KING OF PAIN RELEASE DAY!

 It's finally release day for the fifth and final book in my Interstellar Rescue science fiction romance series, King of Pain: Interstellar Rescue Series Book 5! Get your digital copy to read on Kindle or any of its related apps NOW on Amazon for only $2.99! Or, if you prefer to read a book you can hold in your hands, the paperback is available for only $15.99. Message me here or on my Facebook page and I'll send you a signed bookplate to put in your book!

And, as always, I humbly ask that if you enjoy the read, you post a review of the book on Amazon, Goodreads, and/or BookBub. Reviews are an author's lifeblood, an encouragement to other readers to pick up the book. 

So, enjoy your holidays by reading (and reviewing) a new book!

Cheers, Donna

MEET TREVYN, KING OF PAIN

It’s taken two years to finish King of Pain: Interstellar Rescue Series Book 5, the latest novel in my SFR series. And it all began with Trevyn Dar, the book’s alien hero.

Trevyn is Thrane, one of a race of telepaths feared throughout the galaxy for their history of bloody conquest and brutal use of their psy talents. Worse, he was once a Hunter, part of a family of hired killers that terrorized the galaxy.

We first met Trevyn in Trouble in Mind: Interstellar Rescue Series Book 2, where he was one of two alien brothers hunting the boy Jack, son of Ethan and Asia. We learned that Trevyn is Gabriel Cruz’s half-brother, not a true villain at all, really, but a victim of his older brother Kinnian’s abuse. Throughout that book, he tried to mitigate Kinnian’s violence in whatever way he could, and, in the end, [spoiler alert] he helped rescue the heroine, Lana, and together he and Gabriel killed Kinnian.

He made a reappearance in Not Fade Away: Interstellar Rescue Series Book 4, by which time he’d taken over the family starship, renamed it the Blood’s Honor, and signed on to work for the Interstellar Council for Abolition and Rescue. It hadn’t been easy, but he was trying to distance himself from the past imposed on him by his father, the Butcher of Four Systems, and his brother Kinnian.

Trevyn Dar, troubled hero of King of Pain

The problem is that Trevyn still carries a lot of weight from a childhood of abuse and ridicule, and tons of guilt from his years trying (and failing) to curb the worst of Kinnian’s bloodthirst. He’s ripe for a serious reckoning with his past, and the emotional healing that only love can bring. It means he must return to his home planet of Thrane, tangle with and defeat some heavy villains, and bond with the love of his life. That journey is at the heart of King of Pain.

From the time I first conceived of the brothers Trevyn and Kinnian for Trouble in Mind, I modeled Trevyn on Boromir’s younger brother Faramir from Tolkien’s LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy. When you meet Faramir outside the context of his family (and particularly his father, Denethor), it’s clear he’s a hero—loyal, brave, worthy. His men love him and follow him without question. But Denethor can see none of these qualities; he’s verbally abusive and dismissive, respecting only the older son Boromir. Boromir is kind to his younger brother, but he’s not around to protect him from the madness of their father. Such a lot there to inspire!

So, of course, I took all that inspiration and twisted it. What if Trevyn’s father wasn’t insane, just insanely cruel? And expected the same from his sons? Kinnian, the older son, is cut from the same cloth, learning his lessons in brutality eagerly. But Trevyn, from a young age, is more sensitive and suffers under first his father’s, then his brother’s, savagery. Like Faramir, however, he bears up under all that abuse and emerges from it stronger. He is, at his core, unbreakable.

My heroine, Lael, is immediately attracted to that strength and determination in Trevyn. He never gives up, no matter what his enemies or the icy, mountainous planet of Thrane throw at him, and long before the mating bond begins to form, Lael admires and respects this Thrane from the once-hated House of Dar.

King of Pain: Interstellar Rescue Series Book 5 is in revisions now and the cover is being designed. I hope to publish in December. Take a look at the blurb:

One planet, two worlds. And only Fate could unite them.

Trevyn Dar was once a Hunter of Thrane, feared throughout the galaxy as son of the Butcher of Four Systems and brother of a commander of the murderous Blood Legion. But he clawed his way free of that bloody legacy to find his true path, as captain of a ship serving the anti-slavery goals of the Interstellar Council of Abolition and Rescue.

Lael Saphora is Hinarr, shapeshifter, sharing her skin with a snow cat Companion, but, like all her people, hated, hunted, and oppressed because she lacks the telepathic skills of the genetic Thranes of her home planet. Since she witnessed the brutal death of her father as a child, Lael has been fighting for her people. She leads the Uprising, a movement dedicated to overthrowing the iron grip of the Thrane Ruling Houses.

When Trevyn receives unusual orders from Rescue to seize a ship smuggling weapons for slavers, he discovers the darkly compelling Lael at the helm—no slaver, but a political prisoner, whose extradition to Thrane means torture and certain execution. His journey to uncover what’s behind her false arrest takes him back to a home planet he had hoped to never see again, reveals an ugly conspiracy at the center of an organization he had made his new home, and rips open old wounds. But Trevyn and Lael share a common past, and, ultimately, only love can heal two hearts broken by an ancient pain.

Cheers, Donna

 

 

 

TAXING KING OF PAIN DRAFT NEARS 'THE END'

After much longer than usual, I’m finally approaching the end of my working draft of King of Pain: Interstellar Rescue Series Book Five. The story of Thrane Hunter-turned-Rescue agent Trevyn Dar and shapeshifter Lael Saphora was a tough one to craft during a worldwide pandemic—for a lot of reasons—and it will need plenty of revision. But at least I’ll soon be able to put a tentative “The End” to the first draft. Hallelujah!

Why has this book, which will probably be the final novel in my Interstellar Rescue series, been such a bear to write? Well, I don’t think I’m the only author who has struggled during the pandemic to focus on my work. Even well-known professionals have noted how difficult it’s been to write while the world burns. (The pandemic isn’t the only disaster we’re dealing with, after all.) Fiction, like other forms of creativity, requires emotional space, which is pretty hard to come by when you’re busy thinking about lockdown, full ICUs, politics, climate change, wildfires, hurricanes, floods and all the rest of it. I’d like to think of my work as an escape to another world, but it just doesn’t work that way.

Then, too, I set myself a major challenge in several ways with this particular story. For the first time, I set the story on an alien planet, rather than on Earth or in space. Thrane is the home planet of the humanoid telepathic species I’ve introduced in previous novels, so I had a head start on developing the alien culture. Still, I’m more comfortable here on terra firma or on a starship.

My hero, Trevyn, was a good bad guy in Book Two of the series, Trouble in Mind. The alien half-brother of the hero of that book, Gabriel, he suffered under the abuse of his brutal older sibling, Kinnian, until he broke free and helped Gabriel kill Kinnian and save the heroine, Lana.

So, Trevyn is not your usual kind of alpha male hero. He’s carrying more than the normal amount of baggage—guilt, self-loathing, a fear of his family’s inherited darkness. The challenge for me as a writer is to help him carry that load without crippling his confidence. He still has to kick some serious ass, after all, and fight the good fight, too. He made a start on transforming from a bad guy to a good guy in Trouble in Mind. But in King of Pain, Trevyn finally has to overcome his past and rise above it, not just at the end of the novel, but throughout, so we can love him as the romantic hero.

My heroine, Lael, is a snowcat shapeshifter.

My heroine, Lael, too, is a challenge. I’ve never written a shapeshifting character before, though I’ve read plenty of books featuring shapeshifters. (Nalini Singh’s Psy-Changling series is one of my favorites.) I wanted to make sure to be consistent with the features of the Hinarr culture Lael comes from, the details of shifting (like, what happens with clothes and weapons?) and so on. What aspects of her character transfer to her snowcat Companion? And, how, exactly, do you translate the thinking process of a sentient, but non-speaking, creature, like the Companion, without making it sound like a Disney nature voiceover?

There will be pay-offs, of course. These two are meant to be together, like all my Interstellar Rescue couples. They meet the criteria for fated lovers, enemies to lovers and even a kind of Romeo and Juliet-type story, though with a happy ending. Trevyn and Lael are just making me work for their Happy Ever After!

In fact, they have enough problems of their own, you wouldn’t think they would need a villain to make their book life difficult. But, no, every hero and heroine need a good villain (or two). King of Pain has been a challenge in this way, too, because it started from a Big Idea. (Science fiction as a genre suffers from this problem—the concepts, or the technology, often overshadow the characters.) My Big Idea had to do with the telepathic Thranes who rule the planet and the shapeshifting Hinarr, a severely oppressed minority who lack telepathic skills. The Thranes call them “Ghosts,” due to their lack of telepathy, and consider them mentally deficient. They believe the Hinarr are inferior, useful only for menial labor, and a legitimate prey for hunting in their snowcat form.

The Hinarr, however, are no longer content to play the role of the downtrodden of Thrane. They are fighting back via an underground resistance movement, the Uprising, of which Lael is a leader.

This makes for great conflict, but only in a general way. Just like STAR WAR’s Empire needs Darth Vader, my Ruling Houses of Thrane (and the murderous Blood Legion behind them) need an actual person to embody their evil intent. That person should have goals in opposition to those of my hero and heroine. He (it happens to be a he) should have a clear motivation beyond just “power” or “hatred of the Hinarr.” Given those things, the conflict between my central characters will arise naturally.

So, yes, the Primary Ruler of Thrane, Mennon, is one villain of the book, as is a Brother of the Blood Legion named Avet Van-Del, who hunts Trevyn and Lael through most of the novel. But, as I’ve discovered in the act of writing, the biggest villain, the one who should receive the most attention, is the one pulling the strings of these lesser bad guys. And, as some critics of my last book have pointed out, when it comes time for this villain’s demise, I really have to beat him flat. My readers need the satisfaction of seeing that bad guy get his just deserts.

So, you see, I have lots to work on in the next few weeks. And that’s not even accounting for finding the right images for the cover. Or honing the dang blurb. Oy! Wish me luck!

Cheers, Donna

 

ALIEN FOCUS SHIFTS IN KING OF PAIN

One of the first things you learn as a science fiction romance writer is how to populate your worlds with alien beings. You make your choices—will your aliens be humanoid or so different from us they are nearly unrecognizable? Will they be carbon-based, or based on some other element common throughout the galaxy? Do they breathe oxygen/nitrogen or some other mix? And are you a tentacle-love kinda gal, or, um, not, and will you carry your readers along with you?

The Grays--of froggy origin.

My decisions led me in the direction of mostly humanoid, carbon-based and air-breathing, only because those characteristics made it so much easier to justify my basic premise: that a species of aliens was stealing humans from Earth to serve as slave labor in their galactic empire. The slave-trading aliens—the Minertsans, or Grays—are themselves cold-blooded and amphibian in basic biology, having evolved in a swampy environment from frog-like creatures. But they share enough of the same characteristics of humans that both species could exist on the same planets.

That’s also true of the other humanoid alien species in my Interstellar Rescue series: the tall, lantern-jawed Ninoctins; the brutish, flat-nosed Barelians; the aggressive, telepathic Thranes. Even the non-sentient creatures I’ve created for the series—the buffalo-like psoros, native to Thrane but now commonly raised as a meat animal on several planets; or the targa, a wildcat with a poisonous bite, from a system in the Outer Reaches; or Minertsa’s fang eel—would be able to survive, though possibly not thrive, if transplanted to Earth.  

These parameters circumscribe my science fiction universe a bit, I’ll admit. I ruled out tentacle love a long time ago. And a “monster of the week” for my starship captain wasn’t in the mix, either. I’m more interested in the human—or humanoid—interaction. And I’m plenty challenged trying to come up with wild new ideas within the boundaries I’ve imposed on myself.

Take my latest work-in-progress, for example. In King of Pain: Interstellar Rescue Series Book 5, I’ve had to describe the homeworld of the alien Thrane people in detail as the primary setting of the book. This is the story of Trevyn Dar, a Thrane and half-brother to Gabriel Cruz, hero of Trouble in Mind: Interstellar Rescue Series Book 2. In his first appearance, Trevyn is a “good bad guy,” doing his best to mitigate the damage done by his older brother Kinnian while still under his thumb. He moves toward the light at the end of Trouble in Mind and makes even more progress toward becoming the man he wants to be in Not Fade Away: Interstellar Rescue Series Book 4. But he still carries the guilt of his time as Kinnian’s lieutenant and the son of the Thrane known galaxy-wide as “The Butcher of Four Systems.”

Trevyn’s chance at redemption finally comes when he is called upon to rescue a woman imprisoned on Thrane due to his mistake and slated for execution as a terrorist. Lael Saphora is Hinarr,  a genetically separate species that Thranes disparage as “Ghosts”—because they lack the psy talents that distinguish the majority species of that planet. Yet the Hinarr have their own unique ability: they are shapeshifters, sharing DNA and physical bodies with the snowcats of the rugged mountain ranges of Thrane.

 

The snowcats of Thrane are similar to Earth's own snow leopards.

For hundreds of circuits the dominant Thranes have considered the Hinarr little more than animals, hunting them in their snowcat form and exploiting them as unskilled labor in their humanoid form. But things are about to change. The Hinarr are rising up. Trevyn and Lael, on the run from enemies both political and personal, first forge an alliance of convenience. But they soon find a love stronger than any history, culture, pride or family tie is binding them inevitably to each other. 

The challenge I’m facing now is in creating a new alien species that incorporates elements common to paranormal romance—the shapeshifter. I’ve read plenty of PNR, but I have to admit, I wasn’t paying attention to some of the details. Like, what happens to the clothes when a shifter shifts? It’s fine if the climate is warm (like in Christine Feehan’s Leopard series, which is set in the tropics), or if you just say up front that your characters don’t mind the cold (like Nalini Singh mostly does in her Psy-Changling series). But Thrane is cold, especially in the snowy mountains. Naked humanoids would need protection. 

And then there’s the problem of modesty between newly introduced main characters. She shifts and leaves her clothes behind; he sees her naked wa-a-a-y too early. And in one scene, they’re in the process of escaping a prison. I currently having him scooping up her clothes for her when she changes, but it’s awkward, you know? 



I’m also still working out exactly how she shifts—in a flash? Slowly, cell by cell? Or is it like one of those 80s werewolf movies where she sprouts fur and ears and the snout elongates—no, that’s definitely not romantic!  


And, of course, there’s the ultimate question of how the Hinarr evolved to embody two such different types of physical beings in a single, uh, package. Somehow, it’s easier to imagine—and explain within some realm of scientific possibility—the existence of aliens in our vast galaxy. Even aliens that share much with humans, or that have evolved under similar circumstances. But shapeshifters have usually come under the purview of the paranormal, that is, those things unexplainable by science. So, what’s a science fiction romance author to do?


I have a theory, which I’m not quite ready to reveal yet. It probably wouldn’t satisfy our pickier brothers over at the hard SF end of the spectrum, but they aren’t my biggest fans, anyway. Too much kissy-face in my books for them! I figure if I can provide a reasonable explanation that doesn’t rely on magic or shatter the laws of biology beyond all repair, my readers will accept it. 

As long as the story keeps them turning pages. That’s always the first priority, anyway, right?

IN HONOR OF

Katherine Johnson in 2005

Mathematician, space scientist, human computer and NASA pioneer Katherine Johnson, who died February 24 at the age of 101. If not for Ms. Johnson and her fellow "computers"--most of them black and all of them women--at NASA in the late 50s and early 60s, the U.S. space program would never have gotten off the ground. We certainly would never have made it to the moon in a time without the vast calculating power of cyber-machines. Ms. Johnson and her colleagues did all the calculating with a sliderule and their considerable intellect, despite overt prejudice and the bullying that came with it. We all owe her a massive debt.

Cheers, Donna