Guest Author Skyler White

Please welcome debut urban fantasy author, Skyler White! Skyler's first book, ''and, Falling, Fly'' will be released on March 2, 2010.

Summary from Amazon:

In a dark and seedy underground of burned-out rock stars and angels-turned- vampires, a revolutionary neuroscientist and a fallen angel must put medicine against mythology in an attempt to erase their tortured pasts...but at what price?

Olivia, vampire and fallen angel of desire, is hopeless...and damned. Since the fall from Eden, she has hungered for love, but fed only on desire. Dominic O'Shaughnessy is a neuroscientist plagued by impossible visions. When his research and her despair collide at L'Otel Mathillide-a subterranean hell of beauty, demons, and dreams-rationalist and angel unite in a clash of desire and damnation that threatens to destroy them both.

In this fractures Hotel of the Damned, Olivia and Dominic discover the only force consistent in their opposing realities is the deep, erotic gravity between them. Bound to each other finally in a knot of interwoven freedoms, Dominic and Olivia-the vision-touched scientist and the earth-bound angel, reborn and undead-encounter the mystery of love and find it is both fall...and flight.

Read an excerpt from Chapter 1 here





                                              Why I Love My Cover
                                             By Skyler White

I’m a serial fretter. It’s something I’m working on. I try to worry less. But I end up worrying that I worry too much, so I with the intermediary layer and just let myself fret. So it wasn’t long after I learned that and Falling, Fly had sold that I started worrying about what it would look like. A book cover is someone else’s creation, but it will be your face – the first impression you will make on readers and future friends.

It’s worrisome.

And it’s a bit of an arranged marriage. Your editor, like a good mother, knows your book – not necessarily better, but more objectively than you know yourself. And you trust her. You trust her to see the weaknesses you may not be aware of, and compensate for them. You trust her to craft the back-cover copy in a way that is both true to your voice, and also a sales tool. And most match-making editors do consult their author-children, but we’re not privy to the back-and-forth, the conversations and debates. I turned in a twenty-slide PowerPoint deck with ideas and images from blogs, magazines and album covers. And I assume it mattered, but ultimately, the entire process is shrouded in mystery and possibly magic dark or entrails. As an author, you just don’t know; you can only imagine. And worry.

You’ll know your cover is on its way to you, but you won’t know when it will arrive, so while nervously anticipated, its actual presence in your inbox will inevitably come as a shock. I worried for months. I pestered my agent with questions and my real (and self-chosen) husband with the chronic fretter’s dark boogeyman: What If.

Now, in my defense, and Falling, Fly is a difficult book to render visually.

Olivia is the fallen angel of desire. Her appearance alters subtly to conform to the tastes of whoever wants her. If she looks in the mirror alone, she can’t see herself at all, so how could an artist render her face? He shadowed it heavily with her hair.

Olivia is a vampire, but her feeding teeth are retractable quills on her tooth and nail edges that allow her to feed from those who want her – and she would break her teeth against anyone who did not – without their knowledge. And because she can’t have fangs, she has a dagger. There’s not even a butter knife in the story, but the artist found a way to make her visually as dangerous as she is invisibly.

Olivia is sick of humanity. Everyone you don’t love tastes the same. In the course of the book, she returns to the secret, Irish, subterranean Hotel of the Damned to bury her hope with her severed wings. And the cover gives me the hopeless underground dark in a slanting beam of filtered light, and the Irish earth in the mortared stones behind her.

And then there are her wings. Olivia’s have been entombed for millennia, blood-caked and bone-broken, in a red rock sarcophagus. But her wings are part of the cover too, borrowed from a headstone or funerary statue, and rendered in stone. The symbol of flight in the one material you know cannot fly. And that captures Olivia’s spirit. It illustrates the book’s title. It encapsulates my book.

There’s been a lot of controversy about book covers recently, about images that aren’t just poor fits, but are actually counter to the intent of the book. I feel for the authors who I imagine must feel like an artistic child whose athlete-mother can’t remember she hates sports, and gives her to a jock in marriage. And some of the brides are just grateful to be married and too fearful of parental displeasure that they don’t feel safe asking for a better match.

I think that’s sad, because ultimately as an author you have to trust your editor to choose for you. You have to believe they’ll pick the right mate for you, the one you need. You want to learn to love him, this chosen-for-you spouse, who just shows up in your inbox one day as you’re dashing out the door already late for something else.

And there it is. The image that will hold your book in its paper arms. And the soles of your feet and fingertips start prickling, and the sip of coffee you were taking when you saw the subject line goes cold in your mouth. Because he’s gorgeous. He’s better looking than the boys you admired at the book store. And he’s yours.

At this point, it becomes difficult not to squeal and caper, to retain some dignity. You are, after all, about to be a wife and published author. Surely dizziness and giggles suggests an immaturity unworthy of what’s coming next, but what the hell. You’re too happy to worry about that. Or anything else. And when the worries surface about other things, about blog tours and print runs and reviews, you console yourself some with your good luck in husbands, real and paper-bound. And sometimes you blog about it.

CONTEST
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