Well, hey, it's Monday! So let's do another excerpt from Gameboard of the Gods, shall we? Today we have Chapter 2, letting us look through the eyes of exile Justin March as he slogs his way through the more uncivilized parts of this world.

The link to the chapter is here, and it in turn includes a link to the glossary and background info if you need help, plus the first chapter if you missed it. And yeah...lots more swearing here because this is adult, not young adult. Hope you enjoy!

And if you missed the news about my updated tour schedule this year, you can take a look at it here.

Yay! Here it is. As promised, I have the first excerpt from my next adult novel, Gameboard of the Gods, coming June 4. Two more excerpts will be coming out this month.

Before you dive in, let me give you three pieces of advice:


1. Remember, this is an adult novel, not YA. I say this because there's a lot of swearing in this first chapter. The characters are kind of upset, and people say bad things when they're upset.

2. This is told from Mae's POV, which will soon be obvious. If you want to read the background on her or the world, check out my series of Age of X posts.

3. Many terms will be explained in the context of the book, but if you want to know any now, remember that there's a glossary.


That's it! On to CHAPTER 1!

If you've been following along this week, you've been delving into all the Gameboard of the Gods background and character info that I've been doling out--and boy, is there a lot of it! I know it seems a little heavy compared to some of my other books, and I honestly think this comes from growing up with high fantasy and sci-fi novels. Those were what I read, and I always thought those were the kinds of books I'd be writing, so it was a surprise when I ended up with my lighter paranormals. But it's been a good surprise! I'm so happy I've got into the books I did because I love creating and writing them.

But Gameboard is a great project for me too because it lets me explore some new things. Because it does show echoes of that hardcore fantasy background I came from, there are a lot of terms that might be unfamiliar, so I whipped you up a handy online Gameboard of the Gods Glossary to give you a quick reference to what all these things mean. Now, of course, you're welcome to read through it now. But if it's daunting, hold off until you read the book or next week's excerpts!

And guess what else is coming next week? My tour dates for Gameboard of the Gods. I'll give you a heads-up that this is another small one, focused on the West Coast. But I will be visiting some areas I haven't been to in a while, so that'll be fun. We'll have info on that next week.

My last bit of news is that Vampire Academy: Blood Sisters has been greenlit! This is huge news, and I'm not sure how big people realized it is. Even when you cast a movie, until you get that green light (which is more than just a metaphor), things can still fall apart. But now we have the official go-ahead, and filming is scheduled to start at the end of May in the UK. This just got real, people! If you missed my post about the cast and script, check out this blog entry. It was written before the filming dates were confirmed, but the rest is pretty up-to-date.

Time for another Gameboard of the Gods character breakdown. Here’s a link to the other background stuff I’ve been doing in anticipation of the series, so you can catch up (which you should totally do if you haven't, since this post deals with some complex history and whatnot of the series). The last two characters we looked at, Justin and Mae, are very much the leads in this book. Today’s character, Tessa, is important too since she’s one of our POV people, but she’s a step back from the roles Justin and Mae play in the book’s main plot. She still has a critical role, as we’ll see.

Tessa, the nickname for Teresa Cruz, is sixteen and isn’t from the RUNA. She’s from the province of Panama, which is where Justin has spent his exile. If you recall the background post, I explained that the Mephistopheles virus wasn’t as lethal to those of mixed genetic backgrounds. So, Central America--which has a pretty diverse population--survived better than other places (sorry, Europe). Compared to the RUNA, it’s still pretty savage, though. It has rigid tiers of upper and lower classes and a weak, corrupt government influenced by gangs that vie for control of the city. That being said, they still have electricity and bars, so Justin decided it was the best he could do.

Tessa’s great-grandparents were actually refugees from the RUNA way back when. They fled the genetic mandates that controlled who you were supposed to have kids with. Despite settling in Panama, they were always homesick and passed on this worship of the RUNA to their descendants. So, when Justin is able to get Tessa admittance into the RUNA, it’s an offer her family can’t refuse. Her father helped Justin considerably in Panama, so Justin feels a sense of obligation. He also sees some of the same potential and intelligence he’s so proud of in himself in Tessa, and he thinks her life would go to waste being one of the upper class Panamanian women are educated at home and kept sequestered from dangerous elements outside.

So, Tessa becomes what’s called in literature “the innocent.” Most of the book takes place in the RUNA. Justin and Mae are from there, so they’re totally drinking its Kool-Aid. When we’re in their POVs, they think it’s the most amazing, wonderful, superior place in the whole world. Tessa, as an outsider, looks at it through a different lens. Certainly, she’s still dazzled. After all, the technology is leagues beyond what she grew up with, and the possibilities for a young woman are endless by comparison. Nonetheless, she doesn’t necessarily see the RUNA’s sense of superiority, control over religion and genes, and obsession with media as the awesome things everyone else does.

Lastly, Tessa truly is an innocent, not just in the literary sense. She’s young, and no matter how intelligent she is, she’s been sheltered. This makes for an interesting contrast to jaded and worldly Justin and Mae, not to mention creating a few “fish out of water” situations.

That wraps up our principle characters. Tomorrow, I’ll sum things up with a glossary of all these crazy terms, and next week…first excerpt!

Time for another Gameboard of the Gods character breakdown. Here’s a link to the other background stuff I’ve been doing in anticipation of the series, so you can catch up. Last time, we talked about my male lead, Justin March. Today we go to the first of my two female principles: Mae Koskinen.

Mae is in the RUNA’s military. Specifically, she is a praetorian, which is me showing off with my college classes on Latin and Roman history again. I mentioned in Justin’s post that the RUNA has adopted a loose Greco-Roman culture. In the Roman Empire, praetorians were the emperor’s elite guards. They were well-trained and often instrumental in overthrowing the emperors they were supposed to protect. This is because the later Roman Empire was diverting so much of its regular military into conquering new lands that the praetorians were pretty much the only soldiers left in the city. So, if you wanted to stage a coup and become emperor, “all” you had to do was get the praetorians on your side to turn against their leader.

Anyway, back to the future. The RUNA has a senate, not an emperor, so that’s who the praetorians protect. They also fight on the RUNA’s behalf in the dangerous areas outside the country. Why? Because the praetorians are badass. The RUNA doesn’t like genetic manipulation--not after that virus that took out half the world--but they’re totally cool using technology to make super soldiers. Praetorians have tiny implants in their arms that amp up whatever neurotransmitter or hormone happens to be going strong. So, if you’re in a fight and high on adrenaline, the implant picks up on that and helps you increase your adrenaline to crazy levels that make you faster, stronger, etc. A fun(?) side effect is that the implant will also “helpfully” increase the chemicals of lust churning through you when you’re turned on. Don’t mess with praetorian sex lives.

The other thing to know about Mae is that this tough soldier girl actually comes from a posh, aristocratic background. In the RUNA’s formation, certain ethnic groups wanting to protect the purity of their genes were exempted from forced breeding. Mae is the descendent of one of these groups (which slang calls “castes”), a Finnish one, so she’s a rare blonde in the dark-haired RUNA. The castes, still hardcore about their genetic purity, like to keep their women pampered and at home having kids. So, the fact that a prime specimen like Mae ran off to the military is something of an oddity.

So Mae is a contradiction, a once-fashionable young woman trained in music and grand parties who now fights and kills for her country without hesitation. She keeps her emotions locked down, to the extent that she has sex with the lights off, lest her lovers see what she’s feeling. This impenetrable exterior drives Justin crazy because he’s made a habit (and career) of getting into people’s heads. He drives her crazy because her carefully controlled personality sees his vices as a sign of weakness. What could possibly go wrong with these two hanging out together?

One more character tomorrow!

If you tuned in yesterday, I set up the background for Gameboard of the Gods in anticipation of the excerpts I'll be posting later this month. If you still want to follow along and get some backstory, I'm going to go forward today with the first of three principle characters. The book is told in third person POV, and each chapter follows the perspective of one of our leads. So let's meet these crazy kids.

The first is Justin March, who's not really a kid. Fun fact: when I conceived this story years ago, his name was Justin Drew. Justin, however, is a doctor of the academic sort, and Dr. Drew is a no-go these days. So he got a name makeover in homage to Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. Justin in no way resembles the moral March girls, though. He doesn't even resemble Laurie on a bad day. But we'll get to his vices in a minute.

Remember when I said religion was strictly regulated in the RUNA? The people who do this are called servitors, from servitor veritatis, which is Latin for "servant of the truth." In trying to stamp out separatism, the RUNA has tried to adopt a loosely Greco-Roman cultural style, so they like Latin phrases. I like Latin phrases because it makes me feel like my college days didn't go to waste. These servitors do regular inspections of religious groups and determine whether they're dangerous or can be licensed to worship. A lot of the job is paperwork, but if they find a particularly crazed cult, servitors can call in military backing to disband them.

Justin is a servitor. Or, well, he was. As the book opens, we find he's been both fired and exiled for reasons unknown to us. So, Justin passes his time in the provinces with women, drugs, and alcohol. Actually, this is how he passed a lot of his time back when he was in the RUNA, but it's a little worse now since he's miserable living in what he considers an uncivilized place. Part of what we'll discover about Justin is that he's smart. Really smart. Smarter than me, which makes him hard to write. He observes everything, and his brain is always in overdrive, which is why he indulges in so many substances: he wants a break from thinking sometimes. His cunning is what got him out of humble beginnings and up to a government position and affluent part of society. As for going through women, this comes from the fact that he's a handsome devil with commitment issues. Also, he likes solving puzzles, and each new conquest is a puzzle to crack. He knows how to work his charm, and his ability to read people keeps him busy with female company and is what made him so good at busting cults when he was a servitor.

If you hear me talking about a hard-drinking, womanizing character, it's probably easy to think, "Oh, Adrian 2.0." Not so. First, Adrian doesn't abuse stuff nearly this bad. Second, Adrian is young, and a lot of his vices are ways of coping as he figures out his place in the world. He's still learning who he is. Justin, at thirty-five, knows who he is. He's established his life and found a way to fit in these bad behaviors while still functioning as a productive member of society. I think this is a dangerous thing. We have a tendency to think, "Well, if he still gets up for work and pays the bills, I guess it's okay that he does these things." It's really not. All it does is rationalize addictions, which always eventually come back with a cost.

Writing a character with so many vices is difficult. I want him to be flawed, but at the same time, I need my readers to like him and root for him. So I always have to keep his behaviors in check, lest people get too turned off. So, don't worry. No character is two-dimensionally bad. Justin, despite being seemingly selfish, has a fierce loyalty to his loved ones, particularly the sister he left behind when he was exiled. He also has a soft spot for hard-luck cases, as we'll see in my third character post.

The final thing you should know about Justin is that he has two wise-cracking invisible ravens that talk to him inside his head. Why? Come on, guys, I can't tell you everything. I'm just giving you background here, not the book's plot! :)

More characters to come!

As promised, it's time to get cracking on Gameboard of the Gods. Being set in a future world, it's one of the most complex books I've written as far as setting goes. So, for those interested in knowing what you're walking into with this book, I thought I'd get you up to speed on its history and background.

Gameboard of the Gods takes place a hundred years in the future. Around our current day, religious extremists unleashed a virus called Mephistopheles (they saw it as a demon punishing the world) that took out half the world's population. Countries and infrastructure crumbled as a result, causing many places to descend into chaos and even regress. Different regions coped in different ways. Some weren't very effective at all and went totally Mad Max. This part of history is referred to as the Decline.

The majority of the former US and Canada banded together to create a new country called the Republic of North America. It's usually referred to as the RUNA in the book, pronounced roo-na. Its capital is Vancouver (shout-out to British Columbia!). Noticing that those of mixed genetic backgrounds had greater resistance to the virus, the RUNA instituted a harsh policy where large parts of its population were forcibly swapped with those of another emerging country formed from parts of China and Russia. As the two countries began breeding heterogeneous populations with greater survival rates, they were able to better weather the virus until a vaccine was created.

Fast-forward a century later, to the book's setting. The RUNA's policies have made it the leading country in the world. It's regained the technology it lost in the Decline and has started to advance past where we are today. It's a bright, shiny country with compulsory education, efficient energy, birth control laws, a mighty military, smart phone-esque devices that manage every part of your life, public transportation everywhere, and all sorts of other good stuff. Citizens have small chips in their hands that facilitate what parts of the country they can move through. The RUNA has a very high opinion of itself and looks down on all other parts of the world--many of which are still totally a mess--which it calls "the provinces."

Genetic mixing is no longer mandatory, but those who still reproduce with "genetically optimal" partners get stipends from the government. In addition to this, the RUNA has one other big policy that it used in its recovery. In its eyes, religion was responsible for the Decline. The RUNA sees religion as a source of unrest, creating separatist attitudes and irrational behaviors. Consequently, it has a very strong stance against religion and belief in the supernatural. Most religions were stamped out, though some remained--including many new ones that were revivals of older gods from around the world. Those groups that are allowed to exist must be licensed and deemed not a threat. Any group that seems unstable or is growing too large is disbanded. Stay tuned because this particular policy forms a large part of the book's plot.

And that's a lot of stuff, so I'll close and let your minds boggle over that. Next time, we'll delve into our principle characters.

Believe it or not, there's more going on in Richelleland than the movie and The Fiery Heart. No, really. And, it's happening sooner than those two. On June 4, Gameboard of the Gods (my twentieth novel!) comes out. Gameboard is the first book in my new adult series, Age of X. Yup, adult. There's been some confusion about whether it's YA, so just be advised there's some "content" in there. Of course, I was reading Clan of the Cave Bear and Harlequin novels when I was a teen, so who am I to advise? I grew up to write about succubi, so it looks like it all worked out.

Anyway, I'm super excited about Gameboard because it's a new project for me, which is always cool for an artist/author. I guess the best genre to put it in is "futuristic paranormal." So, you have sci-fi things like automated cars and genetic manipulation mixed with supernatural things like shapeshifters and magical talking ravens. And of course, it has all the other things I like to write about: dysfunctional romances, caffeine, mental health, mythology, mojitos. There are no 1980s references, sadly, since it takes place one-hundred years in the future. Maybe for the next book I'll work in 80s music as a high brow classic art form.

Over the next couple of months, I'm going to give you even more background about Gameboard of the Gods, such as primers on the world and characters, as well as excerpts. Today's post is just an intro, plus a refresher for those who've missed the official descriptions. There's a couple of them:

A brilliant but bitter exile, plagued with an addictive personality and a troubled past. A beautiful super soldier whose true nature holds more danger than anyone realizes. In a futuristic country that's turned its back on religion, these two unlikely partners find that a series of ritualistic murders are just the beginning of supernatural forces slowly attempting to reclaim the world...

Age of X is Richelle's newest adult series, mixing paranormal and near-future genres.

Then there's this one:

In a futuristic world nearly destroyed by religious extremists, Justin March lives in exile after failing in his job as an investigator of religious groups and supernatural claims. But Justin is given a second chance when Mae Koskinen comes to bring him back to the Republic of United North America (RUNA). Raised in an aristocratic caste, Mae is now a member of the military’s most elite and terrifying tier, a soldier with enhanced reflexes and skills.

When Justin and Mae are assigned to work together to solve a string of ritualistic murders, they soon realize that their discoveries have exposed them to terrible danger. As their investigation races forward, unknown enemies and powers greater than they can imagine are gathering in the shadows, ready to reclaim the world in which humans are merely game pieces on their board.

Hope that helps! We'll have more in the days to come...

Do I have your attention?

Wait...isn't that also the name of a creepy cadaver exhibit? Well, that's not what I'm going for. I'm talking about something a little more appealing--say, like, Zoey Deutch and Danila Kozlovsky training for the Vampire Academy movie:



This picture was tweeted recently by Alicia Strom, part of the team who's training Zoey and Danila up to be Rose and Dimitri. To give you context, Danila is resting after a major workout where he "kicked some major butt" and Zoey is checking in on him.

I love this for a couple of reasons. One is that it's just the first pic we've really had of them together (that wasn't PhotoShopped). Another reason is that I'm just so excited seeing them getting ready for the role. That is A LOT of work! I saw some people's reactions to this were: "Wait, they aren't already in complete muscled-up guardian mode?" Uh, no. Don't get me wrong--they're in great shape (and if you hunt, you can find more close-up Danila shots that show he's already got muscles going). But the truth is, most actors don't live their lives in action hero shape. The Avengers, for example? Those guys are all fit and work out regularly, but they kick it up when filming comes around to get that superhero physique. That's what actors do: they take on roles. :) And I love all the dedication that Zoey and Danila are putting into this one. Filming is planned for a couple months or so from now, so you better believe they aren't wasting any time. Just you wait.

I also thought I'd address a question about body type that keeps coming up. People are always speculating on Rose's body. The book mentions her having "curves," which some people read as code for "overweight." When I talk about women having curves, it's code for having breasts and hips...which is what nature has given most women, regardless if your body size is big or small. So, in my head, Rose pretty much has the kind of healthy toned body you'd expect from an athlete, but she also has good-looking hips and breasts like an average young woman would have. You know, because women have children. She's got muscles, but she's not a bulky bodybuilder. She's not stick-thin either. Make of that what you will. If Zoey survives her TRX training and boxing, she's going to be pretty spot-on. :)

The attention is drawn to Rose's "curves" because the Moroi's bodies aren't quite what the average human has. They're tall and slim, with narrow hips and smaller chests--which is why they're often likened to runway models. It's what their genes have given them, though. It's normal and healthy for them. (Though it is unhealthy for someone whose genes aren't geared that way, as we've seen with Sydney).

So, I don't know if that helps you with how I originally envisioned Rose or not. She's active and fit, and her body reflects that. Is she sexy too? Yeah. Because curves are. It's one of my pet peeves that society has a lot of issues with curves and determining what's a normal body. I think there's also a lot of misinformation about what a healthy weight actually is. Like I mentioned above, the media tends to distort things. Whenever I watch America's Next Top Model, and they make a big deal about having a "plus-sized" model who looks pretty average to me, I kind of want to punch my TV.

But I digress. I've turned the awesome training pic into a tirade about body image. It's a hot button issue for me because when I was a teacher, I used to see these beautiful teen girls getting down on themselves for being "fat." And it broke my heart. To be clear: there are a lot of unhealthy habits and bodies in our society right now--which also breaks my heart. It's a serious problem, and I know people often feel trapped by that and don't know how to change it. I lost 40 pounds in 2002, and there were some dark times there. I think at the end of the day we need to measure healthy bodies by our doctor's tests and not the pages of Vogue. Also, at the end of the day, terms like "average" and "normal" are dangerous, so use my words cautiously.

If you want to read something interesting on the topic, check out this interview with Whitney Thompson, ANTM's first plus-size (and extremely beautiful) winner. She has a lot to say about body image--and why runway models really are so small.

Hey! Hot news today. Our friends over at Bookish have revealed the cover to Bloodlines #4, The Fiery Heart:



Pretty awesome, eh? You can click the link to Bookish up above to read a small spoiler-free blurb about the book. The only other thing I'll add is that the "choice" it refers to that the book focuses on is the big exciting that happened at the end of The Indigo Spell. That's all I'll say for now. Amazon has a slightly longer blurb, but it too is *mostly* spoiler-free since there are still many people who haven't read Indigo yet. (If you're worried, skip it for now).

The Fiery Heart comes out November 19 in English-speaking countries, and--believe it or not--it's even hotter than The Indigo Spell!