Counting down the days, counting down the characters. The elementals 5-1.
We’re closing in on July 8th, Keeping House release day, and as such we’ve reached the last bit of the Character gallery, the elementals. Yes, you got a bit of a preview with Flick a few days ago, but Flick isn’t a primary elemental and they’re not native to Embreeville Mountain. Today you’ll meet the first of the primary elementals, Ganolesgi, which means breezy in the Tsalagi (Cherokee) language. For those of you who don’t know, air is often represented by the color yellow, so yellow is Gan’s color too.
Keeping House: An Appalachian Paranormal Fantasy, novel two in the Appalachian Elementals series will be released on July 8th, 2019, and in preparation for the release, I’m sharing my characters gallery, my rogues’ gallery of sorts (seriously, many of them warrant the title of rogue) in groups of 2-6. The overall gallery is very much a labor of love. It’s where I’ve gone when I didn’t know what came next, what one my of my characters might be thinking, how they might react. It’s where I’ve been honing my design skills for the past year.
Beside each character image, you’ll learn a bit about them, including their ages, occupations, gender identity and sexuality. Why the last two? Well, Keeping House is queer fantasy as much as it’s Appalachian Fantasy, meaning the main character, Cent Rhodes is queer and many but certainly not all of her friends identify somewhere along the LGBTQIA+ spectrum. As for her family, some are queer, but just as many are allies.
On to the gallery.
Prereading notes: Elementals have no gender, and all elementals are capable of shapeshifting into whatever form they wish, but they often take human-like forms when their lovers/ companions are humans. This is the form represented in the gallery.
Name: Ganolesgi (Gan)
Age: A tender 12 million
Element: Air
Tendencies: Summer breezes. Blizzards. Laughter as they twirl fall leaves around your feet. Spreader of spring pollen. Air never quits moving, is always in motion, so if you’ll closely, you’ll see clouds in Gan’s eyes.
Pronouns: they/them
True form: a column of swirling air
Current love: Tess Rhodes
Quote: “I want you safe. Tess, no, please.”
Note: Gan’s cracking comes from their effort to create wrinkles so they’ll better identify with Tess, who is 75 years old. But when you can’t understand aging in mortal terms, such things are hard to replicate.
What’s next? Tomorrow you’ll meet Rayne, Embreeville Mountain’s primary water elemental.
Right now, the ebook version of Cleaning House, the first installment in the Appalachian Elementals series, is available for only $.99, so get your copy now.
Cleaning House is available at Amazon, Kobo, Smashwords, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, and most other ebook retailers.
