Introducing the Rise of the Grigori Beneath-the-Surface Blog Series
This spring, I booked my first-ever blog tour featuring The Undine’s Tear. It was a lot of work, as I had to produce original content for nine different blogs. But it was also awesome, because it didn’t take long for me to get tired of saying the same things over and over again and to start getting really creative. And I learned more about my world and my characters in the process.
Ever since, I’ve been intending to repost the best of those articles here. And, starting today, that’s what I’ll be doing for the next several Wednesdays.
I figured starting with an interview-style post might be a great introduction. You know, just in case you’ve never heard me mention anything about this series before. (Hey, it could be happen. And if you’re that new here, welcome! So nice to have you!)
Image by Shot by Cerqueira, @shotbycerqueira, courtesy of Unsplash.
Can you tell us more about the series as a whole?
Sure! The official series description is:
The Rise of the Grigori currently has three titles: The Undines’s Tear (Book 1), The Sphinx’s Heart (Book 2), and a standalone origin story prequel for Zale, the first merman in three millennia, in The Waterboy. The Waterboy is a free download when you sign up for my Books & Inspiration newsletter.
Three thousand years ago, a Mad undine healer sank Atlantis. Ever since, the Heartstone that protects their island has been failing and they haven’t produced a single boy. As the most powerful healer in three millennia, Calandra is the last hope of not only the undines, but the entire cosmos. Because if she can’t figure out how to undo her ancestor’s mistake, the Father of Lies will unleash hell on Earth.
Packed with complex characters, lush world-building, gritty action, and impossible odds, this intricately woven tale presents mermaids like you’ve never seen them before. Join Calandra in a search for redemption that will threaten the very fabric of the universe.
So far, the series includes two books, plus a standalone prequel novella that you can get for free when you sign up to my newsletter.
In The Undine’s Tear, we’re introduced to the world of the undines (UN-deens or un-DEENS—a.k.a. mermaids), an isolated island somewhere in the Atlantic where the all-female undine race has protected, and been protected by, the Heartstone that powers their island’s barrier for thousands of years. Since they’ve lost the ability to produce their own males, they have to capture human men to survive—whom they enslave using the siren mind-bond.
As the queen’s niece and the most powerful healer since the woman who sank their original home of Atlantis, the heroine, Calandra, has been raised to heal the Heartstone and protect her island at any cost—even her own sanity, since every powerful healer before her has gone insane eventually. But when she receives a cryptic message from the mother who abandoned her when she was a baby that hints her mother might have been pregnant with a boy, and that the men she’s been raised to fear are not as dangerous as she’s been led to believe, her entire world is shaken and she starts looking for answers to the mysteries that surround her people and their history… and the brother she never knew she had.
The series is the story of both Calandra and her brother Zale as they uncover the reasons for the devolution of their culture, the divine purpose the undines forgot, and the plans of a nefarious, power-hungry fallen angel/dragon who wants nothing more to rule the entire cosmos by using the powerful brother-sister duo to accomplish his goals.
It’s full of adventure, action, and a world you never knew existed right under our noses.
I hope you enjoy the dive!
Books in the series:
The Undine’s Tear (Book 1)
The Sphinx’s Heart (Book 2)
The Waterboy (Standalone prequel)
Thank you to Viviana Mackade for hosting this post and asking this question in the original tour.
Covers for The Undine’s Tear, The Waterboy, and The Sphinx’s Heart in front of a blue image of the lower side of water’s surface. Text: Rise of the Grigori Beneath the Surface Blog Series
This summer, I experimented a bit with the AI art generator Artbreeder and came up with some character headshots for some of my main characters in the Rise of the Grigori series.
There were some limitations with the technology that would require me to do some further tweaking on my own to make these one hundred percent accurate. I couldn’t figure out how to force golden or green eyes for a person of colour (or even a white person), for instance. And it was pretty hard to get the age just right for some characters, like Zale—he looks too young for sixteen. Also, every time I tried to make his hair long, the software made him look like a girl, so I had to go with short. And putting scars on Robert? Good luck.
But it was still pretty cool to see my characters “in real life,” so to speak.
Plus, playing with the art generator was super fun! I keep wanting to play with another one I’ve heard of, Midjourney, but haven’t gotten to it yet.
Anyway, allow me to introduce you to some of the characters of the Rise of the Grigori series:
I hope you enjoyed this introduction to The Undine’s Tear. If you want to see the rest of the posts as they come, make sure to subscribe to get my blog in your inbox (in the sidebar or below this post, depending what you’re reading on). I’ve got some very fun posts coming up, including a bonus scene and a half, a tourism-style listicle of Sirenia, and some posts about my writing process.
Happy Wednesday!
P.S. Until November 30, you can get any of my books in my Bookstore in any format at an extra 10% off the lowest marked price with coupon code READMORE22. So be sure to snatch up some gifts for someone. (If it’s you, awesome. I won’t judge.)
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An update about my writing projects, my reader community, and other happenings in the last little while.