Athena Grayson's Blog

If you met me on the street, you’d never know I walk around with this crazy, delicate balance of being scared and wary versus being excited and eager to see what’s around the next corner.

We like to talk about being brave and fearless and embracing the authentic, but I live in a culture that has about 129 guns for every person living in the US. (to “defend” – your property, your family/loved ones, etc. Only the greatest threats seem to be coming from each other, and everyone has a gun, so everyone’s a threat, because how can you be a threat-deterrent without being a threat yourself?) It’s a culture of being afraid (and it is exhausting. Sorry, but it is).

Fear Has Flavors

Fear freezes you. The kind of fear that’s a jump-scare or the revelation of a cryptid (funny side-story–I once spotted an Amazon delivery person in the dark, bent over to put down a package on my porch and the angle made me think it was the neighbor’s beagle come to visit until he stood straight and I thought, “Holy shit that beagle is six feet tall on his hind legs, AAAAHHHHH!” That delivery guy has not been back to my house since. I hope I didn’t scare him too bad).

Fear is also a gift (somebody wrote a book about it. It’s a useful book, go read it). Being strategically afraid is useful. Keep your powder dry (see, even our metaphors are armed) and only jump at the shadows that belong to actual threats.

But the fear I’ve been thinking about lately is that fear that produces creative resistance. The fear that keeps us from chasing after all but the greatest ideas that seem to hit us and pass through us like X-rays, invisible but exposing our insides and altering us at the cellular level at the same time.

Creative Resistance

It’s kin to that “FOMO” (Fear Of Missing Out) that attracts our attention instead of prompting us to run. This is the active twin of that jump-scare that says, “look at this, be fascinated by it.” The creative resistance inside that fear is the thing that says, “Hey, this is big. This is a Big Idea that will challenge you. You sure you’re up to this?”

But creative resistance doesn’t speak in screams. It whispers in corners of rooms with bad acoustics so you really have to listen to hear it. And only fools don’t heed its warnings. I’ve been that kind of fool before. There are lessons to be learned once you bandage the wounds. For what it’s worth, I’d be the same kind of stupid again over these ideas if I had to do it all again. But going forward, I’ve learned a few things.

Creative Resistance is a sneaky fear that needs to be sat down with and served tea (formally) and listened to. This fear will speak of its nature and in doing so, provide a road map of the dark woods leading to exactly where I need to go.

Courage is being scared and doing it anyway. I think about the legend of Baba Yaga, the witch who lives in a house that ambles around the dark wood on chicken feet (I’ve never been clear whether it’s two giant chicken legs, or hundreds of regular-sized chicken legs. I persist in believing the latter though, because that’s somehow more scary in its ordinariness). To survive an encounter with her, you must approach her with manners and respect. For the few who can look upon her terrible visage and call her “little grandmother,” she may even let you leave with a gift.

Right now, I’m teased with a Creative Resistance fear. It’s whispering Big Ideas and I recognize the warning signs. I remember my manners well enough…but am I scared enough to have it over for tea?

The post Indie Weekend: Being Scared appeared first on Athena Grayson.

Being a writer feels like a constant struggle between desperately wanting to tell stories and desperately eager to hear other people’s stories. One of the most enduring questions a writer gets is, “Where do you get your ideas?” And most of us will tell you that it’s not getting an idea that’s the hard work, it’s slowing down the onslaught and picking the best idea. Because I have ideas all the time. Lots of random or discrete things from the news will hit me and some of them will burrow into my brain (gross, right?) and live there until they manifest something new that fits into what I’m writing.

Ideas don’t always fit the narrative of what you’re trying to do, though they may seem perfectly suited to a story. They’re like little divergent paths, roads not taken, alternate universes. But they’re sultry, and tempting, and full of bait that can lead a writer off the story road and into the weeds. Which, I will be the first to say from experience, is where some of the most stunning flowers are.

in the weeds is where you find the most startling beauty.

It’s a constant struggle to find the right balance between sticking to the path and making discoveries in the weeds. Every writer has to figure out their own balance for that. Readers, too. From a reader’s perspective, when we read genre fiction, we know (roughly) where we’re going and how (roughly) we’re getting there. Experiencing the “drift” that is unique to every author is what makes the trip so memorable.

The post Indie Weekend: Uncharted Territory appeared first on Athena Grayson.

One of the most enjoyable things I get to do when writing sci-fi and fantasy settings is to create the kind of spaces I’d love to visit. Even the places with, ahem, challenging environments, are still fascinating to me if only to understand how they got there.

Varuna is not one of those “challenging” environments, however. Officially known as Iolia 16, it’s the 16th moon of the gas giant Iolia. Iolia is considered “remote” to the Capitol worlds and inner planets of the Jewel system because the orbit’s jumpgate has few destinations, which makes it harder and longer to get there from the core worlds but makes it very attractive to people who don’t want to be within easy reach of the long arm of the law.

House D’Arno, of the old Star Empire traditionally kept an estate in the Iolian system, but the bustling moons are home to many more folk who consider themselves “tariff bypass facilitators” (ahem, pirates) and the like. Among the rogues’s moons and scoundrels’ hideouts, Varuna stands as a somewhat respectable vacation destination, if one overlooks the presence of the Restoration, stirring up rebellion against the Union’s ever-growing oppression.

But what a place to foment unrest–most of Varuna’s continental landmasses are covered in a shallow sea anywhere from 1-2 meters deep, dotted with archipelagos from the high grounds. Fresh water comes from springs on the island chains. Deeper oceans exist between the continental shelves, and the land above the water is reserved for food production.

The people of Varuna–visitors and residents alike–live in settlements of linked domiciles constructed in the shallow waters on stabilizers not unlike something you’d find in the Maldives. The surface living quarters are simple, consisting of movable walls, thatched roofs, and light, easily-renewable construction materials. Below the waterline are more secure and sturdy living spaces, suitable for sheltering in hurricane season. But the warm, shallow seas, the ocean breezes, the heat from the primary and the gas giant make Varuna an ocean getaway worth the trip.

By far, though, the most stunning thing about Varuna is the daily eclipse it experiences as the gas giant transits the primary star. The locals call it the “little night” and between the eclipse and the amazing view of the Jovian and the other moons, Varuna’s sky is a sight to behold.

Read more about the worlds of the Jewel system in the Huntress of the Star Empire series. Varuna is featured in “The Release,” Part 4 of “Huntress of the Star Empire.” You’re gonna want to read the other three first to get the whole story, exotic intergalactic locales and all!

 

Only her enemy can set her mind free!

When Micah's incarceration brings him face to face with the head of the Union itself, he discovers a devastating weakness in the Union's stranglehold on the star system...and a shocking truth about his people.

Now a fugitive from the Union she so loyally served, Treska is forced into an uneasy alliance with the Restoration. As the lies holding the Union together at the top begin to unravel, so do the thin threads maintaining Treska’s false identity.

With her world shattered and her identity in crisis, Treska’s only ally is the man whose mental powers terrify her. It’s going to take all of Micah’s mental talents to set her free, but her fear of his gifts may make Treska a prisoner of her own mind.

Start reading now

 

Social Media was one of the big inspirations that lived in my creative space when I started dreaming up the stories in the Scions of the Star Empire. When I was writing the story, it felt like the height of social media’s influence on us (heavens, did I underestimate, or what?). Turns out my imagination couldn’t keep up with reality and I’m still not sure we’re hitting “peak social media.”

On the overcrowded city-planet of Landfall, careers rise and fall via social media, same as can be said for here on planet Earth. But Landfall culture takes it one step further–fortunes are won and lost as well, with the Social Capital markets, where a person’s worth is banked upon not by their credit score, but by their “SoCap” score. SoCap scores even affect the alliances of noble house couples, determining beforehand who has the upper hand in a marriage before either party says, “I do.”

The higher up the social ladder you climb, the less an alliance is about a couple, and the more it becomes the union of two entire households, so determining who’s got the advantage holds a lot more at stake than just who gets to ban stewbeets from the household menu (the answer to that is “everyone,” because everyone hates stewbeets. Unfortunately, they form the basis for a LOT of food served to all social classes on this over-burdened world).

You would think that a meteoric rise and “stickiness” at the highest level of SoCap would be the path to greatness, right? But that’s not always the case. Peaking before your time can have disastrous consequences, even for a princess. As the emperor’s daughter, Ione has to make the most advantageous match, but not until her family is ready (because she will never be personally ready to give up her freedom). Timing is even more critical for her boyfriend, Den. If they rise too fast, too soon as a couple, he’ll never be able to escape his domineering father’s will.

Outside of marriage alliances, there are all sorts of business contracts that are made or broken based on the balance of social capital held by the participants. The privileged young people like the students at the Landfall Cultural Academy can use their social capital to influence trends in culture, fashion, and entertainment…but by the same token, their popularity is traded like a commodity for others to profit like stocks on a market exchange. With all eyes on them, all the time, managing their reputations is a matter of survival.

Read more about the world of Landfall in the Star Empire’s system of the Torch in the Scions of the Star Empire series.

 

They have everything they want...except a future

The heirs of Landfall's powerful nobility have all the wealth and privilege of their family status, but there's only one thing that will give them true freedom--the title of Scion. The only way to earn it is by carefully managing the social influence markets that rank them according to their accomplishments. At the exclusive Landfall Cultural Academy, the heirs compete to elevate their status high enough for the Cultural Trust to grant them the title and the freedom to make their own way, and scandal is as good as scholarship.

 

 

A Year of Sneaky Progress

2018 was a year of doing brave things, but sneaky. Like a ninja. At the beginning of the year, I challenged myself to be brave and confront the deep-seated fears I have been carrying around. So I published 3 books in 3 different series and one omnibus while I wasn’t paying attention (nobody else was, either, but hey–I’ve got all the time in the world to run promos).

I finally did some promo that didn’t feel like I was going to bring down the world if I didn’t have everything lined up perfectly. I crossed a Rubicon by letting go of perfection, especially over things I couldn’t control.

Remembering the Joy

2018 was also the year I got my groove back on the fun part of writing. If you’re in the indie publishing community for any time at all, you hear a LOT of people talking about how you have to treat the writing as a business (and to be fair, that ain’t wrong at all), but what they mean is that you have to treat the publishing part like a business. But you have got to leave that shit at the door when you go back into the writing cave, and I was dragging it in with me like a dead carcass that didn’t even have the good meat left on its bones. I spent some time writing for nothing but pure joy this past year and not only did it re-invigorate me, but it helped me identify some deeper themes in my writing and refined my process a little. Hopefully, that’ll show up in my future work.

Turtling Up

2018 was also the year I taught myself to “turtle up” for real. I’m naturally an extrovert, but as any extrovert will tell you, the only way to be extroverted in a healthy manner is to know when you have to step away and let your introverted flipside take the wheel to help you refine all that social energy that comes from being a natural people-person. Turtling up doesn’t mean “lurk on social media” – it means really stepping away from social interaction (even passive social interaction) and letting your brain turn off the social awareness for a time. The end result allowed me to become more discerning about my social interactions and more aware of the level of “noise” I was creating with less-than-meaningful interactions. Not to say that I don’t get on SM and joke around–I do–but I pick my battles (and my parties, don’t get me wrong) better.

2019 Moving Forward

I’m continuing to shed unnecessary carcasses, cleaning out my cave, and forcing myself outside my comfort zones. Expect to see different things from me this year. I’m still writing the same Athena Grayson stories with emotionally-cognizant men and quick-thinking, dynamic women dashing through deeply-developed worlds that feel like a real place you’d want to visit, and quirky, sometimes magical. elements that would make your stay an adventure.

I hope you stick around.

“Presentation”

If I go any further down, I’m going to be going uphill on the other side of the world. Niamne’s legs ached from the downhill trek. Her fingers were sore from grabbing onto the cart through rough patches, uneven bumps, and one sharp dip that nearly broke the bird’s leg. And her head was starting to hurt from squinting into the gloom and jumping at far too many shadows.

So when the first filmy spectres appeared beside her, she was almost too tired and dull-witted to be afraid. Her heart sped up when she realized that the presence of so many dead must mean the Necromancer was nearby. A fine trembling started in her bones, shaking outward as she carefully placed her feet in the narrow space between the two columns of silent, solemn spirits. The ground leveled out and she tried not to look at her dead companions, enough of the old superstitions making her fear their truth. See a spirit, soon be a spirit.

Ridiculous. She was an acolyte of the Living Flame. A flamekeeper’s chosen. The Tithe was a simple exchange to a fellow gifted mage for services rendered. She lifted her head high, straightened her headscarf, and looked to either side of her. The arms of the dead steered her to the left. The strider bird obliged at her nudge, and she carried the shortweighted tithe through the half-collapsed arched doorway to which the spirits pointed.

The room she entered was larger than the great hall at the manor house, larger than the room of the faithful in the Flame temple. In fact, the room could easily have held most of the main temple, except for the storerooms and dormitories. Columns soared to her left and right, many tilted at odd angles, one or two collapsed. Arches stretched overhead, a few flying buttresses flew out into nothing. The walls were not rough-hewn or naturally occurring here. In fact, they bore a startling resemblance to the walls of the temple that was her home.

She remembered that she was bearing an important tithe, and not on a macabre sightseeing tour and brought her head down from the rafters–and closed her gaping mouth as well. Someone had laid out a table, not unlike the ones set in the manor’s great hall for a feast day. It seemed incongruous, this picnic-in-the-mortuary setting, until she remembered tales that the oldest of the priestesses used to tell of how their venerable ones made it an everyday practice instead of the symbolic, once a year “absent guest” festival on the eve of Hallowing.

Her instructions failed her then. She had been instructed to take the tithe into the catacombs, that the dead would make their wishes known, and that she was to deliver the tithe with grace befitting a Flame priestess, but return forthwith–another anomaly in a series of them, since the tithing priestess was usually gone for an entire week. The other acolytes snickered and whispered things having to do with cleansings and impurities and something about profanity.

Niamne could believe it would take a week to get the stink of crypt spider out of her clothing, and the dust down here was of a nature so epic that bards could sing of it, but she failed to see the humor in either the chill underground realm of the dead or its lord, and it was just as well–she didn’t believe most of what the group of tittering dimglows preached as fact.

She shrugged the unease away and straightened her shoulders. In a voice that shook too much, she called out. “Hail, Dread Lord. I bring thee fair Tithe from the grateful folk of the Blessed Lands. Stone and hide and cakes and wine–” Here she ducked her head and set the shoulder pack on the top of the loaded cart. “–and…supplies.” She was greeted with only silence. She looked around, thinking that perhaps, as this was his domain, the Necromancer need not be present to accept and to be aware of his tithe’s arrival. One of the ghosts could probably let him know.

She cleared her throat. “Um. Okay then. I’ll just…be off–“

“Fair Tithe?”

The voice startled her. Not because it came from somewhere inside the room which meant that the Dread Lord was here, but because his voice was as deep as a six-foot hole in the earth, the syllables inflected with the creak of hinges of wooden burial boxes, the groaning timbers of the gallows. And yet, it flowed over her like–like a shroud, light, warming her from the inside, and clinging to her. Her own reaction frightened her more than his sudden appearance in one of the chairs at the macabre dining table, made all the more sudden by her realization that he had always been there. Her mind had just refused to see him until now.

          

Christmas Eve on Friendship Station

An original send-up by Athena Grayson (with apologies to Clement C. Moore, Coca-Cola, and astrophysics)

‘Twas the night before Christmas, all through the space station

Not a creature was resting, or taking vacation.

The techs shifted cargo from shuttle to ship

While inspectors checked mass outside gravity’s grip.

The launch window opened, the countdown proceeded

For the vessel undocking, bringing Mars what it needed.

When outside the station, in the vacuum of night

There appeared a great beacon of unexplained light!

The station chief hollered for the science mechanic

To explain this anomaly before inciting a panic.

The mechanic had studied astronomy and physics

But it’s quantum mechanics whose laws bind St. Nicks.

“There’s no way that a sleigh pulled by reindeer could travel

through a vacuum ‘tween planets without time-space unravel!”

But as she stared out the viewport, biting her lip

That sleigh warped a bubble around the Mars ship.

“The physics are certain, if that ship escapes

We’ll be knocked out of orbit unless it’s replaced!”

The chief and mechanic held hands out of fright

As the sleigh warped away with the ship in the night!

But the shockwave of matter’s abrupt subtraction

Only left in its wake their mutual attraction.

“Holy ****, a parcel!” said the tech with a bleep

The station chief winced. Please let me be asleep.

Let this be a dream, let my mind be a-wander

Let that sound be my nightmares and not the station transponder.

But the Earth spun below, in its blue and green beauty,

And the mechanic next to him…was kind of a cutie.

The tech brought in the box, it measured very dense

The chief, mechanic, and scientist couldn’t make it make sense.

The scientist pulled his scanner, took some readings, and said, “Whoa!”

“This box replaced the mass of the entire Mars cargo!”

The mechanic gasped. “What could replace the mass of all our cargo bays?”

“Only one thing,” the scientist said. “Fruitcake for the holidays!”

© 2016 Athena Grayson

One of the most beloved elements of high fantasy is the feeling that you are in another world. Without the history or the limitations of our own world, the rules can (in theory) be anything you want them to be. Yet there’s a tendency to stick with a “medieval Europe” analogue that’s hard for a writer to break out of, simply because it’s rather familiar from the titans of genre who have gone before.

Part of the reason for that is everyone’s favorite twist–magic. The closer you get to the modern era, the more unlikely magic seems–the greater our need for some sort of quasi-scientific explanation. But what else is a technological advance than our ability to decode something that once felt like magic? In the world of Strange Magics, magic, like physics, adheres to certain rules that people have known for centuries and believe to be infallibly true. Just like we believed in the infallible truth of the “humors of the body” once upon a time.

The magics in Strange Magics stem from the patronage of the gods of the land, and their chosen people are the recipients of those magical gifts. But the strange in Strange Magics comes as the world is poised for change. Just like our world turns to change more frequently than not. Like our world, people in the world of Strange Magics can become hidebound and provincial. But unlike our world, the gods of theirs have been known to shake things up a bit.

Ahh, November. When the autumn sets in for real (or the spring, if you’re in the southern hemisphere) and the weather’s firmly set on the next brutal season and the last vestiges of the previous one are fading. And writers everywhere hunker down in front of their keyboards and “go dark” in varying degrees on Social Media because November is National Novel Writing Month.

I’m no stranger to the NaNo craze – I’ve been “NaNo-ing” since 2002. I haven’t “won” every year, but I have learned tons about my writing process and about the creative process in general. This year, my goal is to Have Fun Writing.

So the headfirst slide into November via a thirty-day binge on making words? I’m there for it. I’ve got coffee, a half-formed idea, and a heavy-duty keyboard, and I’m ready to go!

Tithed to the Dread Lord actually started its life as a NaNoWriMo novel. I wrote it in what I still describe as an orgy of words. Sounds kinky, I know, but I had this idea one day, and it felt so complete and so much fun to do that I ended up writing the whole draft in a month (it was an October, but who’s counting). Ask any writer, and they’ll tell you that books like this one–that feel like they’ve sprung fully-formed from your head–don’t come around that often. When they do, ride that lightning and thank the writing gods for the gift. In the meantime, below is an excerpt. Clicking on the excerpt will take you to the book’s page where you can read the blurb and see where to pick up a copy.

Tithed Excerpt

Excerpt from "Tithed to the Dread Lord" by Athena Grayson. 

"Pure"

“This marks you as a Pure One, then. Untouchable by all but your goddess?”

She licked her lips again and nodded. She tried to catch his eye, but the shock of hair over his face hung down, obscuring his gaze and any thoughts she might read there. “I’m to wear it until I pass my trials of purification.”

His lips stretched in a cynical smile. “You will fail.”

She stepped back. “What?” Her lips folded together. I’ve had enough of being frightened witless, and enough of being left ignorant. “I’ll have that back, please. I’m sorry you didn’t like your tithe or the person who delivered it. I told them it was a bad idea to send an acolyte, but nobody ever listens to acolytes, and now you’ve gone and insulted me, too, so my day is complete and this task is done.”

“You misunderstand, my lady,” he said. “I offer no insult. I’m merely stating fact. Your Councilmen have taken a gamble with my good nature. And they have lost. Or more precisely, they have gambled with and lost you.”

No one likes an ivory tower quite like a mage likes an ivory tower and no matter the school of magic, the world’s practitioners tend to keep apart. So much so that even though the farmfolk who follow the Corn goddess and the priest-caste who serve Lady Flame live together in the Barony, they don’t tend to mix much, and never take apprentices from outside their own peoples. They share the land, but the lines are clearly drawn.

Of course, the gods don’t care for lines drawn by men.

They certainly didn’t when they called Niamne of Sunvale to serve at the temple of Lady Flame. She was older than the other acolytes, and came from the farmfolk who worked the land and honored the Corn goddess. Strange magics were afoot that season, the elders claimed.

Of course, it wasn’t the first time strange magics had visited the people of the Barony. The Catacombs beneath the earth are as old as civilization itself, and far more vast than the sleepy hamlets and villages tucked into the green fields on top of them, and ruled by one man–the Dread Lord. The last necromancer, final heir to a tradition of the dead that some believe ought to have been long-dead and left in the dustbin of history in the face of progress.

Of course, the gods don’t like being told they’re out of date, either.

The dark Bone god may be so fearsome that none speak of him, but old traditions die hard, especially when they’re about honoring the dead. Orphios the Profane, the last necromancer, will have to remind the good folk that the oldest practices are traditions for very good reasons.

 

Introducing the world of Strange Magics
Slake your craving for gothic fantasy romance





















He can tempt her into darkness, but can she lead him out of it?