Welcome Birthday Guest Rory Ni Coileain!

At first, when I sat down to try to come up with a guest list of fictional characters for my own birthday party, I have to admit I had just a tiny little panic attack. See, my favorite fictional characters tend to be a tad… well, demonstrative. Flamboyant, even. And despite what y’all might think of me based on the bad boys I love to write, I’m a stone introvert. Well, on my good days I’m an ambivert, but when I’m done peopling, I’m outies. And the last thing in the world someone like me wants is to be the center of attention in a room full of people like my favorite fictional characters!

But then it dawned on me that if I could actually fill a room with my favorites, there’s about zero chance I’d be the center of attention – they’d all be way too busy entertaining/being entertained by/possibly getting into fistfights with one another. Panic attack over.

So here’s the list, chosen expressly to be so interesting that all I have to do is sit back and watch:

Rocky Jones and Gaby Plauget, from John Varley’s Titan trilogy

Lucien Vaudrey and Stephen Day, from KJ Charles’ The Magpie Lord

James Bolivar diGriz, a/k/a the Stainless Steel Rat, and his lovely and lethal wife Angelina, courtesy of Harry Harrison

Toby Prentiss and Rain Engel, from Susan MacNicol’s Waiting for Rain

From movies:  Deadpool, Indiana Jones (from before he survived a nuclear explosion inside a lead-lined refrigerator, pleaseandthankyou), Iron Man (although Tony Stark would be welcome too), Wonder Woman, StarLord, Gandalf (the movie one rather than the book one because that way I get Sir Ian McKellen), and any fictional character Liam Neeson has ever played, in fact all of them

From television: Jean-Luc Picard, Q, Captain Jack Harkness, and the Fourth and Tenth Doctors

And no party would be complete without some of my Fae, but if I don’t pare the list down a little, I’m not sure we could get special event insurance. Let’s go with Mac, amputee Vietnam veteran and bartender par excellence, his human husband Lucien, a fuzzy muscle bear who looks like the love child of a bulldog and his favorite fire hydrant, and their Fae husband Rhoann, a half-water elemental who has to keep being reminded to wear clothes. (Shhhh…)

Check out her most recent release Stone Cold

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In Stone Cold, the eighth title in the Rainbow-Award-nominated M/M paranormal Soulshares series, Maelduin Guaire is a Fae with a mission. An obsession, really. He’s trained his entire life to become the greatest scian-damhsa, blade-dancer, the Fae have ever known, for the sole purpose of killing the blade-dancer who murdered his father and gave House Guaire its reputation as the Cursed House. Now he’s followed Tiernan Guaire through the Pattern to the human world, to fulfill his oath or die trying… but the passage has cost him all his skill with a blade.

Terry Miller, Josh LaFontaine’s business partner at the Raging Art-on Tattoo and Piercing Parlor, has the worst luck with men since… well, since ever, as far as he’s concerned. Years ago, he walked out on a great thing with Josh, when Bryce Newhouse offered to play sugar daddy for Terry’s ballet company; then Bryce kicked him to the curb, and Terry ended up relying on big-hearted Josh to help him get back on his feet. And now a too-good-to-be-true stranger has turned up in Terry’s half-built dance studio, with a beautiful sword and a bloody nose.

In order to regain the grace and skill he needs to keep his vow, a Fae cursed with the inability to love must SoulShare with a human convinced that love runs screaming when it sees him coming. All with the Marfach looking over their shoulders. No pressure…

Giveaway: Rory is giving away a kindle ecopy of the first book in her SoulShares series, Hard as Stone!

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Tiernan Guaire was exiled from the Fae Realm a century and a half ago for his brother’s murder. His soul torn in half, he lives by his vows — never to trust, never to love. And if he can only be whole by finding and loving the human with the other half of his soul? He’s content to live broken and half-souled.

Kevin Almstead’s future, the career he’s worked for as long as he can remember, has been taken away by a vote of the partners at his law firm. Chance brings him to Purgatory, the hottest all-male nightclub in Washington, D.C., to a meeting with a Fae, with long blond hair, ice-blue eyes, and a smile promising pleasures he’s never dreamed of. But there’s no such thing as chance.

But Tiernan isn’t the only one to find Kevin in Purgatory. The most ancient enemy of the Fae race sees in the handsome lawyer a way to destroy the world from which it, too, was exiled. And only the strength of a true SoulShare bond can keep it from what it seeks.