Halloween/Days of the Dead tour- Author Gail Z. Martin talks Costumes, Candy, and Characters

Costumes, Candy, and Characters
By Gail Z. Martin

I love to see creative costumes at Halloween, especially the off-beat, homemade ones. A boy once came to our door wearing a table (completely with tablecloth) that had a big serving dish on top. When he lifted up the lid, his own head—with plenty of gory makeup so it looked severed—lay on a plate. He definitely got extra chocolate for that!

The most adventurous I ever got was dressing up as a Roaring Twenties flapper when I was in graduate school. At the time, the town had an amazing costume rental store!

That got me thinking about what the characters in my series would wear if they went trick-or-treating or to a costume ball.

For the medieval series (Chronicles of the Necromancer, Fallen Kings Cycle, Ascendant Kings Saga, Assassins of Landria), ‘costumes’ are usually disguises, used to help collect information or avoid being arrested. In peacetime, the characters might have attended a costume ball, but the stories are set during times of upheaval, so elegant events need to wait until order has been restored. The same is true of the characters in our Wasteland Marshals near-future, post-apocalyptic series. For Jake Desmet and his friends from our steampunk series, going to a costume party would probably mean dressing up like historical figures or characters from books.

In the modern-day stories (Deadly Curiosities, Night Vigil, Spells Salt and Steel, and Joe Mack), it’s fun to think about how the characters might approach Halloween and what costumes they might consider.

My Deadly Curiosities crew would have fun with the concept. They use magic and psychic skills to stop the things that go bump in the night, but they wouldn’t hesitate to decorate Trifles and Folly, Cassidy’s antique shop, for the season, or give out candy.

I can definitely imagine Cassidy, Teag and their friends dressing up on Halloween as the cast of Buffy, knowing that most people won’t get the in-joke that Cassidy and her team really do fight monsters.

Sorren, the nearly 600 year-old vampire who is Cassidy’s business partner, wouldn’t pick a Bela Lugosi costume. He’d be more likely to dress like the real European nobility he mingled with hundreds of years ago.

Travis and Brent from the Night Vigil might take the easy costume choice of dressing like the Winchesters from Supernatural, since they also fight demons. Or they could go as characters from The Walking Dead, because they’ve dealt with more than their share of zombies as well. If they felt particularly sarcastic, Travis still has his old suits and clerical collar shirts from when he was a priest, and Brent could do a dark suit and fedora as a private eye.

If Mark Wjocik from the Spells, Salt, and Steel series went to a bar that threw a Halloween bash, he could be a zombie hunter (since he hunts monsters in real life) and pay homage to Dawn of the Dead and Night of the Living Dead which were filmed not far from his corner of Pennsylvania.

Joe Mack, who is immortal after being brought back from the dead by a Slavic god in the late 1800s, could pick from any of the eras of his long life. I think he might favor dressing up like Eliot Ness from the 1920s.

One thing I’m sure of—they all like Halloween candy and would never turn down chocolate! 

Deadly Curiosities (6 books)

 

Night Vigil (2 books)

Jake Desmet Adventure (2 books)

Joe Mack Chronicles (4 books)

Spells, Salt and Steel (2 books)

Chronicles of the Necromancer (4 books)

The Darkhurst (3 books)

Assassins of Landria (6 books)

 

Wasteland Marshals (1 book)

 

 The Ascendant Kingdoms Saga (4 books)

The Fallen Kings Cycle (2 book)

About the Author
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Follow me on Facebook in the Shadow Alliance reader group (www.Facebook.com/Groups/MartinShadowAlliance), X/Twitter, @MorganBriceAuthor on Instagram and @MorganBriceAuthor on TikTok!Gail Z. Martin writes urban fantasy, epic fantasy, steampunk and more for Solaris Books, Orbit Books, Falstaff Books, SOL Publishing and Darkwind Press. Urban fantasy series include Deadly Curiosities and the Night Vigil (Sons of Darkness). Epic fantasy series include Darkhurst, the Chronicles Of The Necromancer, the Fallen Kings Cycle, the Ascendant Kingdoms Saga, and the Assassins of Landria.

Together with Larry N. Martin, she is the co-author of Iron & Blood, Storm & Fury (both Steampunk/alternate history), the Spells Salt and Steel comedic horror series, the Roaring Twenties monster hunter Joe Mack Shadow Council series, and the Wasteland Marshals near-future post-apocalyptic series. As Morgan Brice, she writes urban fantasy MM paranormal romance, with the Witchbane, Badlands, Treasure Trail, Kings of the Mountain and Fox Hollow series. Gail is also a con-runner for ConTinual, the online, ongoing multi-genre convention that never ends.

Fantasy Author Gail Z. Martin: It’s a Wrap—Writing the Final Book in a Series

It’s a Wrap—Writing the Final Book in a Series

By Gail Z. Martin

As a reader, I love series. When I find characters and a world that I really love, I want to pitch a tent, move in, and stay for a long time. I’ve always loved immersive fictional worlds and characters with sufficient depth that you learn new things about them and see new angles as you get to know them better.

So it made sense that as an author, I wanted to create those detailed worlds and characters so I could share that kind of experience with readers. I knew that, as a reader, finishing a series left me with ‘book drop’, a sense of loss and emptiness, missing and even grieving fictional characters. I hadn’t realized that the same would be true, even more so, as an author.

I’ve wrapped up two fantasy series recently, Darkhurst and Assassins of Landria. On one level, they couldn’t be more different. Darkhurst is dark and gritty. Assassins of Landria is epic fantasy bromance, Butch and Sundance as medieval assassins. I loved writing both series, and the characters will always live in my mind.

The Darkhurst trilogy is the story of the Valmonde brothers, undertakers who become tangled up in much bigger issues when monsters start killing their family and friends. Once they begin fighting the monsters, they realize that the stakes are higher, the lies bigger, and the reality much darker than they ever imagined. While Darkhurst is a bit darker than my other series, there is always hope and the bonds of family and friendship are strong enough to overcome all obstacles. Although I don’t have plans at the moment for anything else in this universe, I never say never!

The Assassins of Landria is different from my other epic fantasy series in that the books are shorter (about 250 pages), fewer point-of-view characters (two instead of four or five) and a little more humorous. I have had so many people come up to my table at conventions and heft one of my doorstopper books in hand and tell me that they used to love to read epic fantasy but no longer have the time.

So I wrote Assassins to be a little shorter and funnier than my regular epics, but with all the feels and worldbuilding of the longer books. It’s buddy-flick epic fantasy. Orphan best friends Ridge and Rett rise through the ranks of the army to become the most feared assassins in the land, tasked with protecting the king. But when a wandering mystic foments treason among the aristocrats, Ridge and Rett go rogue to save the kingdom—and find themselves on the most-wanted list!

Over their six-book series, Ridge and Rett stop the bad guys, protect Landria, and redeem their reputation, with a lot of humor and swashbuckling adventure along the way. There will be four more series-adjacent books set in the same world as prequels that tell the stories of two important pairs of allies. The books will be released under my Morgan Brice pen name.

I love my characters even as I put them through all sorts of anguish on their path to triumph. Now that these series are finished, I have plenty more tales to tell and worlds to build that I hope you’ll enjoy!

Be sure to watch for my new books coming soon in the Deadly Curiosities and Night Vigil worlds, as well as the Joe Mack Chronicles, Wasteland Marshals, and Spells, Salt and Steel series that I co-write with Larry N. Martin!

And please check out the newly updated Chronicles of the Necromancer books (The Summoner, The Blood King, Dark Haven, Dark Lady’s Chosen) now in trade paperback and hard cover (for the first time!) as well as ebook and audiobook. Two different limited-edition seventeenth anniversary editions with new cover art are available only on our Square store.

The Darkhurst Series

Amazon

Assassins of Landria Series

Amazon

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Follow me on Facebook in the Shadow Alliance reader group (www.Facebook.com/Groups/MartinShadowAlliance),  X/Twitter, @MorganBriceAuthor on Instagram and @MorganBriceAuthor on TikTok!

Gail Z. Martin writes urban fantasy, epic fantasy, steampunk and more for Solaris Books, Orbit Books, Falstaff Books, SOL Publishing and Darkwind Press. Urban fantasy series include Deadly Curiosities and the Night Vigil (Sons of Darkness). Epic fantasy series include Darkhurst, the Chronicles Of The Necromancer, the Fallen Kings Cycle, the Ascendant Kingdoms Saga, and the Assassins of Landria.

Together with Larry N. Martin, she is the co-author of Iron & Blood, Storm & Fury (both Steampunk/alternate history), the Spells Salt and Steel comedic horror series, the Roaring Twenties monster hunter Joe Mack Shadow Council series, and the Wasteland Marshals near-future post-apocalyptic series. As Morgan Brice, she writes urban fantasy MM paranormal romance, with the Witchbane, Badlands, Treasure Trail, Kings of the Mountain and Fox Hollow series. Gail is also a con-runner for ConTinual, the online, ongoing multi-genre convention that never ends.