Polar Day, the Summer Solstice, and a Free Book

Fairbanks, Alaska at 12:43 a.m. on June 21, 2008

Even though my book Polar Day has been out for more than a year now, I still can't help but think of it when the summer solstice rolls around here in the Northern Hemisphere.

The book, like its predecessor, is set in Fairbanks, Alaska, land of both the midnight sun and the Polar Night. I'm not sure why, but I have always been fascinated by the solstices and the phenomenon of 24 hour daylight or darkness. I'm glad I don't have to live with either extreme!

I know the solstice actually happened yesterday, but I figured it's not too late for me to share a few celebrations that are tied to the event.

The Midnight Sun over Alaska

• Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England is perhaps the most famous location for solstice activities. Every year a host of revelers gather at the ancient site to witness the sun rising above the stone circle. For reasons we will probably never know, the circle was built so that it aligns perfectly with the sunrise on the solstice.

• New York city has held the "Solstice in Times Square" yoga event since 2003. The yoga begins at 7 am and continues until sunset. The day has also been named National Yoga Day as a result of this event. 

• In a tradition that dates back to medieval times, fires are lit in the Alpine region of Austria in honor of the solstice. Party-goers enjoy panoramic views of the fires dotting the mountainside from high up in the Alpine towns. 

• Astrofest in Croatia brings astronomers and star-gazers to the famous Višnjan Observatory. This festival combines science and spirituality for a magical take on the solstice. 

The Midnight Sun game in Fairbanks

• Finally, my favorite solstice celebration is the Midnight Sun baseball game held each year in Fairbanks on the summer solstice. The game begins around 10:30 each year and artificial lighting has never been used. The tradition has been going on since 1906. I thought it sounded like such a fun event I included it to help kick off the action in Polar Day. Although in my version the event didn't stay fun for very long. ;)

Since I'm talking about celebrations, I thought I'd add a little celebration of my own and offer my ebook The Turnagain Arm for free this week on Amazon. The Turnagain Arm is the prequel to both Polar Night and Polar Day, and the events of this story play in to both novels. If you're interested in checking it out, get your free copy here.

Have you ever taken part in a solstice celebration?

Happy Summer to everyone here in the Northern Hemisphere and Happy Winter to our Southern Hemisphere friends!

Phasers: Polar Night, Giftcard and Ebook #Giveaway ! #RealmsFaire

Welcome to Phasers!

The Rules

I, the game master, will offer up a word associated with a popular work of speculative fiction (scifi, fantasy, horror), such as phaser. The first commenter would then give a word he or she associates with phaser, such as stun. The next commenter would then give a word he or she associates with stun, such as shock. The next commenter would then give a word he or she associates with shock, such as electric. And so one...

All commenters will get put into today's drawing. No comments will be counted after 10:00 p.m. eastern time US each day. Winner will be chosen by Random.org.

Today's Prizes

1. Polar Night by Julie Flanders, ebook
2. Twisted Earths by Untethered Realms, ebook
3.  $5 Amazon giftcard from M. Pax

Today's Game

Polar Night by Julie Flanders is today's inspiration. The game word is:

Winter

More Games, More Prizes! Visit these other Realms Faire games!

Riddle Me This ~ Dueling Bards ~ Phasers ~ Unicorn Hunt ~ Who Roams Here? ~ Beware the Vortex ~ VelociRaffle ~ The Hero’s Dilemma ~Stockade Brigade ~ Hall of Doors ~ The Joust ~ Drench-a-Wench/Soak-a-Bloke

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Fantasy Uprising on sale!

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Win a $40 Giftcard! Mayhem in the Air is on tour!

Long and Short Reviews is featuring a tasty snack from Gwen Gardner's "Saving Scrooge: A Short Story Prequel to the Saving Marley Series" today. Ooo!

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Summertime and the living is easy?

Source

With all due respect to the writers of the above famous lyric, I beg to differ.

I hate summer. I hate heat, I hate the blazing sun, and, most of all, I hate humidity. It's safe to say summer is not my season. I know that puts me in a small minority. Possibly of one?

Nothing about me is conducive to enjoying summer. My skin is so pale that I could easily pass for a corpse, and tanning is not something it is capable of. The only color my skin can turn is lobster red. I have thick, curly hair that hates humidity as much as I do. Five minutes outside in July and my carefully coiffed curls are transformed into a frizzy clown wig. Even my feet hate summer, as nearly every pair of sandals I have ever owned has given me blisters.

While most people look forward to the standard summer attire of shorts and tees, I cringe with embarrassment at the thought of exposing my blinding white legs. I loathe leaving work and getting into my car when it has been roasting in the parking lot all day. The inventor of air conditioning is one of my personal heroes.

One of the few things I like about summer is baseball, yet this year my Reds are so pitiful that they have merely increased my seasonal grumpiness.

My hatred of summer played a big role in the development of my latest novel, Polar Day. After writing my debut novel Polar Night around the winter solstice and the Arctic phenomenon of 24 hour darkness, I became interested in writing a sequel about the opposite extreme. When reading about summer in the book's setting of Fairbanks, Alaska, I was horrified at the thought of a sun which never has the decency to set. When I read about an extraordinary summer heatwave that was baking Fairbanks, it was easy to imagine the primary horror facing the people of my story. What else could it be but fire?

Fortunately, unlike the people of my book, I've never had to face the terror of being burned alive. The only burning I've had to deal with is from the sun. But I still count the days until I can say goodbye to summer.

October is far and away my favorite month of the year. I love the cool, crisp air and I love being able to cover my ghostly pale limbs with jeans and hoodies. I love football, the shorter days, snuggling under a toasty blanket, and hearing the leaves crunch under my feet when I take my dog for a walk. In short, I love everything about autumn.

To quote Green Day and wrap this up with another lyric, this one much more suited to my personality, "wake me up when September ends."

A Discovery of Russian Witches

When I sat down to write this post I couldn't resist playing with the title of Deborah Harkness' 2011 book, as it fit so perfectly. I felt like I discovered my own special witches when I was coming up with the stories for my latest release Polar Day and its prequel The Turnagain Arm.

I knew I wanted to use a witch as the antagonist in Polar Day but I also knew I wanted the character to be male as opposed to the more popular or traditional female witch. While doing a little research on the history of witchcraft, I learned that when witch hunts swept across Europe during the seventeenth century, a different kind of witch hunt inspired terror in Russia. Unlike the religious-based trials in Europe, the Russian trials were concerned with stopping "witches" who they feared would use magic to inspire revolt against the system of serfdom and aristocracy that ruled the land. The Russians weren't worried about devil worship; they were worried about social agitators. And their primary targets were men.

I couldn't believe how perfectly this real world history fit in with the history of my fictional universe. Aleksei Nechayev, the antagonist in my first novel Polar Night, was Russian, so I had already established a Russian backstory. Once I discovered this history, my new characters came to life and the stories played out from there.

A line of male Russian witches is introduced in my novella The Turnagain Arm through a saloon owner named Vasyl Dzubenko. While he is a witch, he's not the antagonist of that story. Vasyl is a good man who uses his power reluctantly and only to stop evil. Unfortunately his descendant Jamie, the Polar Day witch, is a very different story.

As a history buff, I couldn't have asked for better inspiration for my story than a real life horror such as the Russian witch trials. History never ceases to fascinate me.

Any other history nuts out there?

Polar Day is now available in paperback and on Amazon Kindle. To celebrate my new release, I'm offering The Turnagain Arm free this week, through Friday, 2/13. If you'd like to get to know my witches, get your free download here.

About Polar Day:

The midnight sun bakes Fairbanks, Alaska as residents gather for the annual summer solstice baseball game. Amidst the revelry and raucous shouts of “Play ball,” a spark alights and a jogger bursts into flames. Detective Danny Fitzpatrick, still reeling from his near death at the hands of vampire Aleksei Nechayev, watches in horror as the man burns alive.

Someone is burning Fairbanks and its residents and leaving nothing but smoldering embers behind. As the city sweats under a record-breaking heatwave and unexplained fires claim more victims, Danny and his colleagues struggle to find an arsonist who can conjure fire out of thin air.

To Danny’s horror, the only one who may be able to help him stop the arsonist is his nemesis Nechayev. Will the vampire help in the hunt for a witch?

All Aboard for The Turnagain Arm

The Turnagain Arm on Kindle

The neighborhood where I live is situated along the Ohio River, directly up a very steep hill that ends at the train tracks that run along the riverbank. On clear mornings and nights, we can hear the whistles of the trains as they make their way along the river. I've always found the whistles eerie and for whatever reason the empty tracks have always been a bit creepy to me. An old abandoned train station used to sit along the tracks and when I was a kid I always imagined all kinds of scary things going on in that deserted station and on the tracks behind it. It seemed to me that station probably had lots of tales to tell.

I got the idea for my latest tale, The Turnagain Arm, after hearing a train whistle coming up from the river while I was walking my dog Clancy early in the morning. Later, I heard another whistle to end the day. It was fall and the night was crisp and chilly, and the whistle lingered in the air long after the train had moved past us. 

I wanted to write a story about what my Polar Night vampire Aleksei Nechayev was up to before the events of that book and after his human experiences as a Russian soldier in World War I. When I read that the Alaskan Railroad construction began in 1914 and reached its peak in 1917, the same year Aleksei became a vampire, my interest peaked. When I then learned that the Trans-Siberian railway from Aleksei's home of St. Petersburg to the far east town of Vladivostok was completed in 1916, I knew I had the beginnings of my story. Suddenly it became crystal clear how Aleksei left the ravages of World War I in the Russian West for a new start in Alaska, as freighters regularly went from Vladivostok to the Western United States and to the Alaskan territory. Like the day that gave me this idea, the story begins and ends with the haunting whistle of a train. 

While researching the time period and the area, I found this great video put out by the Alaska Film Archives showing early footage of the rail's construction, which started in a tent camp that is now the city of Anchorage. 

There are also great historical photos of the early days of the railroad camps, such as this picture of two women who ran their own waffle house. I was so intrigued by the thought of two women running their own business in those days that I created a character who ran a waffle stand of her own.

Source

About thirty miles south of Anchorage was the most difficult stretch of the railroad's construction, the area known as the Turnagain Arm. The tracks had to be constructed at the base of steep vertical cliffs that ended in the body of water that gave the area its name.

This is what the tracks at Turnagain look like in the present day, so it's impossible to imagine how difficult and dangerous it must have been to construct them back in the 19-teens.

Source: alaskarails.org

This photo from the Alaska Digital Archives gives some idea of the conditions the rail workers were working under.

Source

I loved the idea of setting my story in such a hostile and forbidding place. The characters who live and work in the Turnagain Arm camp are a hearty and tough lot by necessity, but they also find time to relax and enjoy themselves in the Turnagain Arm saloon.

Unfortunately for them, the vampire named Aleksei Nechayev finds himself drawn to the saloon as well. And the workers who call the camp home soon learn that the brutal conditions of the Alaskan wilderness are nothing compared to the danger they face now.

Want to take a trip to The Turnagain Arm? Find the novella on Amazon Kindle and on Goodreads

A to Z Blogging Challenge: V is for Vampire

We're almost to the end of the alphabet and the A to Z Blogging Challenge.

If you haven't heard of the A to Z Blogging Challenge, check out the A to Z blog. Why not visit a few of the participants or look back over some of our creature-themed posts?

Here at Untethered Realms, we are taking on the Challenge as a group. Each day, we are sharing a fantastical creature that may be from one of our books, a favorite movie, or something we just came up with as entertainment.

For today's post we have...

V is for Vampire

Polar Night's Aleksei by Heather Holden

When we decided on a theme of magical creatures for our group A to Z I knew right away that I wanted to take the letter V. Vampires are my favorite creatures by far, and a vampire named Aleksei Nechayev is the antagonist of my debut novel Polar Night. 

I admit, I'm not a big fan of the love struck vampires that have become so popular in recent years. I love vampires as monsters and in most cases the more evil they are the better as far as I'm concerned. 

Aleksei is definitely evil. If I had to choose a vampire from popular culture that I think Aleksei is most like I would say Angel's soul-less alter ego Angelus from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is the show that first got me hooked on vampires. Aleksei is arrogant and vicious, and he sees humans as nothing more than toys for him to taunt and tease. He revels in his vampire nature rather than brooding over it. In short, he's not a nice guy at all. 

If you like evil vampires, you may like getting to know Aleksei in Polar Night. 

Only four more days (and creatures) to go!

Genre Confusion

Source: Wikimedia

When people ask what genre I write in, I never really know how to answer the question. The question brings more than a little anxiety, as the honest answer is simply “I don’t know.”

My first book Polar Night is a detective story that features a vampire as its antagonist. My second, The Ghosts of Aquinnah, includes a ghost, but it’s really more of a mystery combined with a love story than a paranormal novel. I would classify both of my books as mash-ups of different genres. But “mixed bag” isn't exactly the answer people are looking for when they ask about genre.

I understand the importance of genre and can’t deny I have sometimes been envious of authors who write in clear-cut genres like science fiction, suspense, romance, or “chick lit.” I've seen authors do brilliant marketing work in creating their brand and platform based around their genre of choice. If I had to pick a brand for myself I suppose something involving a very confused person would be most accurate at this point.

But I also can’t deny that sometimes I wonder why the answer to the genre question can’t simply be “fiction.” When it comes to reading, I've never thought much about genre. If I see or hear about a book that sounds good to me I read it. And I can think of tons of books I've read over the years that don’t seem to fall into any one genre.

One of the things I enjoy about being part of Untethered Realms is that I love that the designation of speculative fiction provides such a big umbrella. I think I have a better answer for the genre question now.

As readers, how important is genre to you? Does it bother you if books fall into more than one category?

Come one, come all to the Blogger Book Fair!

The Blogger Book Fair is going on all this week, through Friday, July 26, and all are invited to join in on the fun!

The fair is run by Kayla Curry and I can't even imagine how many hours of work she puts into the event to get it up and running. There are hundreds of authors participating and many are holding giveaways and other promotional activities for the fair. In addition, there are tons of fun and creative events going on, including Readers Choice Awards, Flash Fiction and Synopsis Challenges, and Excerpt Days. Visit the events page here to see everything that is scheduled during this fun-packed week.

I am taking part in the fair with my novel Polar Night, which will be reviewed by one of the many great book bloggers participating in the event. I'm also interviewing four fellow BBF authors at my blog this week, so please stop by and learn about these authors and their books. In addition, visit me at L.R. Wright's and Shah Wharton's blogs today and at the blogs of Jeff W. Horton and Cathrina Constantine on Wednesday. It's been fun swapping posts and interviews with these authors!

My Untethered Realms comrade M. Pax is also involved with the fair and is giving away ebook copies of The Renaissance of Hetty Locklear. Hetty is an EXCELLENT book so I know you'll want to enter this giveaway if you haven't already read it. Click here for the giveaway page.

Mary and I are both entered into the BBF Reader's Choice Awards, hosted by Shut up & Read, and you can vote for us both here. Polar Night is entered in the "Fantasy - Mature (1)" category and Hetty Locklear is entered in the "Science Fiction - New Adult" category. Please vote for both of us!

And please visit all of us at the Blogger Book Fair this week and "book your trip to far away places!" :)