Hey everyone! Progress update for you: I’m still hard at work revising The Eighth House for submission to my publisher. As of right now, it’s 32% longer than the original and still growing. It’s gonna be the same essential story, but I’m hoping a whole lot more awesome. I don’t know how long it’s going to take me. Could be another month or two, but I can’t carve anything in stone because life. You know?
Meanwhile, An Emperor for the Eclipse is in the hands of my editor, and I already have assets collected and plans for the cover design. When I get the edited copy back and review, it’s off to self-pub land with formatting for e- and print books and a whole slew of other preparatory work. Maybe by the end of January, early February for that one to go up for pre-order on Amazon? Get my newsletter so you know right away.
So while all that’s going on, how about a juicy tidbit from The Eighth House 2.0? This is from the new version of the first scene where Hades and Persephone finally seal the deal. The new scene is way longer, a bit more believable (IMHO), and possibly a bit less rapey than the original. All the tension is still there, I’ve just chosen to draw it out in a different (more satisfying, I hope) way. Here you go!
From Flames of Olympos Volume I: The Eighth House, Part IV: Restraint
Cold! Something wet popped her on the shoulder and she gave a little gasp. Hades’s eyes opened at her jerk and she looked to the ceiling just as another drop of water pocked down against her skin.
The overhead landscape of the chamber still hung heavy with descending stone, but there was no way to mistake it for the same dead cavern she’d seen on her way in the door. There were stalactites and stone curtains, yes, but they were new, and in different locations. Where before, there had been dry relics of the space’s forming, now there were wet inverted spires of living stone, dripping humid life onto their knobby counterparts rising from the floor. Onto her. The bones of the earth in Hades’s private rooms almost seemed to blossom, for lack of a better word.
“My Lord, is this normal?”
He huffed amusement and gathered her close at the hip. “Little flower, not a single piece of this is normal. Not you, not this”—he made a lazy gesture around the room with his free hand—“not any of it.”
She cast a wary eye around the altered space, the potential violence she saw now in the columns of stone. “Will it”—she bit her lip—“will it happen every time?”
The hand at her waist moved up into her wild hair, gripping and drawing her down near his face. “I have no idea, Persephone,” he said, awakening to mischief again. “But your assumption there will be other times is most encouraging.”
So was the hot tongue in her mouth, the scrape of nails at her scalp. If this was the ‘ruin’ to which obedience brought her, Persephone would obey and let him raze her to the ground, then beg to be remade so he could destroy her again.
