Random Stuff
Demon Moon is now available for pre-order at Amazon.com. I’ve included a non-spoilery snippet of dialogue after the jump, just because all of the awesome reviews of the new James Bond are making me craaaaaaaaazzzzzzzzzyyyyyyyyy and I probably won’t see it until it hits DVD.
Thanksgiving was spent in Dallas (OR) at my mother’s house (it was also her birthday — Happy Birthday, Mom!) and I found out that:
- My younger sister (but not my youngest sister, who lives with me) does not like the Demon Moon cover, because she says that Colin looks too old. Oh, and that his leg looks funny (I think it’s the way the highlighting hits his ass.)
- That, speaking of asses, she walked in on my brother’s friend while his (apparently vampire-white) ass was doing some older, married lady. Why this was happening at my parents’ house, I have yet to learn.
- My brother’s friend didn’t want me to mention this on the blog — and, if I did, to describe him as a) not-so-white, b) taller, c) say that the chick was unmarried and younger, and d) that he was uncircumcised.
- The last item (d) was a lie. I just added it for my own amusement.
- My older sister, but not my oldest sister (I have five siblings, four of them female) liked Demon Angel better than the “last crappy one” even though she thought Lilith wimped out at the end by saying “I love you” to Hugh. She’s dead to me now.
- My dad is currently reading the ARC of Demon Angel that I took down. It’s unfortunate that I will never look him in the eye again.
Unedited excerpt from DEMON MOON:
Savi half-rose and turned to peer through the window behind them, saw the black Navigator as it passed beneath a streetlight. “Why do you still have an accent? You’ve lived in the States for a century.”
Bright red filled the display: the SUV’s engine. The device was too primitive to separate the vampires’ data from the motor’s, but apparently it could detect heat from outside the spell’s protective shield.
“Do you think it an affectation?” Colin sounded amused.
“Maybe.” She settled back into her seat. “It probably makes it easier for you to hunt. You just say something poetic and they swoon.”
He gave a heartfelt sigh, and said, “‘I die! I faint! I fail! Let thy love in kisses rain on my lips and eyelids pale. My cheek is cold and white, alas! My heart beats loud and fast; — Oh! Press it to thine own again, where it will break at last.'” He lifted his hand from his chest and arched a brow. “‘The Indian Serenade,’ yet you are not swooning.”
Only because she had something to support her. “Shelley has always struck me as overly dramatic and sentimental,” she managed.
“My sweet Savitri — do not tell me you are a cynic. I’ll not believe it. A skeptic, but not a cynic. “
“No, I’ve seen too much evidence to the contrary. Hugh and Lilith. My parents. Selah and Lucas. My best friend just married a man she’d met once before her wedding, and in her last e-mail she declared herself madly in love with him.” She shrugged. “I just think the odds of finding the perfect person are very low, particularly when you’ve got only sixty years to do it in. So most people either settle for security and fond companionship, or divorce when it doesn’t work out and keep on looking. Are you?”
“I have also seen too much evidence to the contrary.” He smiled slightly. “And the odds have not increased over two hundred years, despite the reams of poetry I’ve recited.”
“Perhaps your odds would increase if you wrote your own.”
“I believe it would utterly destroy them. And I’ve no desire to become a starving poet. I’m content placing my failure at Shelley’s feet; I blame the poem for your resistance, not my recitation of it.”
She met his eyes, and bit the inside of her cheek to hold back her laughter when she saw the mirth reflected there. “You knew him, didn’t you? Shelley? Hugh once mentioned that you’d known John Polidori — and that you were near Lake Geneva the same year as he and Byron. So you must have encountered the Shelleys.”
She didn’t miss the sudden darkening of his gaze before he nodded. “Yes. His wife had some sense, but Shelley was a bloody fool — though I suppose I was no less, at the time.” He paused, and a pleased expression lit his features. “Did you read his work for his connection to me, sweet Savitri?”
“Hugh was a literature professor for years; 1816 is a rather famous summer in the literary world. Ghost stories and competitions and all that. I also had a phase when I was a teenager and read tons of Romantic poetry. I don’t forget anything easily.” She worried her lip with her teeth, then added quickly, “But I’ll admit that I reread Frankenstein and The Vampyre after learning you were there. We’ve gone on a tangent: a century?”
If he triumphed, he hid it well. “Auntie has lived here almost half that, and she still carries an accent.”
“But her first language is different, and when she’s not hosting at the restaurant she’s talking to her friends in Hindi or Marathi. You speak English.” Was it possible that he didn’t talk to many people in San Francisco? Perhaps he only came into frequent contact with Hugh and Lilith — and more recently, those at SI.
“That is true. I confess I prefer to speak English rather than American.”
She rolled her eyes, smiling. Or maybe he was reclusive because he preferred his own rarefied company to the plebeians’. “You are such a snob. You probably have Masterpiece Theater on all the time at your house. Do you call it a ‘telly’?”
His shoulders shook. “No.”
“At least there’s that, as televisions weren’t in development until the 1920s. If you did, it’d be proof of your affectation. You still say ‘bloody’ a lot, though.”
“Given my lifestyle, it’s frequently appropriate.”
Her laughter was cut short by a gasp as he whipped into an alley, plowed through a chain link fence, scraped past a dumpster and accelerated onto a street in the opposite direction.
Savi unclenched her fingers from his upper thigh and her door pull, and ran her palms down her jeans to wipe away the sudden perspiration. “Well,” she said shakily. “That’s one thing the symbols are good for: preventing scratches in your paint.”
“I’d have warned you, but I rather like where your hand went.” He reached down beside his foot, fished for the IR detector that had flown from her grip.
The vampires didn’t follow them through; she watched until Colin drove down another side street and her heart eased into a normal rhythm, then faced forward again. “Gadgets, car chases, a suave British gentleman. I’m officially a Bond girl. I shall call myself Curry Delicious from this day forth.”
