Bell Bridge Books

Keeping it Real

Good news! Dakota Frost, Book 3, LIQUID FIRE, is on sale right now on Kindle—but if that’s not enough to tempt you, I wanted to let you know that there’s more to Dakota Frost than magic tattoos, teenage weretigers, political vampires, battling wizards, and the hatching of dragons!

The Dakota Frost series isn’t just an urban fantasy: it’s also a slice of real life. From the very beginning, I wanted to create the feeling of a real world, not the experience of reading a stage play in prose. That’s why I created the series as a “period piece” set in Atlanta in 2006—the last time I lived in Atlanta for any extended period.

When I create each new book, I dig into the history and locations, trying to set the story in real places I’ve been and to flesh out the story around real events. In FROST MOON, I used Atlanta’s counterculture mecca, Little Five Points, as a backdrop for the action, and the upcoming midterm elections as texture for my political heroine.

In the sequel, BLOOD ROCK, I had to create a wholly unreal place—the backwoods Georgia town of Blood Rock, based on that giant granite boulder, Stone Mountain. I drove out to Stone Mountain, Georgia, hiked through the park, navigated through nearby neighborhoods, and filled it with my experiences of small town life.

But for the third book, LIQUID FIRE, I wanted to do more. I had since moved to the Bay Area, and discovered “restaurants for vampires” like the dark red curtained Asia de Cuba in San Francisco and the quirky Nola restaurant in Palo Alto and all its nearby alleyways. I walked the streets and took extensive pictures for the Battle of Union Square, incorporating real features like the giant heart statue at its corner.

One of my favorite sequences is a diversion with magical alchemist Professor Narayan Devenger and the ensuing battle outside the Stanford Bookstore. A very real and creepy building with a medieval looking tower helped set the direction for the book; a fountain outside the bookstore became a setting for great action.

For the climax, however, I wanted something more, and I already had something special in mind: Maui. I had visited Maui for work and had spent an afternoon climbing through its mountains and forests, which impressed me far more than its beaches, which I hardly visited. And a volcano sparks the imagination. So for the climax of LIQUID FIRE … well, that would be telling, wouldn’t it?

So if you want to catch up with magical tattooist Dakota Frost, her weretiger daughter Cinnamon Frost, or just want to experience the nooks and crannies of Atlanta, the Bay Area and Maui as seen through the eyes of an urban fantasist, check out LIQUID FIRE!

-Anthony

Pick up the rest of Anthony Francis’s titles from Bell Bridge Books!

The Skindancer Series: Books One and Two

Jeremiah Willstone: Book One

COLD CHRISTMAS TRADITIONS

By H.W. “Buzz” Bernard

I’m kind of a sucker for Christmas traditions: cold weather, warm homes with flames dancing in a fireplace, trees drooping with tinsel and lights, carols filling the air.  Thus, there are a couple of scenes early in BLIZZARD, my newest novel, that depict a Thomas Kinkade-like ambience in the suburban Atlanta home of my protagonist, J. C. Riggins.

I designed the bucolic, perhaps nostalgic, backdrops to provide a biting counterpoint to what happens to J. C. later in the book when he’s hurled into the teeth of a historic Southern snowstorm . . . and a few other things.  You know, outlaw bikers, characters who aren’t who they initially seem, and a pack of wolves (escaped from captivity).

But back to the Christmasy introductory settings.  Among other things, they’re developed against frigid conditions that bear “a touch of the Yukon.”  You may wonder if it really ever gets that cold in “Hotlanta” around Christmas.  The answer is yes, it does.  I’ve lived there almost three decades and remember plenty of chilly Christmases.  Often the day will dawn frosty with the mercury later struggling up only into the 40s.  Okay, you’re right.  Not quite arctic conditions.

But there have been such times.  Shortly before I arrived in the city, December 1983 delivered three consecutive days with single-digit lows: 3º on Christmas Eve morning, a flat zero on Christmas morning, and 5º the following a.m.

Just before Christmas 1989, I recall a stretch of four consecutive days when readings failed to top freezing, even during daylight hours.  Christmas Eve day dawned with the mercury sitting (and shivering?) at 4º.

These Christmas excursions into tundra temperatures aren’t common, of course, but I made sure they performed a curtain call in BLIZZARD.

And if you want to talk about really cold Christmases, let me tell you about Christmas Day 1980 in Boston.  It’s one I’ll never forget.  Perhaps it was stuck in the back of my mind as I wrote the holiday scenes for the novel.   At any rate, as darkness fell on Christmas Eve over eastern Massachusetts that year, temperatures were chilly but hardly cold, at least by New England standards.

The reading in Boston at midnight registered 32º.  That was prior to the arrival of screaming northwest winds (yeah, a major league cold front) that likely boosted the airspeed of Santa and his reindeer to around 400 mph.  Anyway, the mercury tumbled to below zero by Christmas morning and remained stuck there all day.  I’m certain that windchills dived into the 30- to 40-below range.  I know for a fact the temperature inside my condo that day never topped 59º.

That was a little too much nostalgia for me.

Hope you enjoy BLIZZARD.

Blizzard by H.W. “Buzz” Bernard is on sale for $1.99 today only! Click the cover below to purchase! 

Anthony Francis, author of the Dakota Frost SkinDancer series (urban fantasy set in Atlanta, GA) reads from his books at the Georgia Institute of Technology library during Dragon Con week. Francis is a GT alumni.

DAKOTA FROST: A Reading by Author Anthony Francis