Anne Boleyn, Vampire Baroness

In the words of the annoying mancer giving her problems:

Anne’s head tilted from one side of her shoulders to the other, long neck bending with it. Like she’s trying to see if the view changed my appearance. The ‘B’ on her neck shined with a flash, a damned beacon trying to get through to me.

“King Henry Price?” she asked again.

“I already answered you.”

“I’m sorry.” She shrugged, hands on her hips, rings rubbing against rough denim. “You’re just so ugly, aren’t you? Broken nose…so many scars. There’s nothing perfect about you. I thought with all the rumors about you being a hound that you’d be better looking. I supposed I shouldn’t be surprised since we live in a time where every woman will stick a toaster in herself if it vibrates quickly enough.

“Women have no standards at all anymore. They don’t want to work for the complete experience. Seduction takes too much time, better to make a blog post about wanting to ‘get to know people’ I think the phrase is.”

“Rumors…” I said.

I locked on the word, ignored the rest. Yup, she wasn’t there for the teapots. Good to know. Asylum toady? Guild spy? Another mancer testing me before she bought a commission? Could have worked for the government…but then maybe not with the clothes she was wearing. She might have been related to Welf too. All possibilities, none the correct answer.

“Look at his little brain go click,” Anne said. “So cute.”

I glanced at the ‘B’ one more time. “If I’m King Henry and you are really Annie B, then doesn’t that mean I get to cut your head off?” I asked, lips pulling back along my teeth.

Something shifted in her. The second gear that Asylum women have when they’re about you put you in place. “You’re going to close down your shop and then you’re going to come with me for a few days,” Annie B told me in plain terms suffering no argument. “I need someone with the skill-set for an Artificer kind of problem that isn’t prisoner to the Guild bylaws and you’ve been volunteered for it. If you try to cut my head off, I’ll kick your little ***. Understand, King Henry?”

Volunteered? Who would volunteer me? Who could volunteer me? Short list. Plutarch, Ceinwyn, or the Lady. “I don’t hire out or build or design without a contract and unless I say so and last I checked—you didn’t offer me payment.” My hands couldn’t take it anymore—they curled into fists. Plutarch, Ceinwyn, or the Lady. Which one would get a kick out of volunteering me without mentioning it to me? All of them. That didn’t help…

“Get out of my store before I build up the anima to smash you across the street, you pushy psycho *****.”

That’s when she punched me in the face so hard I tumbled backwards five feet and slammed into my shelf filled with glassware.

Read more on Annie B in The Foul Mouth and the Fanged Lady by Richard Raley: available on Amazon and Smashwords and Nook.  Or just type "Foul Mouth" into your Kindle...they'll know what you're talking about.

FYI, Prime Pickings is Free on Amazon

Get it while you can, I don't control the length of the freeness.  If you like post-apocalyptic sci-fi you should enjoy it.

Prime Pickings by Richard Raley on Amazon Kindle

Meet Tyson Bonnie, Electromancer

In the words of the only other Ultra in town:

“Yeah, yeah.” I put the box back under the counter. “Takes about two hours to full charge using static electricity, quicker if you find a piece of carpet and start rubbing your arm against it. Theoretically you could attach it to a power-pad but I wouldn’t recommend it—too much power too quick might blow the containment field.”

“Wow, King Henry,” Tyson said, his face all lit up as he swung a lazy punch across his chest that was far too much arm and not enough body torque. “This is awesome. It’s just how I imagined it.”

“Speaking of that, satisfy some curiosity on this…how did you imagine it?”

A brief bit of embarrassment crossed his lit up face, his forehead crinkling. “Stole it from a fantasy novel.”

“****…”

“I know, you hate the things.”

I shook my head. Hated them? Nope, I was jealous that they had it so easy with their ‘magic’. The Mancy’s a long way from some wand flipping and twirling. “Next, you’ll want me to make you a lightsaber.”

His eyes got bright with crazy dreams. “Could you?”

Read more on Tyson in The Foul Mouth and the Fanged Lady by Richard Raley: available on Amazon and Smashwords and Nook.  Or just type "Foul Mouth" into your Kindle...they'll know what you're talking about.

Meet Ceinwyn Dale, Aeromancer

In the words of her favorite student:

“I ain’t going to your school, lady.” 

“Why not?” She was genuinely curious. Ceinwyn Dale, always the interested observer. 

“I’m not a freak. I get by. I got a life. So I fight, who gives a rat’s ***?” 

She picked up my iPod and browsed through the playlist. She had beautiful hands. Not a body part most guys notice, and Ceinwyn Dale had some others that were pretty noticeable, but her delicate fingers and sapphire fingernails drew the eye when she used them in front of you. Nimble manipulation, just like the rest of her, turning those fleshy stubs into the finest tool, skinny and elegant. “Is this the entirety of your reasons? 

“I got a girl.” 

“And you love her?” The smile quirked extra. 

“Sure. I guess.” Love wasn’t a big emotion in the Price household. We had trouble managing giving a ****. 

“Or do you just like what you get to do with her?” 

“That too.” 

One part about Ceinwyn Dale I started figuring out during that first conversation is she mocks everyone but she treats her kids the same as she does adults. Which I wasn’t seeing much of back then. It was inclusive and part of the reason she’s such a good recruiter. 

“You’ll have to give her up.”

Read more on Ceinwyn Dale in The Foul Mouth and the Fanged Lady by Richard Raley: available on Amazon and Smashwords and Nook.  Or just type "Foul Mouth" into your Kindle...they'll know what you're talking about.

Meet King Henry Price, Geomancer

In his own words:

I was screwed up beyond all repair by then.  Only reason I hadn’t been to Juvie was that I had an extra something the other delinquents didn’t have, not that I realized it at the time of my crimes.  All I knew was that I was lucky.  Yeah, cursed more like it.  But back then, it sure was nice to be sitting in the shopping mart contemplating stealing some magazines or candy bars or Chinese-assembled electronics when a display magically fell apart to be a distraction I desperately needed. 

Cigarettes and electronics had been my steals of choice right before I was co-opted into another life and if it wasn’t for the Asylum, I’d be well on my way to lung cancer by now, or dead twenty times over.  Not from hard stuff like you’re thinking—worse I can admit to is bumming some weed when I could—but from fighting.  I loved to get into a fight.  Still do. 

Here I am twenty-one years old and I’m lucky to hit five-foot-eight on some very generous tape-measures.  Back then, middle school and elementary ****holes with babysitting teachers and cruel lunch-ladies, it was even worse.  Some district counselor got all doctor on me and diagnosed it as a Napoleon Complex; that I was trying to prove I was tough despite my size.  But it wasn’t that. 

I liked to fight.

Read more on King Henry in The Foul Mouth and the Fanged Lady by Richard Raley: available on Amazon and Smashwords.  Or just type "Foul Mouth" into your Kindle...they'll know who you're talking about...

Little King Henry is OUT

Little King Henry, my short story set in The King  Henry Tapes world has been released.

Little King Henry by Richard Raley on Amazon
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Real Review: The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson

Link:  The Way of Kings

Brandon Sanderson is one of the most creative forces in Fantasy today and I have to praise him for it. 2011 and we are still strapped down by this notion of GRITTY IS GOOD and our supposedly gifted writing minds are left to play the same stories in the same medieval worlds over and over again. But not Brandon Sanderson, not “The Way of Kings”.

This novel could have been riddled with tropes, it could have started with a farmboy, two friends, and a wizard, and I would have forgiven it. Only it didn’t. Plot = creative. World = creative. Magic = creative. Book itself = gorgeous. Paid for by Sanderson himself, as I understand it, “the Way of Kings” hardcover is worth the price alone, filled with illustrations and colored maps. If more novels looked like this instead of the paper-thin ready-to-fall-apart-on-the-second-read-through messes the publishers put out nowadays, I wouldn’t have moved over to the Kindle.

“The Way of Kings” and the Stormlight Archive will be the most influential fantasy novel/series since Martin added the Character-Killing-Wheel-o’-Death to the genre in 1996. Every page of it remembers…we’re only bound by what we can’t imagine. We can make any world we want. Authors don’t even need to pay for CGI.  It marries the New Weird with the Traditional...that's an important step.

While Sanderson’s prose sometimes is mocked as awkward, here it proves workman-like and that’s to its advantage, beautiful words would have only distracted from the world he builds before the reader. Instead we’re left to enjoy and ponder over Roshar. Of Shadeplate and Shadeblades, of Stormlight and Windrunners, of Fabrials and Knights Radiant. We are plopped down on wind-swept wastelands where life only shows itself after the storm. We see unhindered shattered lands of running slave crews and assassins who seem to defy gravity.

My only complaints have to do with the Shallan character taking so long to get going, the Kaladin flashbacks that don't seem to keep up with the rest of the novel, and...that no one seemed to teach Sanderson how to curse as a teenager. Storm you? Really?  Try: Stick it up your storm hole.  Better...

More like this, fantasy authors, more like this. Four and a half stars and give the man a curve.

Foul Mouth and the Fanged Lady is OUT!

It's out!

The Foul Mouth and the Fanged Lady by Richard Raley on Amazon
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Get a sample at least to meet King Henry Price, he'll rock your world...