Just a twenty-first century gal with nineteenth-century problems…
When Sam’s plane crashes catastrophically over the Atlantic, it defies all odds for Sam to be the sole survivor, but it seems impossible that she’s rescued by a warship in 1805. With a dashing sea captain as her guide, she begins to find her footing in a world she’d only seen in movies.
Then Sam is betrayed. At the mercy of the men and morals of the time and without the means to survive on her own, she’s left with no choice but to throw herself on the charity of the captain’s sisters. She resigns herself to a quiet life of forever hiding her true self. What she doesn’t expect is that her new landlady is Margaret Goodenough—the world famous author whose yet-to-be-completed novel will contain the first lesbian kiss in the history of British Literature, and a clever woman. Clever enough to know her new companion has a secret.
As the two women grow ever closer, Sam must tread the tenuous line between finding her own happiness in a place where she doesn’t think she’ll ever fit in, and possibly accidentally changing the course of history.
Cover Art by SeanceFemme | Cover Design by J.M. Frey
NINE-TENTHS
by J.M. Frey
About the Book
Twenty-four is one year too young for a quarter-life crisis, but hey, Colin’s always been an overachiever. He’s got a degree in Sustainable Tourism, which his family says he’s wasting as a barista, an annoying anxiety disorder, and no freaking idea what to do with his life. The only thing going his way is the cute coffee shop regular, a homo draconis named Dav (who, in his humanshape, is a total hottie.) Still, it’d be easier if Dav didn’t have a habit of accidentally setting things on fire when he’s startled. Like the café kitchen.
When Dav breaks draconic taboo and volunteers as a replacement bean-roaster to apologize for the inferno meet-ugly, sparks really fly. Everything’s finally happening for Colin, until he learns that hooking up with Dav means that under dragon law, Colin is absorbed into Dav’s hoard.
Possession may be nine-tenths of the law, but becoming his boyfriend’s property does not make this whole identity crisis thing easier. Especially now that Colin must navigate politics, paparazzi, and legal questions about his personhood. Colin’s still angling for his Happily Ever After, but the growing scrutiny on his relationship with Dav threatens their budding romance. And if he’s not careful, Colin’s fight for agency may just destroy symbiotic human/dragon relationships worldwide.
How To Read:
The first five chapters of the book will drop January 13th, 2024.
After that, chapters will drop every Wednesday and Saturday morning.
For now you can:
☕Shelve it on Wattpad when it drops, so it’s in your library and you get update each time a new chapter is released.
☕Follow me on Wattpad, so you’re alerted every time this, or any other story of mine, updates. (I’m currently serializing three different books at a time, and have chapters scheduled to drop nearly every day of the week until 2025!)
☕Sign up for my Newsletter to be reminded of the release date, and to stay abreast of any developments with the novel.
Is this book only on Wattpad?
For now, yes. I’m currently working with W by Wattpad Books to release a re-worked, spicier, version of my Watty-Award winning sapphic romance TIME AND TIDE.
I want them to pick this book up as well, especially I since really want to write the other two books in the series, so I’m trying to prove to them that I’m worth it.
In that case, this means centralizing all my lovely readers on their site, with the hope that you’ll vote, comment, and recommend the heck out of it to your friends, so it gets lots of buzz.
Fuse Literary Inc., my literary agency and the publishers of the “Fuse” line of books (including Short Fuse – through which two of my works have been published) has announced a brand new imprint:
To celebrate, what better day to announce the creation of Fuse’s all-new Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror imprint than on Star Wars Day: MAY THE FOURTH BE WITH YOU!
And to make the launch of Strange Fuse even more dynamite, Fuse is releasing four – yes, FOUR – titles today!
It’s been a while, but my debut novel has returned to print, this time in an Author’s Cut edition, with a stunning all-new cover (thanks Rodney V. Smith & Adrienne Kress!), and with some new never-before-in-print material.
And one last announcement… I’ve made what is perhaps a foolish wager with creature and cook Simon Alkenmayer. So to help save my soul – or at least my bank account because I’ve promised to buy Simon some really top quality “Canadian Blood” a.k.a. genuine maple syrup if I lose, and that stuff ain’t cheap – please consider pick up a copy of Triptych in the next three months, and leave a review on Amazon/GoodReads/Your Blog/anywhere you can!
May the Fourth Be with you all, and a very big welcome to STRANGE FUSE!
Well, it’s finally here! The third and final novel of The Accidental Turn series (but not the final book, oh no). THE SILENCED TALE hits the shelves on December 12th!
But before the book can come out, we have to have a cover! So, without further adieu, here it is!
So, to be honest, I think what I love best about this book is that the first one had the lettering in copper, the second in silver, and this one in gold. That is some darn good design there. You’ll notice the book is much darker than it’s predecessors – well, it’s a darker story. And yes, there are hints of the Viceroy’s acid green in there too. What, you didn’t really think his contribution to the story was done, did you?
I adore that blurb from the ever-incredible Julie Czerneda, and just how real the jewels look.
Forsyth Turn never wanted to be a hero. And yet, even in the Overrealm, a hero is what he’ll be.
After their last adventure in Hain, Forsyth expected to return to the life he’d built with Pip and Alis, his days of magic and heroics behind him. But then Pip starts suffering night terrors laced with images of glowing ivy and Elgar Reed calls with fears of bizarre threats and a man garbed all in black.
But there is no magic in the Overrealm. Forsyth refuses to believe that anything other than mundane coincidence is at work—until Elgar’s stalker leaves him a message too eerie and specific to ignore. Now, he has to face the possibility that Pip’s dreams and Elgar’s fears are connected . . . and that maybe they weren’t the only ones to escape the pages of The Tales of Kintyre Turn.
And if that’s the case, it’s going to take more than a handful of heroes to save the day this time. It’s going to take an army. Luckily, Reed fans are legion.
A stunning conclusion to the series, The Silenced Tale is a genre-bending whirlwind that breathes life into the idea that the power of story lies not just with the creator, but with the fans who love it.
I don’t know why, but there seems to be this media-wide conspiracy to ensure that every vampire story set in the 20th and 21st centuries has a mystery element to it. Some are police procedurals with fangs, some have the immortal undead seeking vengeance for the innocent and wronged as detectives and vigilantes, and some focus on supernatural conflicts and personal conundrums in the vampire’s life. But make no mistake – there are a ton of vampire detective stories out there.
Off the top of my head I can think of Dracula: the Series, Forever Knight, The Anita Blake books, The Vampire Files, Angel: The Series, Dark Shadows, Moonlight, Nightwalker, Master of Mosquiton, Michael Morbius, and Blood Ties (both television and books). And that’s without bringing up Wikipedia or Google.
So of course when I was writing my master’s thesis project on Mary Sues and self-representative characters in fanfiction, and I was asked to write a few fanfics of my own demonstrating the principal of the paper, my mind leapt back to my first fandom love – Nicholas de Brabant aka Detective Nick Knight of the Metro Toronto Police Department. I was young, impressionable, and hooked on Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles when one of my cousins introduced me to the Canadian television series Forever Knight.
I tracked down every episode, recorded them onto blank VHS tapes, and watched and rewatched, and rerewatched the weekly mysteries that Detective Knight solved – both legal and supernatural – in the quest to redeem his soul as penance for the lives he’d taken as a young vampire during the Crusades. (Those VHS tapes, by the way, have since been donated to the film department of my undergrad alma mater for research material. The commercials that aired around the show are what’s important to scholars now.) Watching the DVD box set of the episodes while doing my Master’s, I saw that the show didn’t hold up as well as my nostalgia wished. But Geriant Wyn Davies was still dreamy.
And I did notice something else –the pattern. The trope. The stereotype of the vampire who, for some reason or other, decides that it’s his duty to ‘repay society for his sins’, and chooses the path of protecting the innocent and avenging wrongs. To become the Thing That Goes Bump In The Night That Bumps Back. To be a bully bigger and badder than the regular bullies. To use their considerable powers, and memory, and experiences not to exploit, but to protect. And to brood artfully while doing so.
Why was that, I wondered.
Do we humans know that despite our bravado, we are all, in the end, still prey? Prey to one another, to random acts of god, to circumstance and terrorism, war and disease? And do we seek protection so badly that we’re willing to turn to –to have the gall to imagine – a predator willing to guard rather than eat us?
Or is there something titillating about walking that knife-edge of danger? Of knowing that at any moment, the protector could become the stalker, the murderer, the seducer?
The more I thought about it, the more I decided that this is what I had to write about for my thesis project. The trope of the wolf turned shepherd, the stereotype of the vampire detective, and the stock characters that routinely surround him. And as I was working as a production assistant on a made-for-TV film at the time, making my lead protagonist, my Mary Sue, a PA seemed like the most appropriate decision.
Thus “City By Night” was born. Originally meant to be a photo-graphic novel where I would pull the ultimate self-representative stunt and model for the Mary Sue character, the project fell through and I revamped (pun intended) the tale into a prose novella. This gave me a lot more opportunity to develop the backstories and characters, which I jumped into with glee.
Writing “City By Night” felt a lot like writing fanfic of my favourite media texts, but it also gave me one of my first opportunities to flex my own creative wings and start to find my own voice. This was the first instance of the meta-textual storytelling I love to employ, which you’ll find more polished in my The Accidental Turn fantasy series.
And of course, it gave me lots of excuses to reread and rewatch my favourite vampires and swoon, squee, and sigh.
Though I have my theories, I don’t actually know why we love vampire detectives so much. But I’m sure as heck not complaining. And I hope that adding Richmond and Mary to the pantheon makes you swoon, squee and sigh too.
