I’m hard at work on LIQUID FIRE, the third Dakota Frost novel, which reintroduces Dakota to the San Francisco Bay Area. This is a location that will be increasingly important to the Dakota Frost novels – in part because I live here now and I’m always thinking about how my Atlanta native magical tattoo artist will deal with the crazy of the Bay – but mostly because this place, on this one random trip from Dakota’s perspective, will introduce her to many new friends, enemies and settings that will be with her for the rest of her life – or at least for the next several books.

-Anthony

Pictured: the courtyard of Nola, one of my favorite restaurants … and yet another real location I’ve managed to work into a Dakota Frost book.

“Does … does every tattoo use a brand new needle? For health or something?”

“Every time,” I said. “For health reasons, of course, but for the art too, and most of all for the magic. You don’t want some scratcher muddling your hide with a worn-out needle filled with stray mana traces it picked up from half a dozen other pigments.”

“You don’t like scratchers, do you?” She leaned closer to the horn, still not touching it.

“I love my work,” I said, standing, oddly irritated. I sat down on the edge of the butcher’s block, the cabinet to my back. “No, that’s not it. I care about the people getting tattoos. They’re permanent marks. Every time you pick up the needle, you have to give it your A game.”

Onward!

-the Centaur

For some reason, FROST MOON and BLOOD ROCK sell more physical copies in Detroit and Los Angeles than anywhere else … as far as Amazon and Book Scan are concerned. It could also be selling at Barnes and Noble or other independent bookstores, I don’t know. (And this isn’t meant to slight Denver or Grand Rapids, which are next on the list, but Detroit and LA have been this way for a while).

But it’s very intriguing! Any fans from LA or Detroit? Should Dakota visit there in the future?

-the Centaur

Well, thanks to an unexpected trip to deal with a family emergency, I had enough downtime to go through the audio notes for FROST MOON for Traci Odom. I really loved her reading and even got teary eyed at one point (guess when) She’s got the notes now and hopefully that means FROST MOON will be coming to Audible.com sometime in the next few months!

-the Centaur

I know I’ve been a bit slack updating this blog recently … the most frequent updates to Dakota Frost’s status can be found on her Facebook page or on her Google+ page, whereas updates on my own writing life can be found on The Library of Dresan blog or on my Google+ page.

The biggest Dakota Frost news, of course, is the upcoming audio book, read by Traci Odom. I really like it (and so does my wife … especially Cinnamon’s voice) and am working to get my feedback to Traci within a week so she can finish it up and we can get the book out there!

The next biggest news is that I’m gearing up to work on LIQUID FIRE, the third Dakota Frost book. I’ve already got 80,000+ words with a target around … uh … 120,000 words? Hopefully a bit less. While I’m doing that I’m also trying to finish editing the draft of THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE to send to my beta readers, but when that’s done LIQUID FIRE will be the top of my pile.

Keep inking,
-the Centaur

FROST MOON is out in German as SKINDANCER! I don’t read or speak German, but it’s a handsome looking book and skimming through it, it seems like they nailed it. Michaela Gutowsky has done a video review which translates pretty positive:

With Skindancer. Magic Tattoo is Anthony Francis is a wonderful prelude to a new Urban Fantasy series succeeded. I look forward to more works from him and am excited to continue as it is.

Similarly, it’s getting pretty good reviews on Amazon:

Skindancer is actually not in my usual target group. But from the first to the last page of this book captivated me. Exciting, entertaining, a compelling world filled with attractive, interesting characters.

So, if you’re a German language speaker, please check it out!

-the Centaur

SPOILER WARNING
The following gives away a minor twist about BLOOD ROCK, so if you haven’t read it, go read it and come back.

As Devin says, corprolalia, which affects Dakota’s adopted daughter Cinnamon Frost, affects only ten to fifteen percent of Tourette’s Syndrome patients in real life – and certainly many people have learned to fly with the Syndrome.

I make no apologies for Cinnamon’s fiction-friendly Tourettes; in the first draft it was “romanticized”, but during revision, even before editing, I did a lot of research and put a lot of thought into the presentation of her condition. Like many Tourette’s patients, she exhibits a variety of rather subtle symptoms that most characters in the novel never comment on or even notice; Dakota is not an omniscient narrator.

However, literature IS a poor substitute for science: no matter how good a work of fiction, no matter how well researched, it’s a made up point of data, not as good as a real teen with Tourette’s doing poetry slam or a good review article on the subject. I encourage you to read more about Tourette’s from Wikipedia, from the National Institutes of Health, or the Tourette’s Syndrome Association.

That’s 20% of the 50,000 words that make up Nano. HEX CODE is looking to be a slightly more complex YA than I initially thought, probably 90,000 words rather than 60,000 (unless I can keep it tight) so I’m probably about 10% done with the book.

It’s quite fun – the Atlanta Homicide Barbershop Quarter, Rand, McGough, Horscht and Gibbs, have made their first appearance and now that all our principals know each other the scene fits like a glove. Interesting seeing things from Cinnamon’s perspective!

So … onward!

-the Centaur

So it’s another year, another National Novel Writing Month. This year, what was supposed to be my first YA (young adult) novel, the Cinnamon Frost story titled HEX CODE. Actually, I’ve already started a new young adult novel called STRANDED, which makes me feel even better about tacking this new genre.

A sneak preview of the first young adult novel featuring the adopted daughter of the best magical tattooist in the Southeast, Dakota Frost … the mathemagical weretiger, Cinnamon Frost:

It sucks trying to do your homework when you’ve turned into a tiger. It’s not that your body turns two sizes too big for your chair, that your balance goes so you can’t stand, or even that your claws are so sharp that you could punch straight through a keyboard.

It’s the little things. Big cats are nearsighted, so you need big old dorky “tiger” glasses you can barely get on once your hands have gone to claws. And we’re predators, reflexes tied to movement, so I has to fight smashing the screen every time my mouse pointer moves.

And turning into a tiger hurts like getting pummeled with a thousand bars of soap in socks, so the only thing I really want to do after the Change is gnaw on someone, regardless of whether I have three papers all due tomorrow morning.

The material above is actually from the 1500 words of “seed” material I started prior to National Novel Writing Month. I always start with a seed, be it 500 words or 10,000, but commit to fulfilling the Nano challenge by doing 50,000 additional words. This year my final target, counting the seed, is 51544 words. Time to climb that mountain!

Already 1129 words into the challenge (not counting the seed). Go Team Centaur!

-the Centaur
Crossposted at the Library of Dresan, where I’ll be doing more day to day updates than I do here at the Dakota Frost blog.