Welcome to week 1 of the read-along for Dagger’s Sleep!

I meant for this post to go live yesterday, but after a busy weekend and an even busier Monday, it didn’t happen.

Also, stay tuned at the bottom of this post both for the sign up for the blog tour for Midnight’s Curse and this week’s giveaway for the read-along.

About the Read-Along

Here on the blog and in the readers group on Facebook (you can join the group here) we are going to be doing a read-along for Dagger’s Sleep. This is where we all read the book a few chapters a week, then discuss and have fun behind-the-scenes peeks at the chapters, and stuff like that. Kind of like an online book club.

If you haven’t read Dagger’s Sleep yet, there will be spoilers. So you might want to avoid my blog for the next little while or join the read-along yourself and read the book.

Each week, I’m going to be hosting a giveaway starting on Monday or Tuesday (depending when the blog post goes live) with the winner announced Friday with that week’s wrap up post. I’m hoping to post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, but since I’m an inconsistent blogger, we’ll see how well this goes, lol.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask!

Introduction to Dagger’s Sleep

Dagger’s Sleep is the first in my new series Beyond the Tales, which is a series of fairy tale retellings set in a world based on the Appalachian Mountain area of the United States. This series is Christian fantasy and features allegorical elements that make it just as clearly Christian and inspiring as The Blades of Acktar, just in a different and unique way.

It is actually a (major) rewrite of a book I wrote back when I was in fifth or sixth grade. That book was called The Quest for the Sleeping Prince and besides the prince being called Alexander, him pricking himself on his dagger (though under much different circumstances), and having to be woken by water poured on him instead of a kiss (in that version, it was a bucket of water flung on him), there really isn’t much resemblance.

That early, early version was a rather quirky fairy tale romp that brought in just about every fairy tale, legend, and nursery rhyme character I could think of, including but not limited to Thumbelina, the frog prince, Robin Hood, the woman living in a shoe, Little Red Riding Hood, the Three Little Pigs, and Peter Pumpkin eater’s wife living in a pumpkin. It was a terrible mess of a plot and all those side characters sound cool, but I was an eleven-year-old with no concept of character development. Talk about a lot of random cardboard characters cluttering up the story.

In that version, the princess’s name was Cassandra and, shocker, she ended up with the Prince Alexander, who went by the nickname Sandy. Yes, I had Cassie and Sandy. What can I say. I was 11.

Probably most interesting is that the early versions of Isi, Zeke, and Daemyn were all there. Cassandra had a maid with a quirky sense of humor that goes along with her on her quest, and this maid fell in love with the Robin Hood character, who has a little bit of Zeke’s personality (though with more arrogance).

Daemyn’s original character is a bit more tricky. In the early version, I had a character named Ellis who was a twelve-year-old boy when the prince fell asleep. This boy ends up living to be a hundred and twelve (he ages in this version, so he was actually a rickety old man) and leads Cassie to the prince. In a later revision, I added that he was a page boy given the task of carrying Prince Alexander’s dagger out of the castle and kingdom before the hundred years’ of sleep. At the end of the hundred years’ sleep, 11 year old me didn’t know what to do with Ellis. It was too sad to have him die so I ended up having him just live to be really, really, really old. No romance for him. No getting stuck not aging. He still ended up the king’s adviser.

This version wasn’t based on the Appalachian Mountains. It wasn’t Christian fantasy. Actually, it didn’t have any Christian themes. There wasn’t even a clear bad guy except the nebulous difficulties of travel.

I always loved the heart of that story, and since my brand is writing Christian fantasy, I transformed the book by adding in allegorical elements on top of all the changes I made to characters, plot, and setting. It hardly resembles the same book now.

Giveaway!

This week, I am giving away a Kindle copy of Waking Beauty by Sarah E. Morin. This book was published by Enclave Publishing, and it is also a Sleeping Beauty retelling with allegorical elements, like Dagger’s Sleep, though the allegorical part is much more subtle. It is a very lyrical, lovely retelling and the book that showed me how beautifully fairy tales could mix with allegorical elements.

To enter, comment on this post and/or tomorrow’s post either here or in the Facebook group. If you comment on both posts, your comments count as 2 entries. The winner will be announced on Friday. This giveaway is available internationally wherever Amazon Kindle is available (barring Amazon giving me any trouble).

Midnight’s Curse Blog Tour and Launch

It’s that time again! We are a little over a month away from the release for Midnight’s Curse! I can’t believe it is coming so quickly!

I’m going to be hosting a blog tour from August 5-10. If you would like to participate, please sign up using the form below.

If you don’t have a blog but would like to help launch Midnight’s Curse, there will be plenty of opportunities to review the book or post on social media, including an Instagram bookstagram challenge. If you would like to review Midnight’s Curse or participate by posting on social media, you can also sign up using the form below.

Thanks in advance for helping with this launch! Launching a book can be a daunting task, and your help is greatly appreciated!