Friday Five for May 6, 2016

1. Wait. It's May already? Time is flying by! There's three weeks left of school and then my little guy is on summer break. That means I'll be blogging light for June and July. I have some fantastic guests lined up for the next few months, though. If you're interested in doing a guest post, let me know, and I'll be happy to host you.

2. After finishing Totem #4, writing has been slow for me. I started on Totem #5, but I think the opening has fallen lame. It needs a better one, but while I know the rest of the story, I don't have the first chapter yet.

3. I spent April shopping for images from BigStock. I don't even know how many hours I spent clicking through picture after picture, looking for the perfect ones. I have everything I need to create the nine Totem covers, and tons of other spectacular pics for future books. I'd like to do some cleanup on my blog and make new banners, promos for my published books, and teasers for future ones. It will be slow coming, but be prepared for a new design coming before the fall.

4. A big happy Mother's Day to all the moms and like-moms out there! My weekend will be spent visiting the in-laws which means Rocket Science Ice Cream. Love this place because they make ice cream from scratch right in front of you and freeze it instantly with liquid nitrogen. Science has never tasted so good!

5. My final note: I received my contributor's copy of Eldritch Embraces! It looks gorgeous. My short story, "What Lay Below" is a Lovecraftian steampunk romance. Weird mix, but it worked so well. Our household Cthulhu approves!

Level Up! Blogfest

A geeky blogfest! I love it. Our awesome hosts are Allison at Geek Banter and Jamie at Mithril Wisdom. They want to know what's your favorite game. It can be a video game, a board game, a party game, a card game, a childhood playground game--you name it. Let them know how it works and why you love it. Click on the badge to see the linky list and discover some new games!

This is a hard one. I have so many favorite games. I haven't had much of a chance to play any video games in the past few years, but I'm a huge Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior fan. For party games, I love Apples to Apples, and the adult version of it, Cards Against Humanity. I love card games like Munchkin and Killer Bunnies. What I'm going to tell you about is one of my favorite boardgames.

Arkham Horror is "the classic game of Lovecraftian adventure." You play an investigator in Arkham trying to keep the gates to other planes closed before too many open and a powerful being known as an Ancient One slips through. You must either avoid or fight aliens, go through gates into other realms, and try to survive to close the gates. You have Sanity tokens in the game, and if you lose them all, you go insane! It's a game of high tension and strategy. Will you try to fight only for yourself, or will you help the other investigators? It's not a fast-paced game. You could spend hours playing through one game, but it's one of those things you don't realize how many hours of your time it's eating. We've never managed to beat an Ancient One, but what an amazing journey.

Yes, one of the Ancient Ones is Cthulhu!

Don't forget to enter to win the first ebooks in the 13th Floor series including an ARC of the fourth book, The Harbinger!

Montrous Monday Blogfest

This frightening and fun blogfest is hosted by Timothy Brannan. The rules are simple. Post a monster. It can be any monster. One from your current WIP or from your favorite movie. Tell us why you love/hate/worship it. Then visit the other participants and check out their monsters.

There's so many good monsters out there. Oh, the fun ones I could tell you about from Syfy Channel! I want to introduce you to an ancient creature, though. One that has stuck in my head since recently reading the new YA series by Caitlin Kittredge called the Iron Codex. Loved the books. So very Lovecraftian. At one point, the heroes come across an oozing nightmare. A thing called a shoggoth.

A shoggoth is a monster created by H.P. Lovecraft. It's part of the Cthulhu Mythos. I didn't include a picture here not because I was fearful of an artist getting upset about me using his work, but because I couldn't find an image that fit exactly what I imagined a shoggoth to look like.

Here's what Lovecraft says in At The Mountains of Madness: "It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter."

I imagine it as a gigantic tar-like blob with several bulbous eyes and mouths with sharp teeth. It has no body shape and seemingly no heart or brain. Yet some might have a keen intellect. It moves faster than you expect for something of its size. It engulfs its victims and slowly digests them.

They say true fear cannot be given a shape. That's because it's a shoggoth.