Seven Secrets for Summer Reading

As promised in my October 2015 post, I’ve published Seven Secrets in the Upper Attic on Amazon! Check out the Kindle ebook here, or click on the cover image. It’s a young-adult fantasy-action-adventure with magic and paranormal mystery. It’s taken a LOT of years to write, and has endured a LOT of changes over time. 

It’s Book 7 in my Animal Guild Series, but it is different for two reasons:

• Except for a certain dog, all of the characters are human, and are primarily teenagers.*
• It’s a stand-alone novel, so you can read it on its own. However, it does tie into the Animal Guild world in surprising ways. For instance, the “certain dog” made an appearance in Book 1 (The Animal Guild).

Teaser:

Pepin is an abused foster teen who just wants a home, a family and love. But those things happen to other kids, not him. 

After the cruel, violent Rocky torments him and his autistic foster brother Jimmy one too many times, Pepin runs away with some oddball teens. The motley group—two fostered, two neglected, and one just plain reckless—runs smack into a mysterious attic, a weird dog, ghost hunters, theatrical shenanigans, crazy chases, and . . . magic.

Because Pepin is hiding the biggest secret of all: he possesses a “mutant gene” that gives him the power to heal. But even magic can’t protect him from the police or from the revenge of that nasty piece of work called Rocky. 

What exactly are the Seven Secrets in the Upper Attic? This is a stand-alone book as well as Book 7 of The Animal Guild Series, and the adventures of these kids collide with the Animal Guild world in wacky and surprising ways.
(End teaser) 

And FYI, my “single” fiction piece, Randa’s Day: An Interlude in the Animal Guild, will be published later in 2016. It’s a bridge piece between The Hikum and The Rogan Treasures (see below). 

And FYI, the sequel to Seven Secrets is in process, to be published hopefully in 2017 or sooner. It’s called The Rogan Treasures (Book 8 in The Animal Guild Series). 

Confused by all the interconnections between books? It’s why they are all listed here—so the author won’t get confused, ;) Thanks as always for your encouragement and support. Keep on reading! 

* I know! Quite a departure for me. For the longest time, I couldn’t figure out what humans do with their arms and hands. My animal characters are usually sprinting on all fours, about to rip someone apart with their claws. Teenagers don’t do that (as much as they might wish to).

Move Over, Lewis Carroll

Or, fun with new words that are actually just words I didn’t know and now I do and I didn’t make them up. 

Recently I peeked into my “Vocabulary” folder where for more than thirty years I’ve been stashing post-its and paper scraps with words I’d read and needed to look up in the dictionary (or the twenty online dictionaries and my hardcover, teensy-print-size, two-tome Oxford English Dictionary that could kill me during an earthquake). Confess! Some of you maintain files like this, too, and amass freaky lists of weird words that you vow to use in every single one of your novels. Or at least work into conversations.

Glancing over my list, I realize that I have an obsession with Brit lit and the funky words those authors love to use. And not just Terry Pratchett and Diana Wynne Jones—I swear that I read other British authors, too. 

After updating my list of vocabulary (there were only three words that I couldn’t find and suspect my authors were Lewis Carrolling their readers), I wrote two sentences with some of them. This is the joy of words, and these are all real words that some (or most) of you probably already know. Here are my frabjous sentences:

1. After the brangling stramash ended, the yattering, blethering roisterers wambled, then jinked with brattling, ruckling glucks through a pelter of rain into the frowsty, fusty fug of the niffy old mansion.

2. With wingeing girns, the stroppy, fubsy stripling flumped down, wuzzled my frowzled hair, grinned in a pawky, almost smickering manner, and said, “Gosh, you look goluptious today.”

Have fun with these words, provided you look up the ones you don’t know. ;) And for inspiration from one of the greatest poems ever written, check out video readings of Carroll’s Jabberwocky, which I memorized in high school. Didn’t we all?

FYI, I finished writing Chapter 4 of The Rogan Treasures, and intend to use all of the new words in the next chapter, uttering ruckling glucks while doing so.

Write on! (But watch out for falling OEDs.) :)