The Merlin's Stronghold Blog Tour Starts Today!

The next book in the Faerie Crossed series,  Merlin's Stronghold, comes out October 23rd!

 To celebrate, YA Bound Book Tours helped me set up a blog tour and giveaways, and here's the schedule:

And some of the tour stops are sharing my artwork from A Compendium of the Faer Folke, and if you're not familiar with it, it's a book Avery uses in Crow's Rest to learn about the Fae and how to protect herself against them. The pages being shared have an odd history and origin story:

"Specimen #1132 was a wholly unremarkable geode, one of a dozen donated geological samples that made their way from a private collection in Cornwall to a university in the United States. About the size and shape of a sleeping cat, the stone’s secrets abided until a research student detected the shifting of an object inside.

With the aid of the latest imaging devices, she was able to peer past the tabby-colored crust and into the interior of the geode. A nebulous form, one with edges too regular to be anything but manmade, intrigued her enough to flout protocol and cut open the specimen. The hollowed interior contained a remarkable array of sphalarite and ferruginous quartz crystals—along with the remnants of a peculiar tome.

The spine still attached to the hand-painted, leather cover suggested a much thicker volume, but only a fraction of loose pages were extant. Inked on various types of unknown skins, the pages contained drawings and descriptions of fantastical creatures: mythological beings and faeries  treated as genuine subjects for field study. The title, A Compendium of the Faer Folke, could not be found in any database of historical or contemporary books, however.

Suspecting a prank, the student used radiometric dating methods on the geode, and radiocarbon dating for the book. Test results showed an age of approximately nine million years ago for the geode’s creation, and two hundred years for the book’s materials. It was obvious that the specimen exhibited no signs of tampering, other than the cut she herself made.

Before she could publish her findings, the student herself, plus all her notes and samples, disappeared from her locked basement office. Fortunately, before their loss, she invited a local photographer to document the find, and they were able to post images of the now-lost remnants of A Compendium of the Faer Folke to relevant websites.

Requests to confirm the existence of an entire volume in the private library of one Thomas Flynn of Crow’s Rest, California, have been met with silence. It is unknown if any other manuscripts—full or partial—of this fascinating guide to the “Faer Folke” exist. One can only hope that they will eventually come to light."