Vegas Here I Come
Nov 02, 2025 5:11 pm
All the Things I will Learn
The Author Nation conference is using Eventee and I obviously need to clone myself to be able to attend everything that I've tagged in the app. I am pretty sure they are video taping everything, so I might spend the rest of November watching presentations. But overall, I'm expecting to take notes, talk a lot of business and learn how to be better. Either way the 4 days at home was not enough my my extrovert battery is going to be deader than dead by the time I get home.
Vegas is not my favorite place, too loud, too much cigarette smoke, and too expensive, but a friend and I are going to Area 15 and doing Meow Wolf and the John Wick experience. It should be fun and good way to start the week. Then on Wednesday I'm helping with a murder mystery party based on Clue. I am Esmerelda Jade (aka Mrs Green) and believe me, if I am the killer, they totally deserved it.
Don't forget, I'm looking for some new beta readers for my Cori at Large novels, so if you are interested click here <-- Some of you may have signed up before, but this is for this round of beta, so let me know.
Let me know if any of you are coming to Reader Nation. It is completely free, there are a TON of authors there, and they will be selling books. Plus a bunch of them are friends, so you know they have to be awesome!
Book Recommendations!
We saw the preview to this book a few weeks ago, but now you can find out the real story behind the Volcan Knights. And exactly who they are and if the price they pay is worth it. Get The Volcan Knights now.
Weekly Micro Story
The Blight
Princess Elisandra Marquina Roselia Joten sat on her horse, golden hair shorn short, watching what was left of her kingdom. High above her stood her ancestor Joten Farsight, creator of what had once been the Joten kingdom and its defender.
Until now.
"Was there nothing you could do?" Eli asked in a low voice that Joten could hear without issue. No one knew if Joten was god, monster, alien, or something else, but everyone agreed he was power personified.
[No. The best I could do was send the survivors away, chase all the living creatures from my land, and save seeds. That is done. Now there is nothing left but to destroy it.]
The words were flat, but Eli had spent a year helping Joten to cleanse and save, she knew his tears.
"Then do it." Her chest clenched tight with pain and sorrow. Tears ran from her bright green eyes, yet another mark of the Blight.
There was a loud crack, and the two passes into what had been a kingdom of joy and prosperity were sealed, leaving only a dead land. Land that held the bodies of too many humans, animals, even insects, as the Blight swept through killing most and leaving few survivors with weird abilities. Abilities they would have given up for their world back. Eli was no different. At the age of twenty-three she'd buried everyone in her family, except her and Joten: he immune, she marked.
[You should go now. To cleanse the land I need to focus. And you my child have always been endlessly curious.]
"And distracting," she said, trying to smile, but it came out weak. "Where should I go? You know most of the kingdoms are scared of us, scared we still carry the Blight no matter how carefully you cleansed all those leaving. And none of that gets us any closer to identifying why, what, who set this on us. Not that the why matters to me, only the vengeance earned." Eli touched her chest, where the Blight had changed her, made her into something more, something wonderful, and something she would have rather never had if she could still have her family, her kingdom, her people.
[There is one far from here, far enough even my name means nothing. He was a friend once, though I have not spoken to him in … well… a very long time. If he will agree to help you, maybe you might find why. This Blight is not natural and I know of no gods who would have cursed me so. Find him. His true name is Gamesh, but when we were young, I knew him as Meshi.]
"So that is my quest?" Her voice was dry, but maybe somewhere there was a spark of hope.
[Your quest is to destroy whomever did this to us. But as I am unable to guide you, lest this spread across the world, Meshi is all I can provide.]
"It is enough." Eli turned her horse. "How will I know where he is?"
A large finger reached down and touched the back of her burned and dehydrated skin. A glowing arrow appeared.
[The last gift I can give you. If you know the true name of a being, then this arrow will always guid you to them. May it be enough to find that which caused this.] Joten turned back and stepped into the valley, fire bursting up in his wake as he began to cry.
Eli did not look back, but rode away, the arrow pointing to the lands so far north the sun rarely appeared.
~*~
So this is related to the dragon and the princess short story - Difference. Longer than most of them, but it started writing itself. Oops.
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