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Rys Rising Blog Tour and Giveaway

I’m excited to be a stop on the Feel Real Fantasy blog tour celebrating the completion of the Rys Rising series by Tracy Falbe. Here’s an excerpt from the first novel, Rys Rising.

This scene takes place in the city of Jingten. It is a remote colony where tabre magic masters have bred a new race of magical beings called rys. The tabre tightly control the small rys population, and the leader Daykash Breymer has decided to use corporeal punishment against Onja. The rys Dacian watches as the brutality unfolds…

Onja said no more, and the Daykash ordered that the charge be officially read against her. A Nebakarz priest named Dutan stepped forward. He lifted a small wafer thin disc of stone upon which was inscribed the charge. Willful wandering the tabre legal system called it. 

Then her sentence was read. She was to endure eight strokes of the phliamel. Although rumor had already informed all gathered what the sentence would be, discomfort still rippled through the assembled rys upon hearing the sentence.  

A priest, named Angpar who was young and just advanced from being an acolyte, stepped out from behind the Daykash and held out the thin long stick that was split three times at one end where crystals were attached. The thinness of the stick gave it springiness so that its crystal-barbed splinters could deliver a whip-like sting. 

Breymer said, “Long centuries ago, before tabre had fully come to master and appreciate the orderly joys of civilization, harsh methods were employed to teach us discipline. I have decided that the use of the phlia-mel has become necessary again because the rys are a young breed and, as this female has shown, have need of discipline.” 

No one among the hundreds of rys said anything, but Dacian could feel the collective protest caged all around him. He felt he should say something. Ask for mercy at least, but so many things held him back. Was he wrong to question his elders? Did he want to jeopardize his future as a Nebakarz? Did he have any reason to risk himself on account of this female who ignored the law? 

“Begin,” was all the Daykash said, and the two priests who had escorted Onja earlier swiftly grabbed her again and pushed her to her knees. Angpar walked around the trio and regarded his subject. He shook the phlia-mel once so that all could see the spring in the rod, and then he reached down and yanked off her cloak and whipped it aside. He seemed eager to have at her. 

Onja’s clothing was meager. She wore only a small vest and shorts and her lower back was already properly exposed. Dacian could see the muscles in her back tense in anticipation of the abuse, but she did not look over her shoulder at her punisher.  

Angpar raised the phlia-mel, but his eagerness faded for a moment, and he contemplated his next action as if he suddenly realized that the world would change when he lowered his arm. Then his self righteousness returned and he swung at the rys female hard. The crystal barbs flashed with white light when they struck Onja’s blue skin and her cry mixed with the meaty thwap of the rod hitting her. She lunged forward automatically but her handlers yanked her back in place. 

Many rys cried out or gasped, and some turned away, and before anyone could recover from their disgust, Angpar hit her again. The Daykash fixed an emotionless gaze on Onja. Dacian could not see her face but he imagined her grimace.  

Dacian looked at Halor urgently. His lips trembled with outrage. “Stop this,” he begged. 

“It will be over soon,” Halor said woodenly. His eyes insisted on obedience.  

When the third blow fell, Onja’s cry was louder. Dacian heard her take a deep breath to brace herself for the next stroke. As she filled her lungs with this painful gasp, Dacian felt all his rational reasons for standing by collapse like a hillside soaked by torrential rain. He looked at the tabre priests and acolytes lined up on both sides of him. They watched the punishment raptly. Where was their compassion for her suffering? They were all civilized creatures, but Dacian realized that their values did not entirely extend to their much-maligned rys cousins. They would watch Onja endure eight strokes from the phlia-mel and agree with the Daykash that it was necessary and proper. Civilization required order but was brutality the only path to that end?  

Angpar gave Onja her fourth stroke. Her sentence was half complete.  

“Stop!” Dacian shouted. He rushed forward and felt Halor grab him but he shook him off and moved toward Angpar. 

He spun Angpar away from the female and then shoved his chest so that he fell on his butt. Dacian’s magic erupted. The crystals of the phlia-mel disintegrated in three successive blue flashes and the old wood of the rod burst into flames. His next spell cracked the domux and it fell off Onja’s wrists. Its enchanted crystals lost their power and faded to pebbles. 

As the tabre holding Onja shifted to intervene with Dacian, he raised both of his hands into their faces. They were swept backwards off their feet by the hot blasting force of his attack spell. 

Onja had collapsed forward and she was trying to push herself up but the pain in her back was nearly paralyzing. Purple bleeding blisters ravaged her sleek youthful back. She looked over her shoulder at Dacian. Agony twisted her tear-streaked face, but gratitude radiated from her eyes, and he could believe that she would honor him forever.  

“Onja,” he whispered, casting his mind toward her thoughts, her soul. He felt her lifeforce. It was hot and powerful, too powerful for her to have endured this gross mistreatment. 

Distracted entirely by the sight of his downtrodden damsel, Dacian had no shield spell ready when the magic of the Daykash netted him. The spells of many tabre priests piled on next, and Dacian could not move. His legs began to wobble and the blood in his veins became hot and painful. 

Dacian summoned his power and began to untangle the spells gripping his body. In this crisis, he suddenly realized that he could throw off their attacks. He was very powerful. He would teach them not to abuse a rys female for a petty infraction.  

Halor was shouting for him and pushing his way through the tabre. But it was not the voice of his Master that got through to Dacian’s enraged mind. It was her voice. 

“Do not fight them,” Onja said. “Not yet.” 

Dacian looked at her again. She had managed to roll onto her side, and her call to patience intrigued him. Not yet? What does she mean? Dacian thought. Even without an answer, he would do as she asked. He relaxed and the spells of the tabre bit into him vindictively. Defenseless again, Dacian crumbled in pain. 

Halor put his arms around his pupil. “Enough!” he called. “Enough. Stop!” Then in a softer voice he spoke to Dacian. “Yield. Do nothing, I beg you.”  

Dacian nodded and was not ungrateful for the protective embrace of his Master.

Tracy Falbe invites you to give her characters a chance to feel real to you. The Rys Rising fantasy series is driven by magic, passion, bravery, ambition, conquest, and defeat. Rys Rising: Book I is a free ebook and hopefully your gateway to an epic reading experience.

Start reading Rys Rising for free and enter the prize drawing for a $25 Etsy gift card!
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NaNoWriMo Tip #17: Why You Should Learn To Think In Wordcount

A Boyd’s rainforest dragon (Hypsilurus boydii)

These are my personal tips for NaNoWriMo. You know the drill. Take only what works.

Remember when your teacher told you to write a report on gladiolas that had to be ten pages long, so you changed the margins to 2 inches and the font to fourteen point Gils Sans Ultra Bold and BINGOyou had a ten page paper? Yeah, you really fooled her! She never saw that trick before, you sly fox.

But guess what, you can’t fool yourself. You know that page count doesn’t mean squat, so stop calculating how much you’re writing every day by page count. Page count is easily manipulated; it changes based on a million factors. There’s an entire profession devoted to manipulating page count, called a typesetter.

What doesn’t change is word count.

Different genres have different ideal word counts. A children’s chapter book is about 6,000 words. A Young Adult novel or a category romance is about 75,000 words. An adult thriller is about 90,000. A fantasy tome is 120,000 plus.

Nobody says, “A fantasy has five hundred pages” because that’s meaningless. A Young Adult novel may have large type and a padded word count to make it look heftier; a fantasy blockbuster might use a dense, elfin font to squeeze twice that number of words into the same size book so it doesn’t break the bank to print it.

Ebooks, by the way, make these games irrelevant. The reader controls the font size. The writer controls…word count.

It’s weird, at first, trying to think in word count, but there’s an easy way to train yourself to grasp it intuitively. As you type, look for the Tool in your word processing program that says Word Count. In MS Word, it’s in the drop-down menu under Tools. Select a paragraph, check the word count. Select a page, check the word count. Select an entire chapter, check the word count. Write down how many words are in each scene and chapter after you finish it. 

Pretty soon you will be able to plan in word count. “I need three more 1000 word scenes.” You’ll be aim for a certain word count before you even begin a book. You’ll know that in a 90,000 word novel with thirty chapters, each chapter needs to hit 3,000 words. If you know you write longer scenes that tend to be 6,000 words each, you’ll know already that you’re going to want only 15 chapters. Or, if your scenes run only 1,500 words, you might have 60 chapters.

In The Unfinished Song, for instance, I have a set number of chapters that remains constant for each book. There are seven chapters, period. Within the chapter, I have between ten and twelve separately labeled scenes of about 1000 words each. Toward the beginning of the book, I write longer scenes. Toward the end, I shorten the scenes to pick up the pace of the action. The overall word count of the chapter, however, doesn’t change, so when I write shorter scenes, I know I’m also going to have more of them.

I also know how many words I have to write per day in order to finish a book in a given amount of time. Like NaNoWriMo.

I didn’t always write so deliberately. When I started out, I just tossed out the scene and let it plop out however it happened to land. This may sound great, but often the result was a mess, with long, dull scenes growing up right when I needed to have sleek, swift scenes, and choppy short scenes when I didn’t want them. Learning to think in word count helped me tame this confusion and plan my novels—and my work day—every day.

Sticking to the Plan

You know how you give yourself excellent advice and then ignore it?

In other news, hows your NaNoWriMo novel going? Because, yeah, mine is whacked. I’ve written 10,000 words (two chapters) but have come up against the fact that I’ve ignored my own Outline-First plan and jumped into the writing too quickly. I was having so much fun with the story that I became carried away and rushed ahead blindly. But of course, then I slammed into a wall.

So sad, Tara. So sad.

The answer? More brainstorming of course!

Actually, it’s not surprising I’m having trouble, because what’s tripping me up is the mystery subplot. In keeping with the advice from the How To Write Mystery books I’ve been reading, I wrote my villain’s plot first: how the murderer committed the crime and covered it up, etc.

However, I’ve had a few problems:

1.) My Bad Guy backstory wasn’t sufficiently detailed. I sketched it vaguely, leaving too many details to fall into place on their own. Guess what? They didn’t. I need to figure them out.

2.) I haven’t taken my Bad Guy seriously enough. The Bad Guy has to be cunning and clever and driving the plot forward almost as much as the hero.

3.) My outline introduced my mystery plot too late and ends it too early. Since the primary genre of my book is fantasy, I will introduce/conclude the mystery later/earlier respectively than in a pure Mystery novel. But I left only the middle of the novel for the mystery plot.

I have Plot Bunching. That’s what occurs when plot bunches like wrinkled socks, with too much in one spot and bare ankles elsewhere. Bare ankles always make a novel look awkward!

I have some tough choices to make. Do I pare down much of my Act I plot lines, including the characters who are introduced, or do I pare down the mystery plot? It would be easier to do the latter, but I feel it would be the cheap way out… also my stand-alone book might turn into a trilogy.

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