Review: Tommy Nightmare by JL Bryan

Description: While Fallen Oak recovers from the Jenny Pox, someone new is hunting Jenny.

Like Jenny, Ashleigh Gooding belonged to a pair of opposites with powers that mirror each other.

Now Jenny and Seth must face the opposite of love...

My Thoughts:  I've mentioned before how completely blown away I was by Jenny Pox, so I had high expectations heading in to Tommy Nightmare.  Happily, it measured up.  Tommy is genuinely terrifying in moments, moving in others, and juuuust complicated enough that I mourned every time he made an evil decision.  I'm not willing to count him out of the game just yet.

While Bryan has introduced a fun new villain in Tommy, that doesn't mean he's short-changing the girls.  Jenny is every bit as real and amazing as she was in the first book, and Bryan introduces a new girl in the form of an old love of Tommy's.  Furthermore--spoiler alert--we also see the return of Ashleigh Gooding, who is every bit as noxious and calculating in this book as she was when we first met her.  My favorite part of these books is how neatly Bryan writes the relationship between Ashleigh and Jenny--they never lose their petty, high-school nastiness for all that they're immortals fighting a war with incredible, potentially world-ending powers.  Jenny was punished in the first book for her refusal to attempt to understand her powers while Ashleigh was so busily strengthening hers, and she's still struggling with much the same problems in Tommy Nightmare.    Granted, her power is much more difficult to safely test than Ashleigh's, as people either die or are permanently disfigured by her touch rather than finding themselves love-stoned for a few hours.  Jenny's entire arc in this book is, once again, that of trying to stay one step ahead of her own abilities, this time with the added knowledge of just how destructive she can be.  This would be repetitive if not for the added drama of Jenny's secret being released into the world and the additional supervillains thrown into the fray.  Jenny has to grow up, whether she wants to or not, because she's going to be eaten alive if she doesn't.  And, by the end of the book, she seems to realize that she can't just stay in Fallen Oak and be a perpetual child forever, not when Ashleigh is once again on the move and is determined to destroy Jenny's life utterly before continuing with her plans for--I'm not kidding--world domination.  Unfortunately, she's now in the sway of someone even more dangerous than Ashleigh or Tommy, and she's not in a good emotional place.  Jenny Morton is poised to become Batman with mittens, and I love it.

Leech Premiere Celebration.

It's finally here, it's finally here!  Leech, the third book in my Super series, premieres today, and I could not be more ridiculously excited.  I had a lot of trepidations when I began this little book for last year's NaNoWriMo: Super was originally going to be a one-off, J's voice came more naturally to me than anyone else in the series...what was I going to do with Mindy, the character I actually understood the least?  And in the series' major pivot point, at that?

I shouldn't have worried.  Leech turned out to be one of the easiest books I've ever written, with my very favorite villain of all time.  (Um, to the point that my beta readers were a little worried about me.)  I'm so glad to finally be able to present it to the world.  And don't forget!  As part of the premiere celebration and to mark its exit from the KDP Select program, Fire With Fire will be absolutely free on Amazon December 6-8.  I apologize in advance for how obnoxious I am going to be on Twitter.

Buy Leech on Amazon and Smashwords.

And then I failed NaNoWriMo.

I'm throwing in the towel at 28K words and change.  Yeah, I know, there are four days left.  22K isn't an insurmountable goal in that timeframe, especially since I've been possessed of a white heat on all of my other projects over the past few days.  Throwing away four days worth of energy at a book that is fundamentally, fatally flawed seems like a waste of time.  (I know.  You don't edit during NaNoWriMo, every writer thinks they're shoveling shit from a sitting position at least once, but by now I have a certain sense for when I'm being crazy and just need to push through, and when something is going off the skids.  Eat went off the skids.)  In spite of not finishing, though, it felt good to get back in the groove after writing virtually nothing for the better part of five months.  It felt incredibly good to realize that my mental health is back on track to that degree.

And even if I didn't finish NaNoWriMo, buckling down and working on something again helped to unlock my other creative processes, to wit: finally figuring out where Bulletproof, Bonnie's book, fell apart and how I need to fix it.  Involving space zombies, because let's face it: there is nothing I can come up with crazier than what various superhero canons have already done over the years.  The trick is to be outrageous with conviction.  I also had this epiphany as to how to fix Bonnie's story during one of my customary three a.m. flails.  It's been awhile, I had missed them. :)

Leech cover reveal!

 

So, um, yeah.  I'm pretty excited.  Since Audrey's pregnancy is kicking the living hell out of her, I went with Graphicz X Designs.  They're closely affiliated with Mojito Press Plus, whose founders were incredibly kind and friendly to me when I first joined Twitter and had no idea what the hell I was doing.  I give Graphicz X two thumbs up; they're friendly, have fantastic prices, and are fast.  I had a cover less than a day after expressing interest.

With my cover finalized, I can announce with certainty that Leech will be premiering on December 5th, 2012, and in celebration Fire With Fire will go free for three days before exiting the KDP Select program.  So mark your calendars!

Leech Chapters One Through Three!

Hey', y'all!  There really is no point in my apologizing for my long absences at this point, is there?  In my defense, NaNoWriMo has been eating my face right off, but in a good way.  I haven't pantsed a novel in almost a decade, and it's been an interesting experience.  I'm still in the first act, so I'm kind of throwing guns up on mantelpieces with wild abandon right now.  I'll figure out which ones I need to go off later.  And, in other news, my regular photographer, Audrey, has confirmed that she's not going to be able to do the cover for Leech.  Her pregnancy is just kicking her ass way too hard right now; since the baby's not due until January, we would be looking towards March at the earliest if we decided to sit out her pregnancy.  Happily, I'm investigating a few other artists right now (I don't get the biffle discount with them, alas, but what can you do?) and am aiming to premiere Leech on December 5th.  Because that will get it out in time for the holiday bump and, well, I turn 28 on December 6th and want to look at my sales page as a present to myself.  :P  Here are the first three chapters, I hope you like them!

When in doubt, just add zombies.

Why hello there, boils and ghouls! (I'm having trouble letting Halloween go.) I intended to make this post on the thirty-first, but my favorite holiday got away with me.

Yes, it's November, that special month when millions of people collectively lose their minds and decide to write a whole novel in thirty short days. This is my second year playing along, after spending most of the summer and fall alternating between lazy and crazy (of the not-fun kind). I had intended to write the last Super book for this year's NaNoWriMo, but after Bonnie's book imploded on me so hard I decided to step back and reassess. The plots of books four and five are just too tightly intertwined for me not to have them un-fucked before I try the grand finale.

So instead I'm writing a standalone horror novel I outlined in a white heat about three years ago, shortly after learning that certain members of my family robbed my father's house within twenty-four hours of his death. Yes, I am getting belated catharsis through zombies. I changed my mind about two days before NaNoWriMo began, so I have no idea where the original outline is at this point, but I still remember enough of the key scenes to get very, very excited about the chance to finally putting them to paper.

Now, in matters of my other work: Leech, the third Super book (and last year's NaNoWriMo project) is finally edited up to be all shiny and ready to go as soon as I get a cover for it. My photographer is in the last trimester of a hard pregnancy, though, so I'm not giving a release date just yet. I'm pretty excited about this book, I must say; I wrote it only weeks after deciding that Super would be six books long, and several themes and characters who will be important down the line make their first appearance here.

Final Girl, Redux

I talked about this last year, but I love Halloween. I love being frightened, I love being pushed right to my edge, and I love reading about characters who hit their edges and find ways to vault above and become heroes. (I write about people with superpowers. Come on, you're damned right that I have a hero/heroine fetish.) I also believe that fiction reflects and informs life. Horror flicks don't work unless they hit us right in our guts. Big bug movies in the fifties talked about atomic fears, the wave of possessed/scary children movies in the seventies talked about counter-culture, and the slasher films of the eighties talked about sex. (Bay-bee, talked about you-and-me…I'm sorry, I'll stop now.) Given how recently feminism had emerged as a force to be reckoned with, you would think that demonic women vanquished by tough, manly men would emerge as a major trope in these movies, but that's not how it shook out. Demonic forces arose, all right, and only one person could stop them.

And the answer was a girl. It's probably no small mistake that slasher films were aimed at teenagers, they of the shiny-new freedom and disposable incomes. It would have been easy to go for the lowest common denominator and make the boys the stars of the show, since girls will usually consume media about boys while boys are much more hesitant to be associated with anything that could be construed as "girly", but they didn't. Slasher films decided to depict girls being strong, smart, proactive badasses, which is a big part of why I love the genre so very hard.

But enough love songs to horror, or we'll be here all day. I have a deep fondness for Final Girls, which undoubtedly informs everything I write even though I don't dip my toe into straight horror all that often. As I said last Halloween, Sidney Prescott is still the Final Girl to end all Final Girls for me. That doesn't mean that the genre doesn't have plenty of other awesome female characters to offer, though, most notably one Nancy of Nightmare on Elm Street fame. This movie's as old as I am, but I never get tired of watching it. Nancy's smart, tough, and doesn't even think about backing down in the face of evil. She's also, it has to be said, kind of a bitch, but by the end of the movie she's pretty sleep-deprived, and what can I say? I've always had a soft spot for the cranky ones.

Halloween's only a few days away. Who's your favorite Final Girl?