Be Fearless, Be Free by AK Nevermore

FEARLESS FRIDAY

Please welcome AK to Fearless Friday on Discover... What a great post with a lesson for us all. Be sure to read to the end for a free novella! And now I'm humming Janis all day. 

My senior year of high school we were all required to choose a quote to go beside our picture in the yearbook. It seemed a momentous decision. At that stage in my life, I was dancing at the edge of my small town’s accepted society and staring into the mists of the future with no clue what would happen next. Heck, I wasn’t even sure I was going to graduate. 

And it was more than lacking a plan for after I left those hated halls. In a fit of teenaged angst, I’d moved from home at sixteen and fallen into an alternate lifestyle. To look back on it now with a writer’s eye, I cringe at how well it fit the “good girl falls for the bad boy and has a self-awakening” trope. Spoiler, that chapter of my life didn’t have a happy ending and went on for way too long. 

But be that as it may, an inkling of my awareness-to-come echoed in the Janis Joplin quote I ultimately chose: 

“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” 

To this day, I still get an unsettled feeling when Bobby McGee pops up on Spotify. A resonance in my soul. Ethereal fingers strumming the golden tethers of what matters in my life. My family, husband, and children. A roof over my head. Not having to rob Peter to pay Paul every time a bill comes due. 

I have things to lose. 

Yet, those same things I eschewed until my twenty-somethings now define and strengthen me. 

They also terrify me. 

The fear of “what now” has been replaced with anxiety over “what if.” And you know, I have to laugh sometimes. My kids think I’m the most boring person ever. That I never take a risk, always am thinking about the consequences, avoiding danger. “Who cares if you don’t know what the parking situation is?” and “Do you really have to wait for me outside the bathroom?” 

I care, and yes, I do. 

When you love something, I think it’s ingrained in our DNA to hold on, to protect. You want to keep it safe, to succumb to this primal urge to lock out all the potential ugly. The issue then becomes your daughter leaving the house in a fit a teenaged angst when she’s sixteen. 

And yes, I’ve apologized for that. My parents handled the situation with more grace than I would have been able to. Them letting go when I didn’t want to be held allowed me the freedom to discover what truly matters when you have nothing left to lose. 

Letting go. There’s freedom in that, too, but it’s terrifying to give into the winds of fate, allowing them to buffet you. Especially when it’s something you care deeply about…but that axiom about it coming back if it’s meant to be? 

I’m a believer. 

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be an author. So, several years ago, I made an intentional choice to pursue my dream seriously. I took the classes, followed the rules. Checked all the boxes— And got nowhere. 

My frustration was palatable. I didn’t want to mess it up by not following the formula…but when had my life not been messy? It might sound odd, but the realization that I’d found myself in a cage of my own making, once again, with nothing left to lose, was liberating. 

And pulling myself up by my bootstraps is kind of my thing. 

This time, instead of packing my bags, I opened a blank document. The words that had been self-censored after months of academia flowed. I laughed, teared up, and was satisfied when I typed “The End.” 

I didn’t think that manuscript would amount to anything aside from cathartic release, but I let it go, out into the world where all the ugly was waiting for it. Hoping for the best, expecting the worst. 

And ultimately, it returned to me with a publishing contract. 

To say I was taken aback would be an understatement. That those fearless words I’d put on the page, the ones that sounded just like me, were wanted. Again, I’m laughing. Flame & Shadow, my urban fantasy born of my angst, of my truth, allowed me to achieve my dream. 

Nothing left to lose had once again given me my freedom, and opened the door to all the “what ifs.” And as I begin the next chapter in my life, I put pen to page with a new certainty. Freedom is more than nothing less to lose. Freedom is to be fearless in your uncertainty. To believe, and to own your truth. 

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Flame & Shadow features Envy Starr, an emotionally stunted halfling with a drinking problem and a bad attitude, destined to die on Midsummer’s Eve. The daughter of a Daemon and a washed-up Vegas showgirl, she’s big on lamenting her fate, in particular the portion that has her dying a virgin during some crappy cult’s live-stream. With a scant month left to live, she escapes, and is thrust into her absentee father’s world of beautifully cultured cruelty.

Hit with a steep learning curve, Envy discovers everyone has an ulterior motive, including the prehistoric Fae that’s been secreted away in her chest as part of an elaborate game. Her only guide is Brennan, the Dae-licious tutor her father, Silas, has hired to make her into a Fae lady, but Brennan’s contract isn’t just with him, and he’d do anything to break it.

When he’s suspected of reneging, Envy is forced to eat some serious crow to save his life, but she’s not particularly wired for self-sacrifice, and there’s no way she’s doing it quietly, Bambi-onesie be damned—

Yeah, that happened. Stupid Fae games…

Whatever. Midsummer’s Eve is rapidly approaching, and that prehistoric pace-maker holds the cards to stopping a plot to screw over normals and Fae alike. She’ll talk, as soon as Envy agrees to let the Fae wear her like a suit.

That’s not happening, but when the moon begins to rise, Envy finds herself a game piece again, and out of options. Pushed to her limit by a squid, schnitzel, and a golden ball, she’s determined to figure out how to win on her terms, no matter how the deck is stacked against her.

Flame & Shadow releases November 13th, 2023 BUT YOU CAN PREORDER NOW.

AMAZON BUY LINK

APPLE BOOKS BUY LINK

BARNES & NOBLE BUY LINK

You can read the prequel, One Night in Bliss, free: One Night in Bliss 

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AK Nevermore writes science fiction and urban fantasy with spice. She enjoys operating heavy machinery, freebases coffee, and gives up sarcasm for Lent every year. Unable to ignore the voices in her head, and unwilling to become medicated, she writes about dark worlds, perversely irreverent and profound, and always entertaining. Her debut novel, Flame & Shadow comes out November 13th, 2023. 

You can find her on her website or follow her on her sadly neglected Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram feeds.

Musing on Muses by Carmen Webster Buxton #SciFi #romance

MUSE MONDAY 

What better way to do Muse Monday than to talk about Muses with Carmen?

“Where do you get your story ideas?” It’s a question writers are often asked. So, where does inspiration for a story come from? The ancient Greeks believed in the existence of muses, inspirational goddesses of literature, science, and the arts who, presumably, could help those who needed inspiration. However, I’m pretty sure the Greeks didn’t have a muse for science fiction.

Some writers may use a specific process to inspire a story, but for me, most of my stories began their existence as a picture that popped into my head. The first novel I published The Sixth Discipline began with a man walking warily through a forest. The next thing I knew, he was being kidnapped by a bunch of strangers. I didn’t set out to write a far-future science fiction story about a man from a primitive culture being snatched by people with more advanced technology, but when that scene played out in my head, that was what was happening.

On the other hand, the story in my time travel/alternate history novel King of Trees started with a question generated by a real (but not in any way personal) event. I was reading about the abdication of Edward VIII of Great Britain (now the UK) and what a fuss it had caused in 1936. Edward wanted to marry a twice-divorced American woman and since the monarch was the head of the Church of England, that was (at the time) not considered acceptable. [Note: This is incredibly ironic when you realize that the Church of England split off from the Roman Catholic Church so that Henry VIII could divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, in order to marry Anne Boleyn.]

This made me think about what is, in effect, a contract between a monarch and those he rules— or, in more modern times, those from whom he accepts money and reverence, just for being their monarch. What does he owe them in return for what he gets from them? That led me to write a story in which a young man who is a king, but with no actual power, has to choose whether to marry the woman he loves or the woman who can help his country. He’s not named Henry or Edward but Bardolph, and while his country is called Albion, it’s an alternate version of the country we call England. Inspiration doesn’t mean you need to stick to realty.

But the most dramatic instance of story inspiration for me, was when a story came to me because of a major event that happened in my life. My parents had been married for 28 years and had four mostly grown children when my dad announced he was leaving my mom. What came out, eventually, was that he had had learned that a married woman he had admired decades before was now a widow, and so he left my mom and eventually married the other woman. My mom was, naturally, devastated. 

This made me contemplate the way marriage works in our society, both now and in the past. A few hundred years ago, divorce wasn’t acceptable. And yet marriages were often arranged, most often but not exclusively at the higher levels of society. In some cultures, arranged marriages happen even today. A 2020 article in the Washington Post described how many Indian families still rely on old-style matchmakers who connect people looking for spouses.

And of course, in the Western world, many people use online dating apps to screen prospective partners for compatibility, not only of temperament but also income, race, and looks, so I can't claim screening potential mates is a purely an Eastern thing. 

But after seeing my mom’s devastation, I tried to imagine a world where that circumstance could never happen to anyone. How could a human being make a lifetime commitment to someone and be absolutely sure it wouldn’t be broken? I realized, of course, such certainty wasn’t really possible for humans, so I invented a world where it was. I ended up creating Wakanreo, the planet that is the basis for the trilogy that begins with the novel Alien Bonds. The aliens known as Wakanreans are unique in my far-future universe because they mate for life from a purely biological reaction. And once mated, the attraction never fades.

Finding a life partner is a serious matter. Some people stay single from choice, some from despair after a bad relationship, and some because they're waiting for the right person to walk into their lives. But in the society I created on Wakanreo, every adult is either paired off or waiting to be paired off, based on a biological reaction beyond his or her control.

Once I had determined the mechanism for this bonding, I thought about how it would affect the cultures of this world. This system has advantages and disadvantages for individuals, but one side effect is, there are no castes, no aristocrats, no stratification of society, because pairing off cannot be controlled or arranged like marriage can be. Also because of that, sex has nothing to do with morality.

But the heart of that novel is that attraction and love are two different things. The couple in the story cannot resist the pull of the biological reaction, but that does not mean that they love each other. The bond from the biological mating is practically instantaneous, but the bond from love, like love itself, takes time to grow and must be nourished. And in that way, Wakanreans are like humans, in that while the lifelong commitment is unbreakable, love isn’t guaranteed to be part of it.

I don’t know if anyone could tell from reading my books whether they originated from an intellectual question or from pure spontaneous generation, but for me, the process was very different. I am a “pantser.” I write “from the seat of my pants,” without an outline. In fact, I credit a lot of my output to insomnia; I wrote most of my books in my head first, while lying in bed trying to go to sleep. The stories that started from a specific question were more constrained than those that simply flowed from my subconscious, because they had to conform to my inspiration. As to which are the better books, I will leave that to the reader to decide.

But if I were to create a muse for science fiction writers, I think I would name her Mary, after Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley who wrote Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, the very first science fiction novel. It seems only fair.

And if you would like to visit Wakanreo, you can find Alien Bonds for sale online in paperback or on the Kindle.

Buy: US Kindle store (also currently available through Kindle Unlimited)
Buy: Paperback

Blurb:

A human woman and an alien man are unexpectedly bonded and must learn to navigate the sea of their
differences. Industrial chemist Dina Bellaire travels all the way to the planet Wakanreo to advance her career. Her carefully planned life goes up in flames the second she meets Kuaron Du, a Wakanrean who makes his living singing ancient songs in a dead language. Both of them know they can’t go back to the way they were before they met. They just have to convince the rest of the universe that what happened to them is real. From Kirkus Reviews-- "Buxton offers an SF story about interplanetary love triumphing, despite the odds.. . . readers will feel truly immersed in their religion, values, and technology of Wakanreo and appreciate the relevance of Buxton's depiction of a couple fighting for their relationship in a climate of intolerance in this thought-provoking work. A dense but often engrossing tale, grounded in a relatable love affair."

Excerpt:

Neither of them had taken a step since he took hold of her arm. Dina swallowed once, conscious of discreet glances and overt stares from those around them.

“I’m all right,” she said finally, wondering if she was speaking the truth. The dizziness had passed, but she still felt lightheaded. “Thank you, but you can let go now.”

He loosened his grip but didn’t release her for a few seconds. When he did, he brushed her bare arm with the back of his hand. Dina was amazed when it sent shivers of anticipation up her spine.

“This is unexpected.” His wonderfully resonant voice had a rich, warm timbre to it that made Dina’s shivers change from anticipation to yearning.

“Yes,” she said, unsure of what he meant, but afraid to give offense.

“Where do you live?”

“I have an apartment in the off-world sector,” she said, wondering why she was answering him. She fought the urge to close her eyes and just listen to that wonderful voice.

“My house is in the cliffs outside the city. Let’s go there instead.”

“All right.”

It took Dina a moment to realize that she had agreed to go home with him.

Bio:

Carmen Webster Buxton spent her youth reading every book published by Ursula LeGuin, Robert Heinlein and Georgette Heyer. This combination of far-future worlds, alien cultures, and old-fashioned courting customs influenced her writing, especially in her ThreeCon series.

Carmen was born in Honolulu and experienced a childhood on the move, as her father was in the US Navy. Having raised two wonderful children, she now lives in Maryland with her husband Charlie, and a beagle named Cosmo. She writes science fiction, often with a romance or two, and the occasional fantasy. She is a member of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America  (SFWA).