Dakota Frost

Skindancer Book 1: Frost Moon

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony Francis) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 04:00:00 +0000

For those just joining the party, Frost Moon is my first novel, published by Bell Bridge Books and now available on Amazon. A brief introduction:

In an alternate Atlanta where magic is practiced openly, where witches sip coffee at local cafes, shapeshifters party at urban clubs, vampires rule the southern night like gangsters, and mysterious creatures command dark caverns beneath the city, Dakota Frost's talents are coveted by all. She's the best magical tattooist in the southeast, a Skindancer, able to bring her amazing tats to life.
	When a serial killer begins stalking Atlanta's tattooed elite, the police and the Feds seek Dakota's help. Can she find the killer on the dark fringe of the city's Edgeworld? Among its powerful outcasts and tortured loners, what kind of enemies and allies will she attract? Will they see her as an invader, as a seducer, as an unexpected champion ... or as delicious prey?

For those who prefer a taste of the text, here's an excerpt from the first chapter:

I first started wearing a Mohawk to repel low-lifes — barflies, vampires, Republicans, and so on — but when I found my true profession it turned into an ad. People’s eyes are drawn by my hair — no longer a true Mohawk, but a big, unruly “deathhawk,” a stripe of feathered black, purple and white streaks climbing down the center of my head — but they linger on the tattoos, which start as tribalesque vines in the shaved spaces on either side of the ’hawk and then cascade down my throat to my shoulders, flowering into roses and jewels and butterflies.

Their colors are so vivid, their details so sharp many people mistake them for body paint, or assume that they can’t have been done in the States. Yes, they’re real; no, they’re not Japanese — they’re all, with a few exceptions, done by my own hand, right here in Atlanta at the Rogue Unicorn in Little Five Points. Drop by — I’ll ink you. Ask for Dakota Frost.

To retain the more … perceptive … eye, I started wearing an ankle-length leather vest that shows off the intricate designs on my arms, and a cutoff top and lowrider jeans that that show off a tribal yin-yang on my midriff. Throughout it all you can see the curving black tail of some thing big, beginning on the left side of my neck, looping around the yin-yang on my midriff, and arcing through the leaves on my right shoulder. Most people think it’s a dragon, and they wouldn’t be wrong; in case anyone misses the point, I even have the design sewn into the back of a few of my vests.

But those who live on the edge might see a little more: magical runes woven in the tribal designs, working charms woven into the flowers, and, if you look real close at the tail of the dragon, the slow movement of a symbolic familiar. Yes, it did move; and yes, that’s real magic. Drop by the Rogue Unicorn — you’re still asking for the one and only Dakota Frost, the best magical tattooist in the Southeast.

The downside to being a walking ad, of course, is that some of the folks you want to attract start to see you as a scary low-life. We all know that vampires can turn out to be quite decent folk, but so can cleancut young Republicans looking for their first tattoo to impress their tree-hugger girlfriends. As for barflies, well, they’re still barflies; but unfortunately I find the more tats I show the greater the chance that the cops will throw me into the back of the van too if a barfight breaks out.

So I couldn’t help being nervous as two officers marched me into City Hall East...

For more, you'll have to get it on Amazon or Bell Bridge. :-)

I hope you enjoy!
-the Centaur

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought...

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony Francis) — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 05:51:00 +0000

... "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog DVD ~ Neil Patrick Harris ~ 4.8 out of 5 stars (471) ~ $9.49", according to Amazon's stats on Frost Moon.

Which means ... SOMEONE BOUGHT A COPY OF FROST MOON!

Ok, I knew that, because friends told me they had. But it's fun to think there's enough traffic for Amazon's machine learning algorithms to do affinity analysis ... and interesting to see what those people purchased. What does that say about Frost Moon?

-Anthony

Liquid Fire on Unbedtime Stories

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony Francis) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 07:32:00 +0000

Once again I went on Ann Arbor's Unbedtime Stories show on KFJC. The interview and reading are here, 30 minutes in...

FROST MOON IS ON AMAZON

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony Francis) — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 07:24:00 +0000

And you can find it here. If I didn't have one more practice reading to get through and then crash so I can get up at 4am to make it to the radio station in time, I'd have a nervous breakdown or something.

Liquid Fire on the Radio

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony Francis) — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 07:13:00 +0000

Reading from Liquid Fire tomorrow at 7 on KFJC radio's Unbedtime Stories with Ann Arbor... sorry for the late notice!

Frost Moon on its way to the printer...

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony Francis) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 06:47:00 +0000

...and should start showing up in Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Ingram, etc., in the first couple weeks of March. The eBooks will start showing up in the last few weeks of March or early April. Woohoo!

Do the happy dance ...

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony Francis) — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 08:59:00 +0000

... the final version of the book is on its way to production.

It's Official

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony Francis) — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 06:41:00 +0000

Frost Moon: March 2010 from Bell Bridge Books by yours truly.

Not that they haven't announced it already and everything, but now it's on the site, all official like. I got chills.

Book Trailer for Frost Moon

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony Francis) — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 07:15:00 +0000

Amazing to see some of the concepts in the story brought to life ...

... and many of the "filler" images are actually going to create scenes in future books. :-)

-the Centaur
Crossposted on my main blog the Library of Dresan.

First glimmers of Frost Moon on Amazon...

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony Francis) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 08:19:00 +0000

... though it is from my loyal publisher:

Immortal70 says: Does anyone know of any Fantasy or SciFi titles with bisexual women or lesbians as central characters besides the Hollows series? I love them, but I've read them all so far.

Deborah Smith says: Hi, I'm trying to get the word out among GLBT fantasy readers for a new urban fantasy series coming in March from my small press. SKIN DANCER, Book one: FROST MOON is by debut novelist Anthony Francis. Dakota Frost is Atlanta's finest magical tattoo artist. Tall, gorgeous, bi-sexual and enormously skilled as both the magical ink arts and the seduction of skin dancing, she walks the line of Edgeworld, the local community of non-human beings, mages, witches and illusionists. When the Atlanta P.D. need help tracking down a serial killer who slices tattoos from his victims, Dakota is thrown into dangerous intrigues and old alliances, including seeking the help of her ex-girlfriend, Savannah Winters, who is now a vampire.

Still, I got chills...
-the Centaur

More on Dakota Frost from Bell Bridge Books

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony Francis) — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 11:15:00 +0000

Now announced on the Publishers Marketplace website:

Last but not least, our new fantasy series, SKIN DANCER, by debut author Anthony Francis, is careening through production and drawing absolute, total RAVES from early insider reads. Filled with adventure, humor, edgy characters and an incredible alternate reality, this story of a "magical tattoo artist" in modern Atlanta is going to rock the fantasy readers' world. Book one, FROST MOON, introduces the coolest heroine evah: tattoo specialist and "skin dancer" Dakota Frost, a tall, gorgeous, bi-sexual twenty-something whose tats are admiringly known as "Frost bites."

Ahem. I'm very flattered. I hope Frost Moon lives up to that description!
-the Centaur

Crossposted to the Library of Dresan blog...

Liquid Fire: Nanowrimo 2009 Victory!

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony Francis) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:57:00 +0000

Once again, I have completed National Novel Writing Month! This year's entry is the third in the Dakota Frost series, Liquid Fire. I'll have more to say about this later this week, especially the mad scramble to write 38,000 words in 10 days (oy). But until then, let me leave you with the synopsis of Liquid Fire: "Dakota Frost, a magical tattoo artist who can bring tattoos to life, is caught in a war between rival fire magicians over liquid fire - dragon's blood. An ancient order of pyromancers needs it to survive; modern fireweavers need it to perform their magic --- and Dakota Frost is the only person to have summoned a dragon in two hundred years."

Oh, heck, I'll throw in a repost of the first chapter too ... as edited:

“What is life? No scientist can tell you. Oh, the pocket-protector variety will say that living things move, eat and grow, wrapped up in ten-dollar words like ‘locomotion’ and ‘intake’ and ‘self-organization’. But these by themselves are not life: a waterfall moves more vibrantly than any animal, a fire eats more efficiently, a crystal is more organized.

“A worldly scientist, aware of the dance of the sexes, will mention the heat of metabolism, the fire of reproduction. But a fire eats to live just like we do, but faster: and where we breed in a slow dance of desire, a fire lives in a hot orgy of giving, casting off its own substance, flying sparks, glowing seeds, drifting through the air to start the cycle again. If metabolizing and reproducing were all there were to life, would not fire be alive?

“But life is not any one of these things: life is all of them together. It is the combination of moving and eating and organizing, of metabolism and reproduction, of a thousand things more. Put them all together, and you get more than you started with: a holistic—holy—combination that is more than the sum of its parts. Life is magic.

“Or more precisely, magic is life,” I said. Nowhere was this more clear than with my traveling companions, werekin and vampires whose very biology was woven with magic; but since they would not approve of outed just so I could make a point, I instead picked on myself. “I know this, because I’m a skindancer. I ink magic tattoos that only work because their magical lines are laid on a living canvas that powers them. Each tattoo is like a circuit, that captures the intent of the wearer and projects it out it into the world. But it is the flow of the blood beneath the flex of the skin that powers them: without that life, they’d be useless.”

I don’t know what got me on that dissertation, but when I was done, the airline stranger in the seat to my left—a cute granola girl, curvy almost to the point of chubby, with a refreshing patchouli scent and dirty blond hair so curly it looked like coils of copper wire, I mean, really, just my type, down to the nose ring—put her magazine down and looked at me quizzically.

“Lady, are you for real?” she asked.

Crossposted on The Library of Dresan.

Bell Bridge Books has bought Frost Moon

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony Francis) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 19:20:00 +0000

Check them out at http://www.bellbridgebooks.com/. Estimated publication date: March 2010. I'm so excited. More news as it happens.

UPDATE: The announcement is on their twitter stream...

Frost Moon: Back at the Editor

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony Francis) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:58:00 +0000

Frost Moon is back in the hands of the editor. We've gone over the first 12 chapters together and we're both on the same page. Things are looking good...

-the Centaur

P.S. Unfortunately their fall schedule has filled, so the earliest Frost Moon can come out is Winter 2010...

First draft of Blood Rock complete

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony Francis) — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 22:14:00 +0000

141,786 words, 66 chapters. Almost one and a half times the size of Frost Moon. Next draft in progress. That is all.

Join the Dakota Frost Email List

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony Francis) — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 08:01:00 +0000

At this point, the publisher is working through a line edit of Frost Moon which, if I approve it, will be the final step before a signed contract and a firm publication date.

Until then, I'm collecting an list of people who would like to know when Frost Moon is coming out or any general Dakota Frost news. If you want to be on that list, email "contact at dakota frost dot com". It's that simple.

-the Centaur

Dakota Frost in the Flesh

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony Francis) — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 08:35:00 +0000

I recently attended some Bay Area conventions - SuperCon, Baycon and Fanime - and put out some flyers on the freebie tables. (See the flyers, front and back). I did the above portrait of Dakota for the flyer, but to be frank I was working on the flyers until 4am that day, and only now have I had the time to format my hacked-together Corel Painter files into something with a black background I could post here. Enjoy!

Frost Moon: Chapter 1 Excerpt

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony Francis) — Tue, 12 May 2009 06:42:00 +0000

Each time I entered the National Novel Writing Month, I posted a good chunk of the start of each book on the Nanowrimo site - but it was never a complete excerpt.

Now, however, all of Chapter 1 of Frost Moon is online - check it out!

-the Centaur

Frost Moon: Coming Fall 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony Francis) — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:10:00 +0000

The publisher and I just talked, we're on the same page, and assuming we are both happy with the next edit we're working on, Frost Moon should hit the shelves in Fall 2009. There is a chance it could be delayed to January 2010 or that we can't come to agreement on the last few edits, but after our conversation I think the chance of serious problems is vanishingly small.

Keep your fingers crossed!

-the Centaur

Synopses of Book 1 and 2

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony Francis) — Thu, 07 May 2009 05:06:00 +0000

I've fleshed out the synopses of Frost Moon and Blood Rock at the Books page. Hopefully this will give more context than just the excerpts. Enjoy!

-the Centaur
Pictured: the first draft of Frost Moon, moments after I finished it and copied it to a USB key for safekeeping.

Spoiler spacer ...

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony Francis) — Wed, 06 May 2009 00:08:00 +0000

... since blog posts are in reverse order, and the beginning of Book 2 inevitably gives away things about the end of Book 1, I decided it was a bad idea to leave the top post of this blog a link to Book 2.

So this post is a spacer, designed to protect your eyes from spoilage of Skindancer Book 1. ;-) Click through to that before reading the intro to Book 2.

-the Centaur

Skindancer Book 2: Blood Rock

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony Francis) — Tue, 05 May 2009 09:58:00 +0000

Blood Rock is the sequel to Frost Moon, and continues the story of "skindancer" Dakota Frost, a magical tattoo artist living in an alternate Atlanta.

SPOILER NOTE: The beginning of Blood Rock unavoidably gives away some things about Frost Moon - sorry. Keep it under your hats, and please don't tell anyone Anakin Skywalker is actually Darth Vader either.

And now: Blood Rock:

From the outside, my baby blue Prius looks as normal as can be: a streamlined bubble of a car with an aerodynamic rear-hitch bike rack, humming along on a hybrid gas/electric engine. She couldn’t scream ‘liberal soccer mom’ louder if she was a Volvo plastered with NPR stickers. Peer inside, however, and you see something completely different.

In the driver’s seat, yours truly: a six-foot two woman with a purple-and-black Mohawk – short in front, a la Grace Jones, but lengthening in back until it becomes a long tail curling around my neck. Striking, yes, but what really draws your eyes are my tattoos.

Starting at my temples, a rainbow of tribal daggers curls under the perimeter of my Mohawk, cascading down my neck, rippling out over my arms, and exploding in colorful braids of vines and jewels and butterflies. Beautiful, yes, but that’s not why you can’t look away — its because, out of the corner of your eye, you saw my tattoos move — there, they did it again! You swear, that leaf fluttered, that gem sparkled. It’s like magic!

Why, yes, they did move, and yes, they are magic. Thanks for noticing. All inked at the Rogue Unicorn by yours truly, Dakota Frost, best magical tattoo artist in the Southeast.

Beside me sits a five-nothing teenaged girl, listening to a podcast on her iPod. Normally she’s dressed in a vest and Capri pants, but today she’s in a shockingly conservative schoolgirl’s outfit that clashes with her orange hair and elaborate tiger-striped tattoos.

At first what you see is easy to interpret: an outsider trying to fit in, or a rebel suffering a forced fit. But then your eyes do another double take: are those … cat ears poking out from beneath her head scarf? Did they move? And is that a tail? My God, honey, could she be one of those … what are they called … “were-cats”?

Why yes, her ears did move, and yes, she’s a weretiger. But didn’t your mom tell you it’s rude to point? She has a name: Cinnamon Frost. And she’s my adopted daughter.

Both the Prius and the weretiger in its passenger seat are brand new to me. I met Cinnamon only two months ago, visiting a local werehouse to research a werewolf tattoo, and ended up adopting her after a serial killer damn near killed her trying to get to me. I picked up the Prius right around the same time, a little splurge after winning a tattooing contest.

The adjustment was hard at first: Cinnamon took over my house and tried to take over my life. But my Mom had been a schoolteacher, and I’d learned a few tricks. In the first few weeks after she moved in I put the hammer down, never smiling, setting clear boundaries for her behavior and my sanity. Finally — when she got past the point of the tears, the “not-fairs,” and the most egregious misbehaviors — I eased up, and we once again shared the easy “gee you’re a square but I like you anyway” camaraderie we’d started with.

Now we were peas in a pod; whenever I went out she tagged along, riding shotgun, listening to her audiobooks while I jammed to Rush. The two of us look as different as can be, except for the identical stainless steel collars about our necks, but one minute seeing the two of us laughing together and you’d think I’d been her mother for her whole life.

But today my sunny bundle of fur was feeling quite sullen.

“Don’t worry,” I said, patting her knee softly. “One of them will accept you.”

-the Centaur

Skindancer Book 1: Frost Moon

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony Francis) — Tue, 05 May 2009 09:55:00 +0000

Skindancer: Frost Moon was my 2007 National Novel Writing Month contest entry - my response to the challenge to start a new novel in November and to write 50,000 words of the first draft before the end of the month. Skindancer describes what Dakota does and is the tentative name of the series; Frost Moon sounds cool and is the full moon that happens in November.

And now, the beginning of Frost Moon. Enjoy.

Frost Moon

I first started wearing a Mohawk to repel low-lifes — barflies, vampires, Republicans, and so on — but when I found my true profession it turned into an ad. People’s eyes are drawn by my hair — no longer a true Mohawk, but a big, unruly “deathhawk,” a stripe of feathered black, purple and white streaks climbing down the center of my head — but they linger on the tattoos, which start as tribalesque vines in the shaved spaces on either side of the ’hawk and then cascade down my throat to my shoulders, flowering into roses and jewels and butterflies.

Their colors are so vivid, their details so sharp many people mistake them for body paint, or assume that they can’t have been done in the States. Yes, they’re real; no, they’re not Japanese — they’re all, with a few exceptions, done by my own hand, right here in Atlanta at the Rogue Unicorn in Little Five Points. Drop by — I’ll ink you. Ask for Dakota Frost.

To retain the more … perceptive … eye, I started wearing an ankle-length leather vest that shows off the intricate designs on my arms, and a cutoff top and lowrider jeans that that show off a tribal yin-yang on my midriff. Throughout it all you can see the curving black tail of some thing big, beginning on the left side of my neck, looping around the yin-yang on my midriff, and arcing through the leaves on my right shoulder. Most people think it’s a dragon, and they wouldn’t be wrong; in case anyone misses the point, I even have the design sewn into the back of a few of my vests.

But those who live on the edge might see a little more: magical runes woven in the tribal designs, working charms woven into the flowers, and, if you look real close at the tail of the dragon, the slow movement of a symbolic familiar. Yes, it did move; and yes, that’s real magic. Drop by the Rogue Unicorn — you’re still asking for the one and only Dakota Frost, the best magical tattooist in the Southeast.

The downside to being a walking ad, of course, is that some of the folks you want to attract start to see you as a scary low-life. We all know that vampires can turn out to be quite decent folk, but so can cleancut young Republicans looking for their first tattoo to impress their tree-hugger girlfriends. As for barflies, well, they’re still barflies; but unfortunately I find the more tats I show the greater the chance that the cops will throw me into the back of the van too if a barfight breaks out.

So I couldn’t help being nervous as two officers marched me into City Hall East...

-the Centaur

Dakota Frost, Skindancer

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony Francis) — Tue, 05 May 2009 04:55:00 +0000

Dakota Frost: tall, tattooed, edgy - and the best magical tattooist in the Southeast. Come to the Rogue Unicorn in Atlanta, see her work in the flesh - and on her flesh - and you'll believe a tattoo can come to life. And if you're brave enough to sit in her chair, she'll bring one to life on you.

In a version of Atlanta not too different from your own, magic which had been suppressed for centuries was dragged into the light by the counterculture of the Twentieth Century. Now, in the dawn of the Twenty-First, werewolves and vampires prowl the night, the people of the Edge have learned to play with magic - and tattoo magic has the sharpest edge of them all.

Welcome, reader, to the Edgeworld - the world of the skindancer, Dakota Frost.

-Anthony Francis