Laura Bickle has worked in the unholy trinity of politics, criminology, and technology for several years. She and her chief muse live in the Midwest, owned by four mostly-reformed feral cats. Her short fiction has appeared here and there. Embers, first in this exciting new urban fantasy series, was her debut as novelist. Sparks continues the series.
Laura also writes as Alayna Williams. Alayna's "debut" was Dark Oracle, Pocket Juno's June 2010 release. More info on her work can be found at www.salamanderstales.com.


What was the first thing you ever wrote for the pure enjoyment of writing?

When I was a kid, I used to write stories from the perspectives of the family pets. The dachshunds and the cats had pretty exciting adventures in the woods, chasing critters and climbing trees. The fish...not so much.

Who is your favorite character you conjured up and why?

My favorite character is Anya Kalinczyk's fire salamander familiar, Sparky. Sparky was handed down to Anya by her mother. When he's taking a nap or disinterested in Anya's work, he's housed in a salamander-shaped torque she wears around her neck. When he's feeling peevish, or in the presence of danger or ghosts, he's unleashed from the necklace. Most often, he takes the form of a five-foot speckled hellbender. Only Anya and ghosts can see him, but he makes his influence felt in the physical world: he can disrupt electrical fields. He's prone to chewing on cell phones, shorting out fire alarm systems, blowing up microwaves, and wreaking havoc on nearly anything he can get his paws on. He's not a bad salamander...he just manages to find trouble, wherever he goes. In SPARKS, he manages to get the fire department called on him at a baby superstore and sets off the sprinkler system at the crime lab while playing with a Bunsen burner.

There's not much to find about salamanders in the literature, beyond their origins. They're rumored to be capricious, destructive, and unpredictable as fire itself. That made a salamander a perfect sidekick for Anya. And Sparky hopped out onto the page, wiggling his tail and looking for trouble.

What inspired this book?

By day, Anya investigates suspicious fires as an arson investigator in Detroit. By night, she works as part of an eccentric group of ghost hunters. Anya's the rarest type of spiritual medium - a Lantern. Where other mediums allow spirits to use their hands and voices to communicate, Anya incinerates malicious ghosts.

I'd established a theme centering around flame....and decided to give Anya a fire salamander as a companion. Salamanders haven't gotten much press since Paracelsus' time. They are the elemental avatars of fire. Our ancestors assumed that they were the spirit of fire, as they were often seen crawling out of logs tossed into hearth blazes. The salamander was probably annoyed to have his peaceful woodland home turned to tinder, and was making a fleet-footed escape. But alchemists and sorcerers made the link between salamanders and flames, and the association has endured.

Sparky the fire salamander has nest of newts in Anya's bathtub in SPARKS. While Anya's juggling that, she's investigating a rash of spontaneous human combustion cases. For me, inspiration is pretty much following a theme down a rabbit hole.

BLURB:

WITHOUT A TRACE

Anya Kalinczyk is the rarest type of psychic medium, a Lantern, who holds down a day job as an arson investigator with the Detroit Fire Department--while working 24/7 to exterminate malicious spirits plaguing a city plagued by unemployment and despair. Along with her inseparable salamander familiar, Sparky, Anya has seen, and even survived, all manner of fiery hell--but her newest case sparks suspicions of a bizarre phenomenon that no one but her eccentric team of ghost hunters might believe: spontaneous human combustion.

After fire consumes the home of elderly Jasper Bernard, Anya is stunned to discover his remains-- or, more precisely, the lack of them; even the fiercest fires leave some trace of their victims--and she is sure this was no naturally-occurring blaze. Soon she's unearthed a connection to a celebrity psychic who preys on Detroit's poor, promising miracles for money. But Hope Solomon wants more--she's collecting spirits, and in a frantic race against time, Anya will face down an evil adversary who threatens her fragile relationship with her lover, her beloved Sparky's freshly-hatched newts, and the wandering souls of the entire city.

EXCERPT:

Anya stared down into a hole that had been covered by the Dumpster. It reminded her of storm cellars in old houses: a stone frame and steps leading down into blackness. It occurred to her that this was the same spot that the basement had occupied in the footprint of the original building. But, somehow she doubted that she'd find an old store of office supplies and shelves full of dusty bottles in this place. Nothing was as it seemed on the astral plane, and she expected this would be no exception.

"How does this remain hidden?" Anya wondered if there was a truck that came by every week to pick up the astral Dumpster.

"It's an illusion. A bit of camouflage Hope's using to cover her tracks on this plane."

Charon descended the worn steps, and Anya followed. Sparky oozed down the stairs beside her, while the young salamanders leapt down the stone risers like Slinkies. There seemed to be no light in this place, but Sparky and the newts gave off a shifting amber glow that was sufficient to see by, casting writhing shadows on the earthen ceiling. Plant and tree roots reached down from the above as they descended down the broken spiral staircase. The place smelled like winter, like cold earth: sterile and barren, with nothing living.

She heard water, wrinkled her nose. "What's that? The sewer?"

Ahead, Charon shook his head. He didn't seem too need the light of the salamanders to see by; he walked down the uneven steps as if he'd known them well enough to wear the dents in the tops of the steps. "No. It's the Styx."

Anya's breath caught in her throat. The staircase spilled out onto a silty causeway, into the broken edges of a canal hewn into the stone. It was man-made; the arches curved as far as the meager light reached over the shallow black water.

"Are you sure it's the Styx? Because it looks like a sewer."

Charon sighed. "It's not _the_ Styx. Just a weak tributary. If you remember your mythology, it wrapped nine times around the perimeter of Hades."

"I thought we were going after Hope." Anya clenched her fists, trying to resist the urge to strangle the psychopomp's laconic throat.

"This is where she's retreated, at least on this plane. We've got to bring the fight to her." Charon began to pace beside the bank, kicking at pieces of trash: moldering newspapers, plastic cups, pop cans. The salamanders seemed to recoil from the water. Perhaps fire elementals didn't care much for the Styx. Given its dubious origins, Anya didn't blame them.

"Does she know we're coming?" Anya clunked to the water's edge. There was no way she could swim across in her armor. She ran her fingers along the seams. She had no idea if her astral self was wearing clothes under her armor, but she figured that death's ferryman had seen it all. She took her helmet off and set it in a clean patch of gravel by her feet. She began stripping off her gauntlets.

"Probably not. Not yet." Charon was piling up empty milk jugs and was counting caps in one hand. In the other, he was dragging a dented green plastic kiddie pool in the shape of a turtle.

He stared at her trying to open her breastplate. "What the hell are you doing?"

"Getting ready to swim across," she said matter-of-factly, though her cheeks burned.

Charon looked at her as if she was stupid. "Humans can't get into the water. This is the Styx."

"First of all, jackass, this is a sewer. But I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, and say it is, at best, a tributary of the Styx. Second of all, the Styx made Achilles invulnerable. And lastly, you seem to have survived it. So, kiss my ass."

Charon made a slicing gesture with the hand full of plastic caps. His expression was dark.

"You don't know the cost. All magick has a price, and the Styx is no exception. But, hey, if you want to walk around naked, don't let me stop you." Charon turned away and began fitting caps on the plastic pop bottles and milk jugs, but Anya thought she saw a spark of wry amusement in his expression. Just for an instant.

"So...how the hell am I getting across? Is there a bridge, somewhere?" Anya concentrated on wriggling her fingers back into her gauntlets.

Charon was tying the plastic bottles together with a piece of electrical cord, lashing them to the hard rim of the turtle pool. "If you would stop talking and stripping and doing other distracting things, you'd see that I'm working on that."

Anya gave him a sour look. At least he found the prospect of her nudity distracting. That was the only flicker of humanity she'd seen in him.

Charon turned his creation over. The kiddie pool resembled a warped artist's conception of a jellyfish, constructed of trash. Bottles of air were trapped under the rim, and Charon cast it in the water with a splash that made the salamanders scatter and hiss. The pool floated, tentacles of plastic and wire reaching out behind it.

"Here's your boat."

Anya stared at the makeshift craft. "Um, thanks."

Wednesday Promo- Laura Bickle

Hi, Paty! Thanks for having me.
Bio:
Laura Bickle has worked in the unholy trinity of politics, criminology, and technology for several years. She and her chief muse live in the Midwest, owned by four mostly-reformed feral cats. Her short fiction has appeared here and there. Embers, her debut novel, is first in an exciting new urban fantasy series that continues with her forthcoming second novel, Sparks. More information can be found here: www.salamanderstales.com
Laura also writes as Alayna Williams. Alayna's "debut" will be Dark Oracle, Pocket Juno's June 2010 release. More information can be found here: www.alaynawilliams.com

What drew you to writing paranormal books?
I’ve been curious about mythological creatures since I was a child. My mother was a school librarian, and I spent summers curled up in a sunshine-filled nook, devouring every book in the mythology section. From Artemis to zephyrs, I wondered about what it would be like to live in a world where magic lay beneath even the most ordinary things.

I supposed that much of it was an attempt to make sense of the world. When the ancient Greeks dug up dinosaur bones, they probably attributed them to the bones of Titans or terrible monsters. Storytellers wove grand adventures around the things they found. The world was new and shiny, full of mysteries to explain.

As an adult, I view the paranormal genre in much the same way. We’ve explored a great deal of our modern world through science, but we’ve still got that desire to be storytellers. Instead of tangling a yarn of myth around a dinosaur skeleton, we’re telling stories about monsters within, making sense of some of the mysterious things that go on within the human mind. They take shapes from old legends – ghosts and elementals – but the myths to the modern world. They attach to the bones of things that make no sense for us now – love, death, loss. They’re mysteries that we’re still trying to explain, using the metaphors of old monsters.

What do you consider the hardest part about writing your genre? The easiest?
The hardest part, I think, is treading a believable line between the everyday world and the fantastic. I try to anchor my paranormal characters in a realistic world, to give the reader that sense that such at thing could happen to them. In the case of EMBERS, I use real places from Detroit, places like the Detroit Salt Mine. The everyday world goes ticking along like a clock until a paranormal incident causes the gears to skip, throwing the reader into another, alternate time and place.

The easiest part is drawing from that rich mythological heritage that’s out there. There are so many untapped stories that deserve to be revived and retold in a modern frame. For example, in EMBERS, I use the legend of the fire salamander. Salamanders haven’t gotten much play since the time of Paracelsus. And the Sirrush, the dragon from Bel and the Dragon, hasn’t gotten much action since Babylonian times. They’re long overdue to waddle across the page and start setting things on fire.

What are you working on now?
I also write urban fantasy as Alayna Williams. I’m finishing up on ROGUE ORACLE, sequel to DARK ORACLE, to be released by Pocket-Juno books in June. The series deals with a criminal profiler, Tara Sheridan, who solves crimes using Tarot cards. She’s also a member of an ancient secret society of female oracles, Delphi’s Daughters. Delphi’s Daughters are the intellectual descendents of the Oracle of Delphi. In ROGUE, they’re trying to lure Tara back into the fold. Tara and her partner, Federal Agent Harry Li are chasing a serial killer from Chernobyl who’s selling nuclear secrets on the black market.

Blurb for EMBERS:
Anya Kalinczyk spends her days as an arson investigator with the Detroit Fire Department, and her nights pursuing malicious spirits with a team of eccentric ghost hunters. Anya--who is the rarest type of psychic medium, a Lantern--suspects a supernatural arsonist is setting blazes to summon a fiery ancient entity that will leave the city in cinders. By Devil's Night, the spell will be complete, unless Anya--with the help of her salamander familiar and the paranormal investigating team --can stop it.
Anya's accustomed to danger and believes herself inured to loneliness and loss. But this time she's risking everything: her city, her soul, and a man who sees and accepts her for everything she is. Keeping all three safe will be the biggest challenge she's ever faced.

Excerpt from EMBERS:
She stepped into the bathroom and clicked on the overhead light. The black-and-white retro tile gleamed. A collection of rubber duckies lined a shelf on one wall, grinning down at her with cartoon smiles. Anya turned the bathtub tap as hot as it would go, dropped a fistful of bath salts into the water. She plucked her favorite duck, a jaunty pirate with a plastic eye patch, from the collection and dropped him in the water. He spun in lazy circles under the faucet.

She peeled off her sticky, pickle-stained clothes and stuffed them in the washing machine in the bathroom closet. The chill rippled over her body as she measured detergent into the basin and set the water temperature to hot. When she'd moved in, Anya had the foresight to install an extra-large water heater. As a fire investigator, her work was always filthy and she didn't deny herself the luxury of as much hot water as she needed.

She paused, catching sight of her reflection in the mirror. Her light chestnut hair swung over her milky-pale shoulder which was studded with a constellation of beauty marks. Her fingers fluttered over her chest. Below the salamander collar that housed Sparky, a black char mark was burned into the flesh over her left breast. The wound didn't hurt. She knew it would eventually fade, like all the other exorcism burns, but it was a lingering reminder of the soul she'd devoured.

She stepped into the bath, wiggling her toes, feeling the warmth begin to radiate up her legs. She sank up to her neck in the water, massaging the hot water through her hair. The pirate duck bumped against her toes. She reached for a loofah and began to scrub hard, as if she could scrub the memory of the dead child away from her skin.

The sepulchral voice captured on the recorder buzzed in the back of her head, and her thoughts nipped at it:

"Sirrush is coming."

Her brow wrinkled. She'd never heard the name spoken aloud, only read it in books. Sirrush was an old term used for firedrakes and salamanders, a name used only in witches' ceremonial magic to draw down the element of fire. But the spirit's message seemed to be aimed at her and she chewed on it, tasting it for any flavor of a threat.

As the water cooled, Anya climbed out of the bath. She smelled no pickles or ash as she pulled the drain plug, just soap and a hint of jasmine from the bath salts. The pirate duck spiraled around the drain.

Anya toweled off, and pulled on her robe, decorated in a pattern of yellow cartoon ducks. Wet footprints on the shag rug in the hall trailed behind her. She paused in the hallway to turn up the thermostat, looking forward to the warmth of her bed. A simple futon piled high with blankets dominated the small bedroom. Anya couldn't bring herself to buy a second-hand bed. All beds were stained too much with the dreams of their prior owners.

Anya climbed under the blankets, sighing. She'd be able to get a couple of hours of sleep before her shift began. As she drowsed, the salamander collar warmed around her neck. Sparky unpeeled himself, slipped down to the floor. He padded across the floor to a large flannel dog bed placed against the wall. Resting in the bed was his favorite toy: a Gloworm. The stuffed toy was a flashlight ingeniously disguised in a cherubic plastic head and a caterpillar body. Since it ran on batteries, there was little electrical damage that Sparky could do to it that would result in a hazardous situation.

Sparky placed his paw on the Gloworm. It lit up. He removed his paw, and the light winked out. He cocked his head, watching it, then patted it again.

On.

Off.

On.

Anya scrunched her eyes shut against the blinking light. As much as he enjoyed biting ghosts and other ghoulies on the spiritual plane, Sparky could only directly affect two things in the physical world: energy and Anya. The toy had brought him many hours of delight. She'd placed it in the dog bed that he never used, hoping that Sparky could eventually be persuaded to sleep on his own in his own bed.

A whine emanated from the side of Anya's bed.

Anya opened one eye. Sparky's head peered over the mountain of covers. Anya groaned. She was too tired to try to Ferberize the salamander tonight.

She climbed out of bed, grabbed the Gloworm, and tossed it into her bed. Sparky climbed in, rooted under the blankets. He made himself comfortable, draped over one of Anya's hips. He cradled the Gloworm between his paws. Anya idly stroked his loose speckled skin and Sparky began to purr, a low vibration in the back of his ribs.

Sometimes, Anya wondered what it would have been like to have had Brian's warmth next to her. She'd seriously contemplated it in the past. But she didn't know how to explain sharing a bed with a familiar elemental spirit. While it was true that humans couldn't see Sparky, his presence could be sensed: fluctuations in temperature, static electricity, a sense of being watched. When Anya had taken lovers before, Sparky had not taken well to them. It was distracting to be in the act of making love to a man with a five-foot salamander sitting at the foot of the bed, head cocked, slapping his tail on the blankets. Sparky manifested at will, unpredictably. But he could always be trusted to always make an appearance whenever Anya was in the presence of spirits...or when the possibility for intimacy with a man presented itself....

But then again, maybe sex was overrated. Sparky's warm tail coiled around her ankles and he snored softly. At least, Sparky had good manners: he didn't fart, scratch himself, or have morning breath. He was rather like sleeping with an electric blanket. . . which was probably the best Anya could hope for at the present.

Curled in the warm embrace of the salamander cuddling his toy, Anya drifted to sleep.

Embers is available now from Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble

Thanks for having me, Paty!