And now it’s time to introduce a new Throne of Blood character. Meet Almaz:
She is the first albino character in the Nightfall series. She also happens to be the first amputee character we meet. Combining these two facts about her, you can already take a guess about her complicated backstory.
Character Reveal Schedule:
Happy reading! 💖
It’s time for another Throne of Blood character reveal. Meet Rada!
She is in the book for only a short while, but her character makes an impression. She is related to a certain mythological being. If you’ve read Men and Monsters carefully, you should be able to guess which one 🙂
Character Reveal Schedule:
Happy reading! 💖
I’m pleased to introduce you to Mizuki, a new character we get to meet in Throne of Blood!
We briefly hear her name in Men and Monsters. Ila and Vladimir are discussing potential vampire allies, and Ila suggests Mizuki and Takahiro. Vlad immediately rejects the idea, saying that they hate him too much.
So, what changes in this book? Is he desperate enough to work with her? Or does he have no choice? Is she here as an enemy or an ally, or both?
My beta reader is currently working hard on the manuscript, so I hope I’ll be able to share the final version (and the answer to those questions) with you very soon!
In the meantime, I’ll be sharing more info on the upcoming book and introducing you to new characters.
As always, beautiful cover art provided by TheSwanMaindeN on DeviantArt!
Character Reveal Schedule:
Happy reading! 💖
My short story, Snowflake in the Tea, is FINALLY free on Amazon!
It’s an old piece I initially wrote for a creative writing assignment, back when I was a student. The task was to write a short story containing the following elements:
– Falling out of touch with an old friend
– Finding refuge from the outside world in a blanket and a steaming cup of tea
– Some third element I no longer remember 😐
It’s a magical realism tale set in the gloomy winter of northern Germany, featuring a (possibly magic!) cat. The story is a super quick read that you can finish in minutes, even if you take your time 😊
After I published my first book, I thought I could dig out some old stories, dust them off a bit, and share them. I picked this one, did some editing, and quickly put together a cover and the internal design out of stock pictures. I put it up on Amazon, planning to make it free for everyone.
Easier said than done…
You have no idea how difficult it is for an author to make a book free on Amazon! Honestly, I don’t know where all the free books are coming from and what authors and publishers go through to get there, but it took me close to three years.
Long story short, you are not allowed to set the price below 0.99, and only Amazon can decide to lower it to match prices elsewhere. Well, this story has been free on every other marketplace from the very beginning. Which I had been reporting to Amazon multiple times in the past three years, but they only reacted recently.
While I’m really happy, the fight is far from over. In fact, it’s only beginning! While the book is free on Amazon.COM, it’s still paid on Amazon.[anything else]. So if you live in a region where you can’t shop from Amazon.com just use a VPN and get it for free anyway, you can use the Amazon feature to report a lower price, and if enough people do it, hopefully, they’ll take action and match it. Otherwise, you can always get it for free from Barnes&Noble, Kobo, and literally everywhere else!
Happy reading! 💖
Yesterday I managed to do my first post-lockdown trip, which also doubled as book research 🙂
The quarantine has been weird for me for more reasons than the usual. While most people got stuck in their hometowns, I had just relocated and got stuck in a city (and country!) where I’ve never lived before and knew hardly anyone. Can’t complain though; Copenhagen is far from the worst city to get stuck in, and I was able to work from home, so my job was fine. Still, now that things in Denmark are stable, it felt good to hop on the train and leave the city for a day, and combining the trip with book research made it even better!
Now that I’ve completed the Throne of Blood draft on my side and can’t do much more than wait for editorial feedback, I’ve started work on a brand new book.
It’s a historical fantasy based on several of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytales and personal life. And while the novel is set mostly in early 19th-century Copenhagen, with a few detours into the Swedish wilderness, I thought it also made sense to visit the author’s hometown, Odense:
Everything in Odense is connected to H.C. Andersen!
You can see the house where he was born: Continue reading
We can’t travel in the real world right now, but we can still travel in books! Each Nightfall book expands the setting, in both space and time, and in Throne of Blood we see periods and places we haven’t visited before.
The earliest scene in Throne of Blood is set in 222 BC. The latest is in the present day: our familiar 26th century post-apocalyptic world.
But where do we go? Of course, today’s countries no longer exist under their current shape and form in the Nightfall universe. Still, people, cultures and languages are to some extend the same in the same regions, and we’ll see more on how exactly that works in the coming book.
This map shows which of the current world countries have Throne of Blood scenes set in their territories:
Wow, so many colors, what do they all mean? In a nutshell, blue means present day (26th century) and green means flashbacks. As most chapters are from the point of view of centuries-old (often millennia-old) vampires who have seen lots of periods in history, the book is very flashback-heavy, though not nearly as much as Men and Monsters.
Some flashback are very brief, a quick paragraph or a few sentences in the middle of something else. They are colored in light green. Others are full scenes, sometimes an entire chapter: these are dark green.
We also see some dark blue here. This indicates territories where we have both present day action and flashbacks.
Can’t wait to be able to share the book with you, so we can all travel together ❤
Larger resolution map here.
I recently shared that I extremely spontaneously decided to move to Denmark. And, as expected of a quick relocation, my last two days in Berlin were extremely hectic. Finishing packing and shipping stuff, selling and giving away furniture, repainting the flat, running around the city on different errands. But on top of all else, there was one more thing to take care of: I found out I still had four Kingdom of Ashes and one Men and Monsters paperbacks.
I had initially ordered all of them planning to run more Goodreads giveaways as I’ve done in the past. But then Goodreads changed the giveaway rules, and this was no longer possible. And so I stuffed them in a cupboard to wait for the time I find a way to run a giveaway or find interested bloggers, and I almost forgot about their existence until it was time to move.
But what was I going to do with the books? I couldn’t possibly take them with me; I didn’t have an extra molecule of space in my luggage. And there was no time to mail them around. And so, I came up with an idea: I would sign them and donate them to open phone booth libraries around the city. And so I spent half of a crazy day running around the city, dropping off books, but I hope it was worth it!
Read on to see how to get them in case you have trips to Berlin planned soon!
If you’ve missed the Nightfall series so far, now is the time to get all published books for free!
The New Year sale on Smashwords runs until Jan 1st. Happy reading!
You might have noticed I haven’t been posting as many writing updates as usual in the past few months. Three major things happened recently that have slowed down my progress, but hopefully things will get back to normal beginning of next year:
1) First, my computer broke
Completely. And because of some other events that happened at the same time, it was a few weeks before I could buy a new one. Computerless for weeks 😦
Also, I couldn’t use the computers at work for writing Throne of Blood because the work I do is theoretically “strictly confidential” so I can’t send files to external emails or use USBs or transfer data in any other way. Everything I write on the work computer stays on the work computer and is checked by numerous departments to ensure I am not leaking strictly confidential data. Needless to say, bad idea to write fantasy books on the work computer 
What’s worse, the last two chapters of Throne of Blood were on my old computer, and I hadn’t backed them up, so I was panicking they were lost forever and I had to write them again from scratch. I checked some data recovery services around where I live, but they were all insanely expensive. In the end, I managed to recover all my data by myself, with the help of a screwdriver and a 2-Euro cable I got on ebay. Perhaps I should quit my day job and become a data recovery guy.
Oh wait… I did quit my day job.
But more on that later.
2) Next, I spontaneously went to Iceland Continue reading
Throne of Blood, Book 3 in the Nightfall series, is approaching completion, and I can already tell you a secret…
Chapter One, “Legend” will be the first chapter in the series from Vlad’s point of view. While we have seen his story in Men and Monsters, we hear it through Myra and through what he chooses to tell her. Now, for the first time, we will properly get inside his head.
I have two questions for you, and if you answer correctly, you’ll enter a lottery to win a Men and Monsters signed paperback!
How on earth should you know that, you ask. Simple! You just need to guess where I am:
Read on for more clues and details how to enter!
