of working in business surrendered to a full-time indulgence in the imaginative world of books, and when she started writing, she was instantly hooked. Diana lives in a log cabin amongst the tall evergreens and emerald moss of Oregon’s rainforest with her husband, two dogs, bats, owls, and the occasional family of coyotes.

Diana’s Links:

Website/Blog: http://mythsofthemirror.com

Website/Books: http://dwallacepeachbooks.com

Amazon Author’s Page: https://www.amazon.com/D.-Wallace-Peach/e/B00CLKLXP8

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Myths-of-the-Mirror/187264861398982

Twitter: @dwallacepeach

Thanks, Diana, and may you have much success with this new series!

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Guest Author, D. Wallace Peach – Big Hearts and Artists

Steven Baird13 Comments

Let me introduce a wonderful writer and friend. D. Wallace Peach is an author well worth discovering, if you haven’t already. Her encouragement has been tremendous, and her writing is as smooth as a glass of fine wine. And she’s one heck of a story teller.

Sue Vincent's Daily Echo

I am very happy to welcome D. Wallace Peach, author of Myths of the Mirror,  The Bone Wall and many other books,  as my guest today. Diana is a creator and shaper of worlds… a writer of fantasy. Her latest book, The Sorcerors’ Garden, explores the links and shifting boundaries between the levels of reality and how the stories unfolding in less tangible realms intertwine. Today, however, she writes from of  a more personal perspective…

Big Hearts and Artists

book photoI’ve heard through the rumor-mill that somewhere in the wide world there are writers who attempt to sabotage the work of others with snarky reviews, solely for the purpose of laying low the “competition.” If they exist, I imagine them sitting in dark caves, ruminating over their coveted creations like Gollum over his precious gold ring, too myopic to envision a world with thousands of well-told stories brimming with…

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Ordinary Handsome: Roadside

Steven Baird6 Comments
So you wake up to a myopic glare of smoky light, dull and hot and raw, shapeless drifts and textures. A pounding in your ears, your guts, a harsh wet throbbing pulse in you and around you. Crushed bones and spilled heartbeats, a thrumming drum of pain. All your thoughts scrubbed away, memories blanched, self-awareness boiled out
and then something that used to resemble sleep but feels deeper and more primitive, and not even the rain feels cold because there is nothing outside of you that feels real, a tumble
down a well of darkness, of muddy thoughts and screaming voices
Me. Who is the cypher sinking in this swamp of churning thought? Blood-flow dampness, sensations of grim wandering and peeling back layers of tissue and marrow.
Days and years and moments and fragments pass, the smell of rain and moss and rotting dirt, they pass, bones crumpled like old linen, scarred flesh fills in the wounds and time becomes a moth-ridden blanket that covers you and then unravels meager threads and abandons you naked in the darkness
***
How long. The mud-stream washes away the grit and the absoluteness of nothing-thought, pieces of lights and color, sensations too vivid to be arbitrary. You are remembering who you are and who you were and none of it makes sense. Trundling beetles and curious spiders and crickets hop and study and hop, and birds cry out (widgee-widgee-widgee, three short bursts of artillery fire), and you lay there observing everything, everything out of context. Bits of radio music and soft singing voices and droning bees pass by unaware, scraps of scripture and huckstering and idle conversation flow down sticky drainage pipes, and you can’t hold onto any of it, it’s as elusive as the cycles of wind, as untouchable as darkness, needing to pry onto something, something to give it all substance and meaning.
Two. Three. Five. Seven. Eleven. Thirteen. Seventeen. Nineteen. Prime numbers. You used to know the first thousand primes, but they were all illusions of significance. And/but they helped you heal. The scream of a doe as a coyote bares its teeth; the rasping papery sound of unfolding insect wings; a vagrant wind tossing pine needles and gray plastic bags with the same indifferent breath. These are real things, things of significance. But there’s comfort in those prime numbers, a logic that propels your mind forward, a self-sustaining sanity in spite of the pain.

OrdinaryHandsomeII

Excerpt from Ordinary Handsome. Available at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00P46ZPA0

Free downloadable Kindle app also available.

Rebranding

Steven Baird6 Comments

I’m thinking of rebranding Ordinary Handsome… yes, I’m still flogging this tired old horse of mine. Because that’s what I do when I’m not writing something new.

When I first published it, I had to decide on a genre or category, and I honestly didn’t know what to call it. It’s part ghost story, part mystery, part desperate-men-doing-desperate-things-in-a-dying-little-town kind of a story. So I called it a ghost story. Which is accurate, but not quite complete. It has very little to do with the supernatural. I think, at its bare-bones core, it’s about love. The love of a father for his son. The mistakes he made, the disappointments he had to endure. A man doing the only thing he could to give his boy a future. And how it all went to hell.

I still believe in this little book. So I’ll keep running the excerpts until someone tells me to stop. I think of the excerpts as quilt pieces, arranged haphazardly but with a distinctive pattern.  I’ve omitted the threads. And it does all fit together.

So it’s a love story. Okay, I’m good with that.

OrdinaryHandsomeII Ordinary Handsome: Available at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00P46ZPA0

Free downloadable Kindle app also available.

A Shooting

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He hitched his pants. They were too big and baggy on his lean frame. Then he rubbed his hands on his knees. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to clean his hands or wipe off the flakes of dried blood from his pants. He moved slowly, like he was in a trance. All the crazy energy he had when I drove up was gone. Continue reading →

Ordinary Handsome: Woodrow

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Excerpt from Ordinary Handsome. Available at amazon.com/dp/B00P46ZPA0

Woodrow didn’t strike me as a curious man, just someone looking for something he was good at. And he never found it.

Shot dead trying to rob a butcher shop. I guess he unwrapped one of his crazier ideas and it got him killed. I still think about that. I know there was nothing I could have said to pry out whatever sharp objects were in stuck in his head. But still. What man hasn’t been in the same situation, where doing something stupid made more sense than anything else he could come up with?

I ended up hiring his boy. A good kid, I think, but he’s got his father’s restless eyes and his way of tuning out most of the world. Jimmy Wheat’s a big kid, bigger than others his age, and even-tempered. But I see his father in him, and that’s about the loneliest thing I can imagine. I tried to do right by Woodrow. He was a good man, mostly, but useless.

Ordinary Handsome: October

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Excerpt from Ordinary Handsome. Available at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00P46ZPA0

***

Just another half mile or so. It was hot, so damned hot for late October, but he knew he always felt the heat more unsettling here than anywhere else.

It took him a good fifteen minutes to come upon the second spot.

His face was wet with sweat and tears when he arrived. His heart ached more every time he came here. Even though he was an old man now, he knew this place aged him more than simple calendar time. He figured that he was jarred so quickly between the past and present, it probably double-timed his age.

The man knelt one last time and began digging small pockets of dirt from the ground, the final chrysanthemums to offer.