V.S. Holmes's Blog

I'm swinging by with  some great lists of fantasy and science fiction books for you to add to your TBR this month! You can find them all below. Smoke and Rain will also be just 0.99 all month and is now available on Tapas !

Free Fantasy & Science Fiction:

New Year Fantasy Reads:

SFF Series Sales:

It's that time again! I'm popping in between EMISSARIES details and goodies to share two fun sales with you all! There's the Sci-Fi and Space sale and a neat Fantasy and Sci-Fi Series sale if you'd like to start your next favorite series. Plus, a great set of Into The Future Freebies! Both are going on all month, so be sure to check them out before the end of November.
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Sci-Fi and Space
Into the Future Freebies!
Sci-Fi and Fantasy Series Starter

To celebrate the upcoming EMISSARIES release, I'll be sharing some great science fiction and sapphic sales (talk about a tongue twister 😉) going on this month!

First up we have some Out of This World Sci-Fi romance titles.
And you can also check out the start to these exciting science fiction series :
Dive into these must-read Starships and Cyberpunk science fiction titles!
And fall in love with these   0.99 Sapphic Romance   books!

I was lucky enough to snag an advance copy of Overkill by Lou Wilham. This is the first book in the Hunters of Ironport series, interconnected with the Witches of Moondale series. Wilham is a new author to me, though I’ve seen her work in the author-sphere for some time. She does not disappoint! Eric Marcelino is Venator–a protector of humanity whose genes are activated when vampires come to town. Despite his tight-knit group of trainees, witches, and healers, it's a lonely job, and a bloody one. But then he learns that a new crop of vamps is not only visiting Ironport but being sired there. With the Council of Creatures mired in bureaucracy, Eric must trust a new Venator–the sarcastic and way-too-attractive Tony McMahon.
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Overkill takes the world set up in the Witches series and runs with it. Though this is my first taste of Moondale and Ironport, I was never lost, and enjoyed the callbacks to previous story arcs–I plan to go back and read Lou’s Moondale series as well. The romance between Eric and Tony is complicated, but sweet and honest. I was thrilled to see Wilham did her diligence with Tony’s backstory as a trans man, and can’t wait to see more of him. Filled with action, longing, and found family facing the Big Bad, Overkill gave all the feels of watching Buffy for the first time, but now with characters like me! I adored this world and story and was almost late for work one day because I couldn’t tear myself away. The imperfect, authentic characters of Overkill sink their teeth into you and refuse to let go. 

Recommended for readers of urban fantasy who are hungry for something fresh. 5 out of 5 stars. 

It's been a long time since I participated in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) with any degree of dedication. Often it didn't line up with the strict deadlines I imposed on myself, and in more recent years, I've been too burned out to even attempt the challenge of 50,000 words in a single month.

While I still feel like that particular goal is insurmountable, I'm using this year's NaNo challenge as inspiration. I'm not participating in any unofficial capacity, but my goal is to write about five times a week. my project is already at 40K, so I haven't even set a wordcount goal for each session. For now I'm only working on showing up to write more regularly.

To help keep my momentum going, and maybe for a bit of accountability, I'll stop by Patreon to talk about my progress and share favorite (unedited!) scenes or lines from that week.

For now, here's a peek at my project for NaNo 2023.

​Exciting news from Castle Holmes: I'm reviving the Patre0n! For the past two months I've been quietly breathing life back into this space, sharing book reviews and updates, as well as exclusive first-looks. I'll have another, official announcement coming up soon, but if you'd like to brag that you got there first, come check things out! 

The support of some awesome humans enables me to write more, more often, and also helps my editors and cover artists. As thanks for your invaluable support, you can access updates, ARC opportunities, first-looks, and short fiction and serials (more on that later!) You can also get free downloads of my ebooks and the chance to be written in as a side character.  Join Now!

I’m thrilled to be an advance reader of Wolf, Willow, Witch, the second book in the Gideon Testaments from Freydís Moon. Wolf picks up shortly after Heart, Haunt, Havoc leaves off, departing from Colin and Bishop’s tale to follow the Norse witch, Tehlor. Tehlor sees opportunity wherever she looks, and when she finds a recently re-murdered body in her friend’s basement, she seizes the chance to create a resurrected guard. But it turns out Lincoln Stone is as thirsty for power as Tehlor’s gods are for sacrifice and makes an unwilling servant. But when a new cult comes to town, Tehlor and Lincoln are forced to decide whether great power is really worth having to work together. 

Wolf, Willow, Witch is as sharp and biting as Tehlor’s attitude and Lincoln’s teeth. The two are equally matched in their greed and their lingering fear of the consequences of terrible choices. The pair find each other bonding and at one another’s throats in equal turns. Heart, Haunt, Havoc approached the divine and holy with reverence, but Wolf stalks divinity, magic, and death with all the unrelenting patience of its namesake. Moon’s signature steady, creeping dread is present here as well, balanced with insatiable hunger–and Tehlor’s hunger for power is matched only by Lincoln’s own.

Recommended for fans of modern folk horror who know the price for power, and are willing to pay. 5 out of 5 stars. 

PRE-ORDER NOW!

​Queer archaeological science fiction with a side of horror and romance.

?‍? Lesbian POV
?‍? LGBTQIA supporting cast
?‍? Snark, Science, and Sex
?‍? Action-Adventure
?‍? Lovers-to-enemies
?‍? Space-horror

OUT 8/12/23!

The body count is rising, and so is Nel's temper.

Archaeologist Dr. Nel Bently has spent her life avoiding clingy exes, but she never dreamed she’d be escaping across the stars. Now she and a fleet of refugees are hunted at every turn by the only woman she ever made the mistake of loving. And Nel, used to outrunning everything, just lost a leg.
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Facing her life’s new trajectory is hard enough, but when Nel starts hearing the deadly signal they tracked on Earth, she is forced to team up with the two men who were once her greatest enemies. Then, a grisly discovery on an abandoned hauler sheds horrific light on the voices in Nel’s head–and what, exactly, Lin is after.

Their hold is full of bodies, their plans are full of holes, and bad-tempered Dr. Nel Bently, avoidant-extraordinaire, is sick of running.

Preorder Now! FUGITIVES FIRST LOOK“PROXIMITY ALERT!”
 
Nel dismissed the warning from her screen with a snarl before tossing over to face the window. Outside space was black. Before, Odyssey’s soft phosphorescent ambiance had allowed her to see billions of stars scattered across the black. Here it was different. The narrow infirmary room held a single porthole at chest-height. Chest-height if I could still stand. The alert had been sounding for the last two days. If collision was imminent, surely they would have plowed into something by now.
 
The alert clicked off, only to be replaced by her door chime. Ignoring that too, she pulled herself out of bed, balancing on her left leg enough to lean against the slim porthole’s sill. Her head rested on the cold acrylic wall. A massive asteroid appeared through her window. Its pocked surface loomed just outside inches of reinforced glass, seeming close enough to graze the ship’s side. Realistically, it was probably several thousand meters away. It would have been thrilling if Nel cared about asteroids. The entire journey would have been thrilling if Nel cared about anything at all.

Another asteroid drifted behind this one, and another and another, dotting the sky above their ship for miles—probably more. Nel’s Earth-born depth perception was utterly useless in a place where distances were measured based on the speed of light. “Where the fuck are we?” she muttered.
 
The door dinged again and she jabbed a finger at the comm button. “I can’t make it to PT today, sorry.”
 
“I’m not PT,” came the answering drawl.
 
Nel grimaced. There was only one person she wanted to see less than the hideously chipper PT tech, and it was Komodor Muda Dar Nalawangsa. “What do you want?”
 
“Open up and I’ll tell you.”
 
“If it was important, it’d be one of the hundred fucking notices pinging around my computer screen. I’m not interested and really don’t want to talk to anyone.”
 
“As evidenced by your treatment of those who still attempt to visit.” He quipped. “Just open the door.”
 
“I can’t reach it,” she lied.
 
“I can bypass the security of your room and set off every single med alarm. The whole team would come rushing in there to see what’s wrong and probably jab you with needles.”

Oh fuck right off, you pompous asshole. Still, his clever threat was not Nel’s idea of a good time. She hopped over to her chair. A glance at the brakes told her it wasn’t going to roll away the second she put her weight in it like the first two times she’d transferred herself unsupervised. Seated, she shoved herself over to the door and slammed her hand onto the panel. There was a pause, then the door hissed open.
 
Dar leaned on the wall across the hall from her. Immaculate, of course, and still wearing his officer’s robe—despite his insistence that there was no command here beyond the flight crew. Soft chimes and the low sound of conversation drifted in with the distinct scent of iodine and something that might have been curry.
 
“Make it quick.” She remained in the doorway, blocking entry to her rooms. These four monochrome walls were hers, even if she hated them, and she wasn’t about to let Dar’s snippy self sully what was shaping up to be a perfectly miserable wallowing session.
 
“Yeah, you’re so damn busy.”
 
“PROXIMITY ALERT.”
 
The bell rang for its allotted three times. Nel didn’t know how they managed to make something as dire as a proximity alert sound boring, but they’d succeeded with flying colors.
“Where even are we? And what day is it?”
 
He snorted. “You don’t know?”
 
“What am I supposed to do,” she sneered, “check the position of the sun? Oh wait—we don’t have one!”
 
“You have a comm and computer. Don’t act like you’re imprisoned here by anything other than your own shitty attitude.”
 
She glared. Truthfully, she barely looked at her computer to do anything other than swipe away notifications that she’d missed yet another appointment or meeting, or dismiss the incessant proximity alerts. She slept or she didn’t, neither mattered or helped her mood.
“We’ve been traveling for five weeks, twenty-three days of which you’ve been conscious. More or less.” He rolled his eyes and gestured to her room. “You want answers, you're going to have to let me in. This isn’t for general consumption.”
 
Something that resembled curiosity, if curiosity was born of apathetic boredom, unfolded in her mind, and was just as quickly squashed. It’s not like I can help them with any of this. Not anymore. With a final pointed, if childish, glare she backed up and gestured dramatically to the room.

He swept in, scanning the untidiness with disdain. “You don’t have a chair?”
 
She smacked the side of her wheelchair. “Only this one and you can’t have it.”
 
He shook his head and went to the window. He was probably checking his own reflection instead of watching the seriously close asteroid tumbling above them.
 
“You still haven’t seen your mother. Or anyone, actually.”
 
“What, you’re talking to her now?”
 
Dar snorted. “Hardly, never met the woman. I just hacked your door’s data logs.”
 
“Gross,” Nel snapped. “How is who I visit any of your business?”
 
“It’s time you got out of here. You’ve been wallowing in your own misery for weeks. You saved Earth. You lived through it. You’re approved for the highest-tech prosthetic we can make—which you would know if you went to a single one of your appointments. Get over yourself long enough to be grateful.”
 
Nel snarled and turned away. She hated Dar. She hated the lack of empathy. She hated the pretentious, spoiled thoughts in the man’s perfectly groomed head. Mostly, though, she hated how much he reminded her of Lin.
 
“I mean, it’s obvious you have some feelings,” Dar observed. His voice had dipped into something other than his usual bark. She couldn’t place it, but it sounded as if he were about to impart some sacred knowledge.
 
Nel wished he would just leave her alone. “No shit, Sherlock.” She had a lot of feelings, if you counted each specific flavor of her anger and apathy separately. Fuck, by that measure she probably had more feelings than space had shitty dark corners. And, judging by however long they’d been traveling, space had about a zillion of those.
 
He sighed. “I have an investment in you, and I’m less than pleased that it appears to be almost impossible to make that pay off.”
 
That made her scowl deeper. “I’m a person, not an investment, you creep.”
 
“Right now you’re pathetic,” Dar muttered.
 
The numb chill that permeated from the hole inside her chest spread in a brittle layer just under her skin. Dar’s words shattered its surface. A flame of her anger licked up through the cracks. “Stop being a fucking alien!”
 
“Stop being a bitch maybe I would!” Dar snapped back. “The minute you get over yourself, I’ll start treating you like an adult.”
 
“Your ship blew off my leg, goddammit, I can’t just get over that,” she shouted, shoving her tray table away. It crashed against the far wall with a clatter. The flash of anger fizzled back into numbness.
 
“I respect that. But I need you to respect that what I’ve got is a lot of problems. And not enough people to solve them.”
 
“That why we’re drifting around some fucking rocky minefield?”
 
The question had the desired effect—Dar’s face settled from his judgmental sneer into something that was either stony anger or reserved frustration. She never could really tell with Dar. “We’re out here because it’s the only place we can hide right now. We’re out here because we don’t know where we’re going next. We’re out here because your infuriating and ridiculously determined ex-girlfriend has been point-three sectors behind us the entire way. You really don’t read a single notice, do you? This is all old news to pretty much everyone in the fleet.”
 
“Well, I’ve been busy.” She braced for the inevitable quip about what she could have possibly been busy with, but to her surprise, it never came.
 
“We’re safe out here, but it won’t last forever. And we burn too hot when we’re running to waste any power on our analysis systems. We could really use your help. No one else saw as many stages of this investigation as you.”
 
She shook her head. “Look, I’m not one of you. I have no idea what half the stuff I saw down there even was, let alone what it did or how. It was fun, I guess, to play for a while, but I’m not cut out for this sci-fi shit. Just get out of my room.”
 
“Nel, next week it won’t be your room.”
 
“What?”
 
“You’re no longer in need of acute medical care. You’re scheduled for a psych eval and assuming you pass it—and despite your nasty attitude, you will—you’re moving to the residential units and starting service shifts.”
 
“What?” For the first time since she woke, very real concern spread in a chill through her body. Psych eval? Would they flag her because of her temper? What about how she had handled Mikey’s death? Or Gretta’s? Or Paul’s? Or facing down her own in the bitter cold of New England’s wilderness, or consumed by raging fires in exchange for Earth’s safety? Nel wasn’t a therapist, but there was a lot to flag on her chart, surely, and most of those flags looked pretty fucking red. And that wasn’t even including the dreams, the number of times she woke drenched in sweat with a thousand voices screaming accusations in her skull. “Why a psych eval?”
 
“It’s protocol. To make sure you’re not a danger to yourself or others. You’ve been through a lot—all of us have.”
 
She glared up at him, wondering if that was actual sympathy in his voice. “I’m just not a fan of therapists. And I don’t see why I need to move at all.”
 
“Look, I pulled every string I could to keep you here so far. But it’s selfish now. You’re wasting the medics’ time and frankly, we really need the bed.”
She paused. “Why do you need the bed?”
 
“We’re a refugee fleet, Bently. Most of us escaped during firefights. You’re not the only one who lost a limb. You’re just lucky you only lost one.” He paused in her doorway. “You need to be done wallowing.”
 
Nel glared at him, wishing IDH had outfitted her with something useful, like laser eyes to zap jerks. She squeezed her eyes closed. Pressure built in her ears, between her eyes, the background mutters of several dozen accusing voices crescendoing every time her lids slid shut. When she opened them again, she was alone. She wasn’t done wallowing. No longer wallowing meant she’d have to actually do something and she hadn’t the faintest idea where to start.Preorder Now!

SUPPORT NOW! I'm so excited to share that the Kickstarter for the We Came to Dance anthology is live today!

Amphibian Press came together with over a dozen authors to support Club Q through storytelling. On November 19, 2022, an LGBT community hub and nightclub called Club Q was attacked by a shooter in Colorado Springs. Five people were murdered. Someone tried to destroy not just individual queer folx’ lives, but a safe place for the LGBT community. Someone silenced the music everyone in the club had come to celebrate with gunfire. We can’t let that happen.

Authors from around the world shared stories of queer joy, filled with gender and culture-diverse characters, found family, community solidarity, love, comfort and hope. All proceeds will be donated to Club Q.

Keep a lookout as Amphibian Press reveals the incredible authors who came together to make this amazing project possible! You can find out more, support the project, and share with your friends below!

Fugitives ARC The time has finally come! With FUGITIVES back from my editor, I'm getting ready to share Nel's latest adventure with all of you. I'm looking for some advance reviewers to join my street team, the Trowel Bearers! If you're a fan of fast-paced, character-driven science fiction with a queer cast and a side of space-horror, I'd love for you to join me! Help reveal the FUGITIVES cover and share an honest review in exchange for an advance copy. Spots are limited so be sure to apply soon! 

Archaeologist Dr. Nel Bently has spent her life avoiding clingy exes, but she never dreamed she’d be escaping across the stars. Now she and a fleet of refugees are hunted at every turn by the only woman she ever made the mistake of loving. And Nel, used to outrunning everything, just lost a leg.

Facing her life’s new trajectory is hard enough, but when Nel starts hearing the deadly signal they tracked on Earth, she is forced to team up with the two men who were once her greatest enemies. Then, a grisly discovery on an abandoned hauler sheds horrific light on the voices in Nel’s head–and what, exactly, Lin is after.

Their hold is full of bodies, their plans are full of holes, and bad-tempered Dr. Nel Bently, avoidant-extraordinaire, is sick of running.