So when I was asked write a second Forgotten Realms book and started riffing on the background of the character I was playing in a current D&D game, I got very concerned. What the hell was I doing? I knew better than this. I had seen what horrors such folly wrought! Horrors like that last sentence!

In the end though, I realized it’s the kind of thing that can go horribly wrong or fantastically right, depending on how much you’re willing to accept change.

This is part of the character summary I gave the DM when we started:
Farideh and Tamurra are twin tieflings raised among the dragonborn of Tymanther after a warrior found them beside the body of their human mother. As such, she and her sister have the cultural notions on honor and fear favored by dragonborn, and they tend to think of humanoids as “squishy.” They hate dragons, and any interaction they have with people is bound to go south, as such, they’ve learned to cover up as much as they can.
Farideh grew up sullen and surly, wanting to fit in with her family, but only feeling separate. As an adult, she’s withdrawn and somewhat depressed. When her enterprising sister captured a banshrae, it tried to trick Farideh into letting it escape. Its simpler tricks exhausted and the executioner’s axe drawing nearer, it offered her a pact. Farideh attempted to throw the banshrae off by offering it her soul—believing that as a tiefling, she does not have one and it would be a lot of fun to make the trapped banshrae angry. But the banshrae leapt on the deal, binding Farideh to the feypact…and leaving her searching for a god to help her reclaim the soul she didn’t think she had. The banshrae, Shemzu, has plans that Farideh knows nothing about. She’s on a fine line here, still wanting to be good but—for the first time in her life—truly outcast and being offered a lot of power.

Now, Brimstone Angels is a complicated story, but at its core, it’s about a young warlock’s struggles to master her pact with a sociopathic entity while being caught in the middle of a plot that could bring civil war to the Hells. It’s about the things she does to try and take control over her life, and the ways in which she has to sacrifice and compromise to do so.

If you’re looking at the same conversion—game to fiction—the most important question to ask is this:  Does this detail support and enhance the story? I find there are four answers. Yes. No. No, but it doesn’t hurt it. Yes, if I adjust it.

In the yes bucket, I liked the tiefling warlock combo—two elements that feed the same dilemma. Tieflings are the descendants of mortals and devils and there’s no denying their heritage: horns, pointy teeth, spooky eyes, even a tail. Warlocks make a pact with a supernatural entity to gain magic. If that entity’s not so good, does that mean the warlock’s not either? If the tiefling’s ancestors are devils, are they born to be bad? Love it. And I like that she’s disconnected from her birth family. It just ramps up that character dilemma in a way that wouldn’t work if you knew her mom and dad were okay folks.

The fact that she’s a twin inspired the character in my book, so I wanted to keep that. And it adds, I think, to that divided worldview. Sometimes she’s her own person, sometimes she feels more like half of a set.

But a lot of things that made for a fun PC, just don’t work for a novel, and belong in the no bucket. I like the fey pact build for playing, but since the book is a lot about what it’s like to be a tiefling, an infernal pact made more sense. And PC Farideh is a lot older—twenty-seven—while the plot that quickly started forming for Brimstone Angels really needed someone just starting to come into herself. If she’s almost thirty and just starting to push boundaries, that’s not an attractive character. So Farideh became seventeen. (Actually, she was supposed to be nineteen, but my editor wanted sixteen, so we met in the middle).

And—despite what people assume about teenagers—the character’s voice rapidly became much less bitchy than my PC’s. She hasn’t had time to lose her idealism yet. In fact, I kind of wanted to play up the fact that she’s nice…well, nice enough. She definitely couldn’t be the sort of person who answers the Aglarondan rescue team’s question of “How did you come to be in this evil island fortress?” with “On a boat.” That person is amusing, but not strong enough to anchor a story on.

The no, but it doesn’t hurt bucket is tricky. While I think most people are capable of recognizing the most egregious items that need to go in the no bucket, the no, but it doesn’t hurt bucket can hide a lot of things that really belong in the former spot.

Take names: A lot of people like names for their PCs that reference real world names (e.g. a warlock called “Shynerbach” amuses the hell out of Texans), other works of fiction (e.g. “Arwen”), or their own names (“Nire…?”). These should all be changed with extreme prejudice in my opinion. If you’re making an in-joke, you’re kicking the reader out of the narrative.

But Farideh just sounds right—soft, but not too soft; pretty, but not too pretty. It doesn’t really add anything a new name wouldn’t, but it doesn’t hurt the way it would if the name made a real world reference or nodded to another work. Even if it’s not obvious:  I might love Verity Kindle from To Say Nothing of the Dog enough to name a daughter after her, but Verity the warlock is just too goddamn precious.

The yes, if I adjust it bucket is where you save the things that really belong in the no bucket, but you can’t bear to part with. But still, you need to be ruthless if you want it all to work out. I liked the “raised by dragonborn” bit. I like dragonborn (despite the boobs) and I like the idea of non-dragonborn with dragonborn mannerisms. It helps the story in the sense that it provides a disconnect from her birth family, but as it stands, it’s just too weird.

Why did those mysterious birth parents pick a dragonborn village? There’s enough of a biological difference there—so who knew how to raise babies that grow three times slower than dragonborn hatchlings? How much am I going to have to create and then explain weird personality tics to support this cross-cultural background? And how am I going to stop that from being one long joke that kills my story’s tension every time I reference it. If I have to spend a lot of time explaining it, and it doesn’t really add a lot, then this little oddity is not worth having.

But I wanted it.

So I thought, what if it’s only one dragonborn, one specific, soft-hearted dragonborn, in a village with plenty of tieflings and humans (and a dwarf that raises yaks…). That’s a little less intense. The overall culture of the village would be a human one that’s hyper-aware of tiefling experiences, but she’d be influenced by her adoptive father’s quirks, in much the same way so many of us are influenced by our parents’ cultural origins when they’re transplants. I’ve never lived in the South proper, but I have the faintest drawl on some words that I can blame on my Tennessean father. My husband’s never lived in New Mexico, but he’s learned to have a hell of an opinion about chiles and posole from his parents. And Farideh isn’t a dragonborn, or a scion of a military family from Djerad Thymar, but she speaks Draconic and has only a nascent sense of the gods, courtesy of Clanless Mehen.

And I got my dragonborn. Score.

One last word of caution: Other people’s characters, in my experience, almost always belong in the no bucket. None of them were likely created with your main character or your book in mind, and all of them were created to be the center of the player’s game story—not yours. (Even a name-drop, a side reference, stands out like you wouldn’t believe. This is often a tell for me that the story coming from the slushpile is based on a game.) As much as you might hate to break up the party, it’s probably for the best.

What’s a lot easier, is filling a role. The character backstory above references her twin sister Tamurra, who was played by Susan J. Morris. I wanted to keep a “twin.” And I wanted the twin to be different from Farideh in the same way Tamurra was different from my PC. But much, much easier than trying to adapt my editor’s monster-hunting, kill-counting, sharp-tongued rogue? Crafting a sister who was a perfect foil to my anxious, stubborn, lonesome main character. And boy am I glad I did. Havilar is one of my very favorite characters.

Recently, I was interviewed for The Tome Show about The God Catcher. You can listen to it here (I don’t start talking until halfway in, but the rest of the book club is pretty interesting too).

But, readers, I have a confession to make. I goofed.

You might notice, several times throughout the interview, I joke about how I can’t remember things. And . . . well, lately I can’t. I have an adorable parasite stealing all my blood at the moment. I jokingly warned Jeff and Tracy right at the start of the interview—before the recording—that I was eight months pregnant and for the love of god, don’t interrupt me because I have lost all my momentary memory and I will never remember what I was saying.

In general, nothing of the sort happened. Except right off the bat.

They asked me if I had had experiences in life that mirrored The God Catcher’s themes of identity and what you do when your perceived self doesn’t match your internal self. And, to be honest, this isn’t something I’ve thought about in so many words. I’m pretty certain it’s universal, and given a moment to ponder over it I can point to times in my life where I would certainly phrase it as such. But in general, when my perceived self doesn’t match my internal self, I tend to correct people. Or stew about it, whichever.

So I scrambled. I remembered a time this definitely happened! And recently! My very geekness was called into question. People asserting I didn’t look like a geek! I brought that up and . . .

. . . totally forgot the story I was going to tell.

I filled it in with a much weaker anecdote about a coworker assuming I was a cheerleader in high school (predicated, by the way, by my arranging the sizeable collection of Dread Vampire Spawn minis that lived atop Susan Morris’s bookshelf into a human pyramid and making one say “Ready? Okay!”) and how insulted I was. Even telling this story, I felt like an idiot.

First, I don’t actually have anything against cheerleaders. In high school, I did, though less against particular cheerleaders and more against the idea of a cheerleader versus the idea of me. Cheerleaders embodied what I simultaneously didn’t want and couldn’t have, and so did sort of want. It would have been nice, for example, to not worry about whether I had anyone to sit with at lunch or whether everyone was determining my sexuality based on my thrift store jeans. (Hint: This is not a measure of . . . anything really.) But then, I don’t know that the cheerleaders I went to school with weren’t having the exact same sorts of problems. Besides, high school ends, and now I have plenty of people to lunch with who will at least pretend to laugh at my jokes.

So, cheerleaders, are we cool?

The phrase “I don’t look like a geek” has genuinely been bothering me. It sounds like I think it’s a bad thing to “look like a geek.” It sounds like I think we all dress alike. It sounds like the opposite of Zooey Deschanel. So to clarify, here is the story I meant to tell:

This year, I went to GenCon on my own dime. I don’t work at WotC anymore, so I didn’t have to wear one of their (gross) (sweaty) (no seriously, it’s like the thing’s made of plastic) polos. I wore my clothes, specifically my pregnancy clothes.

Maternity wear has a curious side effect. You have to buy these things because one day your clothes will not fit you, no matter how much you try and make them, because this shirt has an empire waist and these pants can totally be held together with a rubber band. But maternity clothes are a) as expensive as regular clothes and frequently more and b) only sold by a handful of manufacturers. You can certainly go hunting for high end stuff on the internet, but you’re buying clothing that you will wear for six months to a year, tops. It’s hard to justify the expense.

However, the unintended result is that you have a) a limited wardrobe and b) a wardrobe you basically share with every other pregnant woman in America. You are, in effect, wearing a uniform.

I fucking hate it.

See, normally, I look like this:

Normal me...except that stupid expression.

And in the act of packing up my regular clothes, in the hopes that after labor and a suitable recovery period they will once again fit, I realized I had become rather attached to looking like that. I liked the way I dressed.

Now, here’s a little history that makes this all tie in a little better: Back in the day? Before I had disposable income and a yen for ruffles and prints? I wore what I would call the Geek Girl Uniform—jeans, t-shirt preferably with clever saying (I did not wear the hoodie. I hate wearing hoodies). Muted colors. Black, preferable. Combat boots for a while—but it was the nineties. This is not how we all dress, but if you were going to create a character whose primary characteristic was “Geeky Girl,” these are probably the duds you’d code her with.

To be honest, I wore it for a lot of reasons, and none of them were very good: it was easy, it was what my friends wore, it made me look cool. Then my mother—in her fashion—opined that I probably wore such ugly colors so that people would pay attention to how smart I was instead of my pretty face. This is the kind of thing my mother says, and usually it’s best to just ignore her. But this time it really shocked me, because it was true—I was hiding in these clothes and the worst part was it didn’t even work. I still had to be ten times as obnoxious to get people to believe I was smart, and I was wearing clothes that I didn’t really feel good in.

So it took me years, but I finally figured out what I do like, and amassed a decent wardrobe of such items.

Please note, I’m not calling anyone else’s clothes into question. If you’re happy in hoodies and jeans, then that is exactly what you should wear. I just always feel like that damned hood is strangling me. . .

Anyway: GenCon.

I’m at GenCon, and I look like this:

AKA "Baby's First GenCon"

This is my favorite maternity outfit. It’s comfortable and stylish, and that top transitions for nursing so it’s a little easier to swallow the fact that it’s overpriced and annoying to wash. I feel good in this.

It started when Susan Morris and I were walking to the exhibitor’s hall to get our passes. We’re dragging rolling suitcases full of presentation materials through the sky bridges, and fighting our way through a series of doors. Two men, already with their badges, are behind us, and I quip something about the automatic door buttons making them obsolete. We laugh, we chat, and then one of them says something about how we must be totally gobsmacked by all the weirdoes.

Yes, readers: they think we’re in town for the marketers’ convention happening in our hotel.

Readers, it was an honest mistake, I know that. And I promise, I was all politeness. But inside, I saw red. I informed them that not only were we supremely geeky ladies, but that Susan had, until recently been the line editor for Forgotten Realms and I was the Neverwinter author who was not R.A. Salvatore. Lucky them.

This happened again. And again. And again. Were we with the marketers? Were we with the nursing convention? We probably didn’t get the kickass Neverwinter branded hotel keys because they were for the convention attendees. Hanging with Candlekeep people, someone admitted that when they’d met me a few years prior, they’d assumed I was an intern for the marketing team, assigned to escort Ed Greenwood around.

So when I say “I don’t look like a geek” this is what I mean. I do not register on people’s radar as one of us. I am at worst lost, at best, a poseur. Is it my clothes? My demeanor? My nervous laughter? Is it just that I’m a woman and have a higher hurdle to get over? I don’t know. But it is frustrating, and it’s probably the time I feel most like a Nestrix.

Okay, that’s not exactly true. If someone turned up with fanart of one of my characters, I would be absolutely tickled. But not because I want to see representations of these people—because it was real enough and clear enough to make someone want to recreate it. I loved hearing someone tell me that Nestrix, for them, was totally Rousseau from Lost, or that Tennora looked like the woman on the cover of Renegade Wizards. That’s all fantastic. Do that, please.

But while I’m writing? No. Not good. Most of the time, I find it just messes me up. Makes me want to describe the picture and not think about the best words, the best phrases to evoke a character’s appearance through the viewpoint character’s eyes. If I get out of the text, I get tripped up.

This, dear readers,  is the story of a picture that tripped me up something fierce.

If you haven’t read Brimstone Angels yet—and I’ll assume it’s because you’re currently incapacitated, possibly by a large boulder—there’s a character there named Lorcan. Lorcan is a cambion, a character who prompted me to learn the word deuteragonist. He’s not the villain, but he’s sure as hell villainous. If you want a peek, check out this sample where he shows up. I’ll wait.

…

So if you read that sample, you may have found it’s a bit racy. Not too much, mind, but it’s definitely the sort of scene that when my friends and writing group read it, they were a little unsure of how to approach the fact that . . . it’s a little hot. And it has to be, or else nothing that the main character does makes sense.

I cannot tell you how many rewrites this took. And it’s not because it’s hard to write sexy or it’s fun to rewrite sexy—no. The problem, dear readers, is this:

"S'up, bra?"

This, as of the time I was writing, was the only image of a cambion in the sourcebooks. I wasn’t looking for a Lorcan—remember, I don’t like to do that—but I did want to clear up some basics of the monster’s stats. Cambions, for example, are fire-resistant as well as poison resistant. So without meaning to, I was faced with that guy.I mean no disrespect to the artist when I say this, but that guy . . . that guy is a tool.

If you’ve read the prologue—and if you haven’t, I’ll assume it’s because you’re currently undergoing eye surgery, bless your heart—I think a few problems are fairly apparent. In order to side with a main character—like Farideh—you have to sympathize with their motivations. You need to like them and at least understand how they can come to make a decision. Especially if that decision isn’t one you yourself would make. So in this case, where a teenaged girl agrees to a pact with a devil—a decision I think most of us would at least be a little circumspect about—it’s going to work better from a structural standpoint if she’s got some motives you can sympathize with.

And while I think it’s probably the case that most of us can sympathize with going along with something a little too long because we’re distracted by our libido, that doesn’t usually happen with a dude in a mesh shirt making that face.

At least, not so far as I could imagine. Initial drafts of this scene were terrible. Why would she do this? I wouldn’t. You wouldn’t. Not with this douchelord making the offers.

Admit it: you'd like to roll a 20 and wipe that smirk off his face.

This art might be perfect for its intended purpose, but it kicked my legs out from under me right from the start. It’s not sexy. Not even a little. Time for problem solving. Time to find a proper Lorcan.

Fortunately, the internet makes it easy to find pictures of men making sexy faces, and—with a little bit of searching—sexy and slightly threatening faces. Behold:

BOOM!

Okay. He looks a little like he’s going to forcibly sell you cologne. But it is far, far more probable a seventeen-year-old girl who’s wary as they come is going to get swept up in what this guy says. Except he’s not quite…

PERFECT

Okay, no–he’s not perfect. And because he’s actually a male model named Gabriel Aubry, I couldn’t show this to the artist who did the gorgeous cover. But he’s enough to break my habit of mentally referencing mesh shirt guy–and in the end that’s the most important thing, finding the tools to get past your roadblocks and get writing. So if when you read Brimstone Angels, forget about the cambion in the Monster Manual. That guy’s there for your PCs to kick halfway to Avernus and back. This guy’s the one you sell your soul to.

• The Tome Show reads The God Catcher and interviews me.
• Erik Scott de Bie (author of Shadowbane) and I talk about Brimstone Angels and Neverwinter.
• BrutalGamer loves Brimstone Angels
• Read Between the Lines does too!
• Suvudu sums it up nicely (interview to come)
• And if now you really want to buy a copy, you can go here. Or here. Or better still, go to your local  book  store.
• And tell me you read it on my new, public author Facebook page.

(One of these makes sure the other gets fed.*)

That’s my son, Idris, and my second novel, Brimstone Angels. So far both are getting excellent reviews, although honestly most of Idris’s reviewers are slightly biased. We really cannot say for certain if he is the cutest baby boy in the whole goddamned world.** But I think its probably a close thing.

A lot of authors will refer to their books as their babies–I’ve done it myself a time or two, especially when pressed by well-meaning relations about when I was planning to procreate. “My book’s my baby right now.” And, having had both now, I can say for certain there are a lot of ways in which they’re similar.

1. They take about nine months to produce. At least, the first draft of Brimstone Angels took about that long. I had pretty much finished the first draft when I found out there was a baby on the way.
2. You want to talk about both all the time, but suspect that people would rather talk about something else. Possibly their own kids/books. Still, you angle the car seat towards people and keep a copy of the novel in the diaper bag, in case it comes up.
3. Creating them kills your social life. Whether it’s going to bed at 9 because you’re exhausted from growing a person or going from day job straight to laptop to get that chapter done, no one sees you for ages.
4. Holding them for the first time is cognitively disorienting. It’s hard to believe you actually made this.
5. Naming them is impossible.
6. There is a point, just before you’re finished, where you panic and think you’re never, ever going to manage this. And then you do, because the part of you doing the work of labor or writing is not the part doing the judging–and at some point the judger/editor has to shut up and let you get it done.
7. You want to hear what people think of them. Even though you don’t, because you’re so happy with how things turned out. But still–it’s nice to hear other people agree with you.
8. You may have a story that makes people goggle. Brimstone Angels was substantially rewritten in the second draft when my editor pointed out that Farideh had no external arc to speak of and I decided the best way to fix that was to throw out a third of the book and revise the rest. In three months. While I had morning sickness all day long. Idris was born after a sixteen hour, unmedicated labor (with back labor!) where I wasn’t, ahem, ready to push when my body started insisting I push.
9. It will only vaguely occur to you that these are horror stories, because they are simply the things you had to do to get the result you wanted: a book that feels solid, a healthy, happy baby.
10. They have the most adorable toes. Except for the book.

* NB: If your copy of Brimstone Angels tries to eat infants, it’s probably a part of a print run cursed by Baalzebul, Lord of the Seventh. Please return it for an uncursed copy.

** My grandmother, in her forthrightness, ranks him second-cutest.

After explaining things, people still tend to get stuck on the notion that the game is dictating what I write. I like to think of it more as guiding. The analogy I’m fond of is that if novel writing were poetry, regular stories would be like free verse and shared-world would be like writing a haiku or a pantoum. The rules certainly can make it harder, but they can also inspire you to more interesting creations.

The main villain in Brimstone Angels is a succubus called Rohini. She’s featured in the Neverwinter Campaign Setting as well, and is planned as a character in the upcoming
Neverwinter MMO. The story of how Rohini came together is long and twisty (and unfinished, actually, since we’ll have to wait for that MMO).

But she started out as a way to tie the story I already wanted to write to a line in Cryptic’s story bible about a man called the Foulspawn Prophet. And a big, big reason she came together the way she did, is because of the dramatic shift between succubi and erinyes in 3.5 and 4.0 D&D.

To review: This is a succubus and an erinyes from before fourth edition

Succubus

Erinyes

The succubus was a demon, the erinyes a devil. (Here is a quick summary of what that means) In the Blood War (a millennia-long war between the demons of the Abyss and the devils of the Nine Hells), these two monsters were sort of counterparts. They were both listed with about the same difficulty. They look an awful lot alike, and although the erinyes are still warriors, both eventually have the same modus operandi: get to the material plane, look like a sexy, sexy  lady (or sometimes man), seduce men (or sometimes women), corrupt. The differences were very nuanced and the nuances  were aggressively played up, in my opinion.

Then fourth edition created this:

New Succubus

New Erinyes

Now the Blood War is over and the succubi have switched sides: they’re devils just like the erinyes now, albeit they have the same m.o. they did before. The erinyes however, have gotten closer to their Greek roots—they are monstrous, the elite soldiers of the Hells. They’ve gotten a higher CR than the succubi. And note, they have lost their wings.

If pockets of the internet are to be believed, this was one of the worst things ever. There are still people upset about it. You might be one. If you’d like to take a moment to vent in the comments, now’s probably the best time. I’ll wait.

. . .

I need to admit up front, though, I love the new erinyes. The sexy female monster who wants to sex all  the dudes gets a little tiresome. And when it happens as often as it did for a bit there, it gets a little insulting, too—creatures don’t stop varying when they’re female. Erinyes in Greek myth are not sexy. They are terrifying. They are ugly. They are dangerous. And they mean business.

But all of that aside, the situation as of the start of Brimstone Angels stands thus: Succubi
are devils, subordinate to their former counterparts. Erinyes got ugly and flightless. They are all sharing the same space now.

Much as I love erinyes, I love this even more.

I’m willing to bet this was not what drew the designers of fourth edition devils to shake things up. I’m willing to be this was more about cleaning up a system that had picked up a lot of extraneous and contradictory lore and making it feel neater, or maybe introducing elements that someone felt would be cool and make the game more fun. But in doing so they opened up some major, major spaces for story.

Imagine it: You’re a succubus. You’re easily the least crazy demon in the Abyss. But that distinction suddenly starts becoming more and more distinct. Things start getting weird and dangerous, and you and your sisters know its only a matter of time before you’re screwed. You decide to bail for the enemy side and thank the gods, it works. But now  you’re caught in  the middle of this hierarchy, under those bitches, the erinyes. No one in the Hells is going to trust you—more so because everyone there has spent millennia  fighting against you. They’re probably sneering at you and calling you a crazy whore behind your back. This hierarchy business might sound intriguing, but what’s the point? You have to get in good with the archdevils and no one’s going to let you in.

Or this: You’re an erinyes. Your main goals in life are to mess up demons and corrupt mortals. Then one day, something happens. Your entire appearance changes and suddenly your bosses are bringing in these succubi who you’ve spent millennia trying to eradicate, and they get to keep their appearance? Even if you can let go of the fact that you’re not as pretty and you can’t change your shape (and maybe you can let that slide, since you’re more important now and those jerkface [devils] are scared of you now), those goddamned succubi get to keep their wings. And you’re grounded. You don’t trust the succubi and you’re not about to make things easier on them.

And no one has said “This is why we’re doing this.” (Though, frankly, even if they had, neither of you would be all that pleased).

This, people, is the sort of game mechanic I love. 

It begat Rohini, a succubus who’s risen to the edge of promotion. Just one more mission and she might have pleased the archdevil she  serves enough to become an erinyes. Rohini knows what people say about her, but she shrugs it off. She might feel the pull of the Abyss, but she knows how to control it. And the rest of the Hells can assume she’s just a dumb slut all they want—she knows they’ve all realized she’s someone to be afraid of. Someone who can corrupt and manipulate in a thousand, neatly tailored ways . . . and also kill her intended without a lot of trouble. She’s caught between reaching the peak of her potential, and wanting out out out. One more mission and she doesn’t ever have to hear people doubt her again.

The devil in charge of that mission is an erinyes though: Exalted Invadiah. Invadiah has also reached her peak in a lot of ways. She commands the elite corps of erinyes—all her daughters—that enforce the will of Glasya, the archduchess of the Sixth Layer. Invadiah is clever and cruel and very much lording her position over Rohini. But she needs Rohini to complete this mission for Glasya. Even if she’d rather beat the tar out of this smug  succubus. She wants to succeed and yet she’d also really like Rohini (and her precious wings!) to fail.

And an additional compounding factor?: Cambions. Cambions  used to be the male offspring of a succubus and a mortal. In fourth edition, the term became gender neutral and the race became devils along with their mothers. (If you need to vent about this, go ahead).

But they also became the offspring of every other devil-mortal pairing. Which means erinyes stopped making baby erinyes, and  started making cambion children. Which also means that Invadiah’s streak of  erinyes daughters ended in a cambion boy-child, Lorcan. Which means I have another character with a more interesting backstory because of this shift.

And why has all this happened? Well, I think I ought to leave some things for you to read in Brimstone Angels (available November 1).

Friday from 12:30-1:30 PM, I’ll be signing with Ed Greenwood. Bring God Catchers and Realms of the Deads* and I’ll sign them–or be one of the first 50 fans to come by and I’ll sign a free copy of The God Catcher for you!

I’ll also have bookmarks to promote Brimstone Angels, featuring a piece of the gorgeous cover art by Kekai Kotaki. If you’re excited for Neverwinter, this novel’s for you!

*Still haven’t read this awesome anthology? Check out my story “The Resurrection Agent” for free, here.

“By the way, I put that conversation we had about Sean Bean up on my blog, and–”

“WHO?”

“The Fellowship of the Ring guy!”

“WHICH ONE?”

“Boromir, damn it!”

“That still doesn’t mean anything! All the humans look the same: Greasy.”

What can you do but laugh (and merge onto Montlake)?

Example: How do you sum up the fact that you appreciate the fact that he does half the housework (including vacuuming because, holy gods, you hate vacuuming) because it’s his house, too, and he takes pride in it, plus your gender doesn’t mean you’ll suddenly be a neat freak (and, he wonders, why would someone think that?), and the closest thing you’ve had to a conversation about how he needs to clean is you asking “Why do your socks end up under the table?” which turns into a hilarious conversation? Hallmark doesn’t make that card. 

So, readers, keep that in mind as I tell this story. Also remember, the Husband is brilliant. I’ve proofed his resume before, and the sheer variety of programming languages he knows fluently (let alone the proficient and familiar columns) is a sharp reminder I didn’t wed no dummy. But while he can keep all those syntaxes and commands (They have those, right?) straight in his head, he does not have a good memory for names. 

The Husband and I were driving home from dinner, and through the course of conversation, Game of Thrones came up—a show neither of us have watched, since we haven’t got HBO. Specifically, for reasons I won’t go into, I point out Eddard Stark is played by Sean Bean. 

            “Who is Sean Bean?” the Husband asked.

            “He’s the guy that played Boromir in The Fellowship of the Ring.” Blank look. “He was the Russian double agent in that Bond movie. Goldfinger—no. The one with Pierce Brosnan that sounds like Goldfinger?” Blank look. “They made a really good video game out of it?”

            “GoldenEye?”

            “Yes. He was the double agent in GoldenEye. 006.”

            “Ah.” No. Not ringing any bells.

            “And he was Boromir.”

            Quiet.

            Husband has not read The Lord of the Rings, I should note. “He was the guy who went off the deep end a little and wanted to take the ring? And then he dies at the end of the first movie?”

            Quiet.

            “So I know I’m supposed to know who that is. But there were like a million people in those Lord of the Rings movies—”

            “There are nine people in the Fellowship.”

            Skeptical look. “No way! More like fifty. There are a bunch of hobbits and a bunch of humans and—“

            “There are four hobbits—Merry, Pippin, Frodo, and Sam—two humans–Boromir and Aragorn—Legolas, Gimli the dwarf, and…” Check fingers. “Gandalf. Nine.”

            “Oh. But there are more people in the movie.”

            “Yes, but those are the important ones. They’re the Fellowship.”

            “Ah. Who’s Aragorn again?”

            “Viggo Mortensen.”

            “Who?”

            “He’s…The greasy one.”

            “All the humans looked greasy.”

            “Yes, but Aragorn’s the really greasy one…If you were going to offer the use of our shower to the Fellowship of the Ring, you would make Aragorn go first. Then Boromir. Who’s Sean Bean.”

            “OH!” Quiet. “What is Game of Thrones anyway?”

            “Fantasy mini-series. Made-up medieval times-ish. Not a lot of magic stuff.”

            “But…they’re aren’t playing the game? It’s not like they’re pulled into the world?”

Readers, rest assured. I’m taking full responsibility of the fantasy component of Baby Evans-Hyphenate’s literary education. But (especially since I’ve only just stopped yelling at the monitor when things lock up) his dad will probably handle the computer literacy. And the vacuuming.