Music Monday: Life Support

So...Multiverse. How do I put into words how much I love this con and how lucky I am to get to go almost every year? The people I meet on panels and at my table leave me refreshed and ready to get back to writing every year, and I'm so thankful. They even forgive me (I hope) when I make goofs like getting the time for my panels wrong (first year I was half an hour late for one and this year I missed one all together) and forgetting to get my sherpa badge on time...but they gave my canine bookseller a badge because "a dog should have a badge" without even a second thought.

NO ONE TELL STANLEY OR WILLOW THAT, GOT IT?

On my way back home Sunday night I decided to switch up the playlist and belt out some showtunes because I was getting sleepy. Phantom was my first choice (duh) but it wasn't working because it's been 30+ years since my voice teacher would ask me to sing back to him something Christine Daaé sang. On to RENT! and while that is always a good time, it wasn't hitting home until the song Life Support came up.

Look - I find some of what you teach suspect

Because I'm used to relying on intellect

But I try to open up to what I don't know

Because reason says I should have died

Three years ago

 

Three years ago. Eugene was still on board. Chemo was happening. And I came to Multiverse for the first time with a headwrap on because I was bald and tried so hard not to look "sick." Three years ago. I nearly ran off the road at that line.

Enjoy the rest of this amazing piece from one of my favorite musicals. No day but today. For the person who asked what my dedication in the front of The Druid's Nature meant...that's it. Check your bind points, because there is no day but today.

Music Monday: Multiverse Incoming

All I'm gonna say about Multiverse this coming weekend is that you need to come check out this con if you're in the area. Great folks, great programming, and I will be in Author's Alley with my books including the new Orana's Legacy novella, The Druid's Nature.

I am up for a side quest involving cheese, though...always.

Book Launch: The Druid's Nature

[Cover art by MythologyArt on Pixabay]

She's here! Elys is here! I've really enjoyed making the change to novellas that focus on one event and one character (or two in this case, maybe four? Anyway...). While Taeben's story (The Wizard's Bond) ended up exactly as I expected (like he was going to redeem himself with his backstory? Come on...), Elys took me in a different direction than the one I'd planned. I hope you enjoy it if you give her a chance. It's out in paperback now and eBook on October 10th (I will figure all this out one day) and I will have paperback copies at Multiverse next weekend. I'm so excited!!

Get your copy now: 

Amazon Kindle Copy

Amazon Paperback Copy

Signed Paperback Copy from my Website (still listed as pre-order but I'm working on that)

Music Monday: Ikara as Rob Zombie, sorta...

The song "Dragula" by Rob Zombie is always on my playlists, especially ones for driving. I guess I'm just GenX enough that I need songs with that kind of driving beat to listen to while I'm actually...you know, driving. Anyway, I was listening to it as I left the house to go to work one day and it hit me...I could see the cinematic in my head of Ikara rising from his prison in the Underworld and flying across the length of Orana as the foliage and vegetation beneath him withered and died. Then, at the very end of the song, I saw him step onto the beach at Gudaveh and look back over his shoulder from the Dark Side of the World toward those who sent him to the Underworld in the first place. "Soon." DELICIOUS chills.

This is like the one where I saw the souls in the labyrinth but I'm going to shut it before I give even more spoilers. Here's Ikara's anthem...enjoy.

Music Monday: Geronimo...with some context

We are less than a month out from the newest Orana story greeting the world, and this song made me think of the protagonist, Elys. If you haven't read my other Orana Chronicles, Elys is a wood elf druid who was born with the soul of a warrior. Part of her backstory involves getting unsanctioned training from a high elf which led to both of them being banished. Where Gin is a healer and generally a mother figure, Elys is...a firebug. She is the one that doesn't care what the size of the room is, she's casting fireball. 

Except when she is with her "wee man," the gnome warrior, Hack. The two of them are soulmates on the level of two halves of the same whole...but don't bring it up because she will deny it. In "The Druid's Nature," I'm introducing you properly to Elys, and I hope you find her as endearing and hilarious as I do. This song is all Elys, jumping before she thinks things through. "Y'all stand back, I'm gonna try something." Enjoy.

(Those who know me know that I am VERY careful when using any words that might be a slur or the inappropriate use of an indigenous term or something offensive to a culture different than my own. So I have researched this song up one side and down the other (wonder where THAT idiom is from? Hmmm...) and have landed on it not being offensive because it is using the name of an Apache hero in a way that recalls bravery, which is how he is remembered. Still...I will take it down in a hot minute if I find out I am wrong. HOT. MINUTE.)

Music Monday: Uninvited, on Repeat

 All right, Lark, let's get your story written, okay? 😉 (Lyrics below)

Like anyone would beI am flattered by your fascination with meLike any hot-blooded womanI have simply wanted an object to crave
But you, you're not allowedYou're uninvitedAn unfortunate slight
Must be strangely excitingTo watch the stoic squirmMust be somewhat hearteningTo watch shepherd meet shepherd
But you, you're not allowedYou're uninvitedAn unfortunate slight
Like any uncharted territoryI must seem greatly intriguingYou speak of my love likeYou have experienced love like mine before
But this is not allowedYou're uninvitedAn unfortunate slight
I don't think you unworthyBut I need a moment to deliberate

Music Monday: Solid Flashback

 Y'all...I overheard this coming from my husband's phone the other day and I had to stop where I was and have a dance break. This song came out while my family was in the UK for 6 weeks back in 1995 and this band was all over the place. You couldn't go anywhere without seeing that big hat with horns, and while none of those songs remain in the Old Lady Memory Bank, one song released the next year did. I dare you to listen and not have your own dance break. It seemed like what I needed after Friday's solemn remembrance...hope can be found in terrible dance moves in one's kitchen. 

Even though I was back from my first expat experience by the time this song was released, something about it still makes me desperately homesick for my other home. Enjoy.

25 Years, Gone in a blink...

Polly Anna Herself, on location in NYC, 1997.

25 years ago, I was working for the SC Department of Mental Health. On that particular day in September, I was on my drive down to a day in the psych hospital. We had a juvenile inpatient who needed an interpreter.

I was supposed to be there at 9am so I was close by in the car, listening to NPR, when the first plane hit. I sat in the car in the parking lot until the absolute last minute that I had to go in, and then went straight to the unit to do the morning programing with the patient.

I recount this story every year because I wish I could have had the lack of awareness of what was going on that my patient had. The first thing I was asked upon arriving on the unit was why the staff was playing the same part of a movie over and over on the telly. I remember that same sense of optimism, in my case because I am the eternal Polly Anna (or used to be, pre-Eugene), and remember thinking that it had to be an accident. A terrible, large scale accident, but an accident just the same.

The staff sat the patient down and told them what was going on, in excruciating detail, because they were chronologically a teenager with the processing level of a smaller child. The staff were very kind and careful during that interaction, which ended with some typical questions: Is my mom all right? Are they going to fly planes into my mom's house? Heartbreaking but important.

When people talk about the lack of innocence that followed 9/11, that's what I think of. So many of us were caught off guard in the worst way possible that day. I think that is an important lesson to remember now, while we are caught in the grips of leadership that want to take us back to the pre 9/11 USA, when we believed that we were safe because our leaders told us so...when we believed the hype about being the greatest country in the world. Remember the shock that you felt, even if you didn't have anyone directly in harm's way that morning*. Remember it and use the clear vision we all had afterward to critically listen to all the noise coming from politicians and heads of state.

Do not ever let yourself be so complacent that you accept something without questioning again...or we will be right back where we were, 25 years ago. Don't misunderstand...the togetherness and the increased community that we saw in the immediate days afterward was a good thing, and if we could all reach out to each other that way again, regardless of the contrived ideas that we think divide us, our country would be stronger and, I think, safer.

Hug those you love today, y'all. If there was any lesson to be learned from 9/11/2001, it is that we aren't promised tomorrow and we need to act accordingly, to all, but especially to the least of these.

*I may have known someone that was there that day. When I worked at UGA I met a Scottish guy in the welcome to your new job orientation nonsense named Marcus. I cannot remember his last name to save my life, but he was once working as a bartender in London and told me all the patrons called him Angus because of his accent. I know that he was living in New York in 2001 and I THINK he was working in the Wall Street area. I think of him every year, showing up to one of the orientation events in a kilt that looked suspiciously like a Campbell tartan to me, and talking about the fact that my family are McDonalds. 

 

Music Monday: SUN of a Son...

Here's something I think you should either already know about me, or you can totally see this as the truth: I'm a gamer. (Hello, World of Arcstone anyone?) Up until a few years ago, my time was focused on either MMORPGs or those little games that become a time sink in one's smartphone. Recently, though, I got to live out a bucket list item that I've had since elementary school: I got to play D&D.

I remember clearly finding some guys playing D&D and asking to play in early middle school. They rolled me a character and then said she fell down into a hole, then asked what I was going to do. I frantically looked at the sheets of paper on the table (I don't even remember what class or race she was) and as I was trying to figure out what to say one of them told me that another rock had closed over the hole and my poor little character was dead.

Boys. I tell ya. 

Anyway, I started playing in my grown up group with a wood elf druid called Lyrei, Rei for short. She is moody and dark, her dad stepped out on her mom, and she has a magical wolfhound that follows her around that's called Aoife. I'd always played the magical casting types that stay out of the melee and hurl lightning bolts and fire from a distance, you see. I love Rei, don't get me wrong...I even added a ranger subclass for her so that she can wield a bow and do cool...ranger stuff. Our DM calls her the group's little Rei of Sunshine but I think that's about 85% sarcasm.

For a one shot that came next, I tried a wood elf rogue named Róisín, but low level rogues aren't much fun really AND people at the table kept calling her Raisin. No more Irish names for my characters, that's for sure. So when we decided to do a one shot with pirates, I went in a completely new direction and tried an artificer gnome who was once in the navy and likes to blow things to bits. Her name is Regretta Y'metme and she is SO MUCH FUN. No one makes fun of her name and everyone begs her to keep her mouth shut in public because she likes to talk about NOTHING just as much as I do...which means she could reveal secrets and not realise it for several paragraphs in her diatribe. She also loves her ship...like more than most people, loves the sea air hitting her face from the crow's nest, and has a clockwork raven called Sprocket that can carry messages and swears occasionally a lot.

What's not to love?

So the music for today is a long time favorite that I usually ignore when it comes on the playlist (along with a few other by Jimmy Buffett because it reminds me of some very awful times and people from a specific time in my past...I'm looking at a Pirate that is Looking at 40, specifically, but one of my sorority jerseys had SOASOAS on the back). But this time, I heard it on the way back from our last session, and found that I'm learning new things about my little artificer that will make her even more fun to play AND potentially write about. 

I told you, she's got a lot to say.

Enjoy the video...it has lyrics on the screen and the background images are also pretty important to my little Sun of a Son of a Sailor and her crew on the Narwhal. 🏴‍☠️

Music Monday: Mystic Woman

It's really no surprise that this song is my current earworm. It's all over social media, and it's like a southern gothic Hozier decided to write a song about a deconstructed religious journey...or, because it's all about my FMC, Lark. It doesn't hurt that I can see the MMC Connor singing this for her...bless his sweet heart. Hopefully this will get them out of my head long enough to finish Elysiam's novella. Hopefully. Anyway, enjoy.

 

Music Monday: Is í an teanga mo ghrá.

(Pronounced: Iss ee un tyang-uh muh graw) The title (in Irish) means I love language, specifically the Irish language, also called Gaeilge (pronounced GWEIL-geh). I'm getting very into learning Irish (via Duolingo, best I can manage for now), and one of the easiest ways for me to remember things is singing them. Go figure.

Here's one of my favorite of the Chasing Abbey songs that have become my latest hyper fixation: Arís is Arís (Ah-reesh ish ah-reesh) which is an idiom meaning Again and Again. The words are on the screen so you don't need the automatic captions. I especially like it because it taught me the name for one of my novels, Darkness (Dorchadas). See? Language nerd.🤓Enjoy.

Music Monday: It's Obvious...Child

There is nothing related to any of my WIP or my published work in this week's Music Monday. What is there is some motivation. I have to go back to the DayJob® tomorrow and to say I'm not looking forward to it is an understatement. For the first time since Eugene pulled up and made my life awful, I actually have to go to campus and y'all...I am not as healed as I like to make people think. But needs must, so I'm sure I will have this one on LOUD repeat in the car. Enjoy.

Happy Birthday, Sweet Boy!!

Stanley doesn't have his own blog like our Bryn did, but I can wish him a happy 3rd Birthday here! We're so lucky to have you in our family, my sweet cinnamon roll boy. Love you to the moon and back.

Our Bánbhuí Beastie, Stanley

Music Monday: Still Uninvited

So, this song by Alanis Morissette has been speaking to me about a big bad fight in an upcoming WIP, but when I heard this version it blew me out of the water. I love Brandi Carlisle and she did this total justice. Rage on, sister. Rage.

UninvitedSong by Alanis Morissette
Like anyone would beI am flattered by your fascination with meLike any hot-blooded womanI have simply wanted an object to craveBut you, you're not allowedYou're uninvitedAn unfortunate slight
Must be strangely excitingTo watch the stoic squirmMust be somewhat hearteningTo watch shepherd need shepherdBut you, you're not allowedYou're uninvitedAn unfortunate slight
Like any uncharted territoryI must seem greatly intriguingYou speak of my love likeYou have experienced love like mine beforeBut this is not allowedYou're uninvitedAn unfortunate slight
I don't think you unworthyI need a moment to deliberate

Newsletter, August 2026

Hey, y'all!

Lots has happened since I last wrote...LOTS. Some of it is on the personal side, and let's just say that we are on a good path as far as that's concerned.

Coming soon, our new boy Stanley (shown here with me at the Georgia Renaissance Festival last spring) will be three... this month! Not a day goes by that I don't wish our big girls Bryn and Ciaragh were still here to show him the ropes, but he has healed the holes that they left in my heart...if not the ones in the yard.

As far as the Nancy E. Dunne side, there's loads to tell there too.

• I'm getting back on track with events and shows to meet more and more of you and get signed copies of my book babies in your hands. The events I have left this year are the Upstate Renaissance Festival, 18-20 September in Spartanburg, SC; Multiverse Con, 16-18 October in Peachtree City, GA; and SC Comicon Junior, 25 October in Greenville, SC.
• There's also a new way to get your hands on signed copies of my novels! Click on the button down there to access The Bookshop, where you can order signed copies and pre-order physical copies of upcoming stories. (If digital copies are your thing, you can get those as usual in my Amazon book listings here.)

Finally, the new edition in the Orana's Legacy novellas is coming in October: The Druid's Nature. 

THERE'S STILL ONLY ONE WAY TO FIND OUT.

Elys has never questioned her devotion to Kildir, her sworn deity. When he gives her a mission to complete without a lot of explanation, she takes it...even though it leads to another separation from Hack and tests all of the parts of her nature, those things that make her who she is. Will she be able to complete this mission in time to save the gnome she loves? Can she live up to the mantle of Guardian of the Wilds?

This novella fits into the Orana Chronicles timeline after the events of Red, The Temple, and Hero. Click on the link below for more information and to pre-order your copy!

Visit the Bookshop

I hope your August is fantastic, and I will see you back here in September.