Vivian Maylor is trying to hold it together. But her attempts to build a life with the man she loves seem doomed by the dragon inside her yearning to break free. Vivian is a dreamshifter, the last line of defense between reality and the dreamworld, and the only one of her kind.
Weston Jennings also believes he is the only one of his kind. He fears his powers as a dreamshifter, and resists learning to control them. After suffering a tragic loss, Weston heads deep into the woods of the Pacific Northwest to embrace a safe life of solitude. But when a terrible mistake leads to an innocent’s death, his guilt drives him to his former home, where he encounters what he never thought he would find: another shifter.
Kerry Schafer is licensed both as a Mental Health Professional and an RN, and spends most of her daylight hours helping people–usually even with a smile. In books, she gets to blow stuff up, preferably with something more interesting than a bomb. Dragons are good; exploding giant slime toads are even better. She has published two novels with Ace Books: BETWEEN, which was released in January 2013, and WAKEWORLD, slated to hit stores in January 2014. She is also the author of THE DREAM WARS novellas, available where electronic books are sold.
Kerry and her Viking live in Colville, Washington, in a little house surrounded by rocks, trees, and gangs of deer and wild turkeys.
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Guest Post From Kerry:
Every now and then someone asks me why I write.
On the surface of things it seems like a reasonable question, especially considering the restrictions I need to put on the rest of my life in order to make time for the words. These days the day job doesn’t leave me much time for anything, let alone writing. I’m up at 4:30 am on weekday mornings, ready to start writing by 5. I very seldom turn on the TV. I haven’t touched my piano in months. My house has become a safe haven for dust bunnies.
If you think this is insane, I agree with you. But there are varying levels of insanity, and the insane of getting up at ungodly hours to make the writing happen is much more manageable than the state of mind I get into if I’m not writing.
Not that I don’t think about it from time to time. Some days writing is damn hard work. I have spells of wishful day dreaming about a life where I sleep in every morning and come home from work to read books and watch TV and hang out online with my writer friends.
But wait.
In that life I wouldn’t actually have writer friends to hang out with. And if I had all that time to loll about reading and watching TV and maybe doing crafts, then I would also have time to clean. The dust bunnies would be sad and so would I.
The truth is that I need to write or my head gets so cluttered with thoughts and ideas and emotions and unfinished conversations that I can’t think straight any more. My nerves get all jumpy and edgy. I snap at people for no good reason. It feels a bit like a kettle on the stove with the lid on tight and the steam vent plugged.
Sooner or later the whole thing will explode and there will be a mess.
I write to make sense of the world. I write because I love the music words make when I line them up in the right order on the page. I write because there is magic in it, and maybe that is the most important reason.
We all are looking for some sort of magic in this world of realities. And there is a deep magic in watching characters come to life. As the story grows it takes on a life of its own. Things happen that I as the writer never foresaw. When the writing is going well there is an incredible rush of creative energy and the magic of an unfolding world.
Sometimes, there is the even deeper magic of a reader who fully connects with the story, who is moved to tears or laughter or maybe even both. And that is the very best reason of all.
Thanks so much for having me over - your blog is lovely.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much Kerry! It was my pleasure.
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