I remember
our first phone call back in early 2016. My heart was pounding and my cheeks
burned red (and I’m not the one between us who blushes often). I told Krissy:
Before we do this, you should know that I’m pregnant. I was about six weeks
and, aside from immediate family, she was the first to find out.
My life
wasn’t in the best place back then, and I was about to embark on a long journey
with prenatal depression and postnatal depression. At the same time, Krissy was
starting to put some pieces of a puzzle together: her daughter has epilepsy.
Last year, her youngest had her Make-A-Wish party, which was a month of not
writing because the reality of it was consuming.
From the
moment we started writing everything was about interruptions. Even when your
kids are healthy, even when you’re healthy, it’s hard to be a mom and to work.
Rewarding, worthwhile, but a constant battle between I need to do this for me,
my kids need me, and sometimes am I missing out on my family for something
fictional?
Add in
time zones and school schedules and appointments and life is pretty crazy
between us. We don't have a solid schedule, it changes with the seasons,
but...There are a few things that work for us:
● Warm up 30 minute phone call before
work (usually while Holly makes breakfast and Krissy drives her youngest home
from preschool)
● Joint writing: 9am/12pm - 11am/2pm.
We start at 7/10am on a really good day.
● Fill (ideally): 5am-7am (Krissy) and
10pm-12am (Holly)
● Our houses lose. Every time.
○ We have phone and video chats while
doing housework
○ We have learned to detach from the
story enough to get things done
The
hardest thing we’ve discovered is that in person meetings are not in the cards
right now. They would be so useful, but when you put our five kids in one house
the world implodes.
Parenting
with kids...it’s the only reason we found each other, it’s the only reason Blue
Note exists. When we write, our characters often have kids and we work them
into their lives and stories. When we want to pull our hair out and scream,
when balancing things is impossible, I remember that our joint writing is
founded in parenting, and our stories are too. All we can do — all our
characters can do — is try.
Blue Note
The Fractured Prism
Book One
Holly Graf and Krissy May
Genre: NA Urban Fantasy
The Fractured Prism
Book One
Holly Graf and Krissy May
Genre: NA Urban Fantasy
Publisher: 252 Publishing
Date of Publication: 6/21/19
ISBN: 978-1-950753-00-0
ASIN: 195075300X
Number of pages: 250
Word Count: 67,444
Cover Artist: Krissy May
Tagline: Everything has a price
Book Description:
Niels Poulsen, self-styled God of Rock and lead singer in a popular punk band, has everything he could want: family, friends, fortune, and fame. When his best friend and fellow band member, Jace, goes missing, Niels will do anything to get him home safe.
Niels discovers that their money and connections won’t help them on their journey. They will rely on an model airplane, a family secret, and a tangled magic that weaves the band into the fabric of other realms so tightly they may never make it home again. Their quest takes them across new worlds, through foreign dangers, and straight into the path of an ancient prophecy that wants Niels for itself.
If Niels and his friends survive long enough to find Jace and negotiate their way home to Manhattan, will it be worth the price? The magic says one of them will have to die…
Excerpt:
As they walked away from the sketchy
people, Niels leaned down close to Hattie’s face. “The liquor stall? Or do you
think it’s a setup? Christ.” He leaned away. “I’m as paranoid as Rhyss now.”
“No you’re not.” She side-hugged him as
they walked. “I’ve got a bad feeling too.”
“They pointed that way,” he gestured,
“so let’s go this way.”
“Good idea.”
They passed several stalls. One had all
kinds of colorful eggs on display. Another had a row of kids dancing in front
with a sign that read: Ontriss Academy of Noc Thui. Another stall had fried
dough smothered in cinnamon.
Niels’ stomach rumbled again.
They should’ve begged Kenzie for some
money before she left, but Niels had the feeling she didn’t have much in the
way of funds. Land pirates were still pirates, after all.
Something just ahead of them started
screeching.
Places to go: not in that direction.
Whatever was up there probably ate people. Niels steered them casually toward a
stall with jewelry, but Hattie was having none of being steered around.
“What is that?” She moved towards the
keening, cutting off a pissy guy with a cart full of vegetables. Some of the
food toppled off the cart.
Niels almost reached for one, but two
thoughts stopped him: One, he had no idea whether they were even edible; two,
Kenzie said they executed thieves, and this didn’t feel like a good day for
that. Dying wasn’t on his agenda.
He let Hattie pull him across the road
on her quest for death-by-screech, until they were in sight of the screeching
thing.
“Is that a
dragon?” Niels asked.
Holy shit.
Not just a
dragon, but...a dragon. It was about the size of a teacup, or a gerbil maybe
because teacups didn’t have tails, and this dragon did. It was covered with
spines and opalescent scales in every pastel color of the rainbow.
Even though it
wasn’t as big as the other dragons they’d seen in Sylem, it made the most god
awful noise to make up for its size. Niels was tempted to screech back at it,
see how it liked that. Or bring his guitar and climb into the higher notes,
with an amp.
When the dragon
saw Niels, it screeched even louder, rattling the side of its cage so violently
Niels thought it might knock itself off the table.
“It wants you,”
Hattie said.
No it didn’t.
Clearly it wanted out so it could attack him. While that technically counted as
wanting him it wasn’t the good thing Hattie’s tone made it out to be.
He stopped
freaking out. What had he just said to himself? He needed to trust that Hattie
was often more right than he was about shit.
He finished
crossing the road with her and didn’t stop her when she asked, “Can we look at
that dragon?”
The stall owner,
a beefy guy who would have been a butcher - or a Mafioso, which amounted to the
same thing - in any decent, clichéd movie, frowned at them. “You spoiled my
dragon.”
He lifted the
latch on the cage door and the little rainbow-tiled monster shot out of the
cage, directly at Niels.
Niels backed
away. He couldn’t die yet. He still had songs to write, Hattie to date, his mom
to annoy…
The dragon
landed on his shoulder, chirped once, and let out a huff of steam that
condensed into beads of water on Niels' neck.
Okay, so not
dying today. Not yet, anyway.
Niels allowed
himself to breathe.
The dragon was
kind of cute if he ignored its claws digging into his shoulder through his
shirt.
“That’s three
hundred Angmol.”
Oh yeah, Niels
could just pull that out of his ass.
“We don’t have
three hundred those things,” Hattie said.
“Or one,” Niels
muttered so only she could hear. She laughed.
About the Authors:
Holly began her career as an accountant. While her sense of humor tends appropriately dry, her love for writing far exceeds the constraints of an office job. She attended four colleges across three states in pursuit of her BS in Accounting, while taking extra courses in philosophy, law, and writing. Between words, she spends her time immersing herself in the magic of life.
Krissy lives in a chaos factory, which is run by a merciless team of miniature humans and their pets. She enjoys music, foreign languages, noise-cancelling headphones, and the smell of fresh-mowed grass. She has a useless degree in Physics and part of another useless degree in Nursing, neither of which helped in the creation of this book.
1 comment:
I am enjoying these tours and finding all the terrific books my family is enjoying reading. Thanks for bringing them to us and keep up the good work.
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