By The River has a quiet, mesmerizing rhythm to it, pulsing with life as it relates the story of a young man who might just be as elemental as water itself.   With her wonderful characterizations and vivid descriptions of a setting that is clearly close to the author’s heart, Katey Hawthorne builds a story of a love between two men that becomes so strong, so elemental in nature that even the idea of loss cannot break it.

Today I've been thinking a lot about genre, just from doing a lot of the adminny stuff that happens before a book sees the light of day for By the River. While I fully recognize that the superpowered stuff I do is extremely casual about its fantasy elements, there is a system for it, it is employed rigidly, and I definitely consider it paranormal romance, if extremely cracky and quirky.

This Elementals stuff is different because it's like I wrote a contemporary romance based on a folk tale. The term "magical realism" is difficult, to say the very least (see the genrethought ramble I'm about to throw up at kvtaylor.com if that kind of thing interests you), but "paranormal" isn't right either -- it sets the thing up to be way more structured and fantasy-ish than it is. When really, it's sort of...

Yeah, I don't know. Let's just say I want to hug Loose Id for being all daring about my weird cross-genre tendencies. I think the best way to explain what's going on with it is to drop in a little snippet that I think encapsulates what the barely-there, yet crucial magic in By the River is about, and go with that. So here we go, an explanatory and totally unedited snippet -- proper (hot) excerpts soon, promise. This is Leith talking about his father with Adam. While running a bath for them. As you do.

Leith said, "I know how it looks. Like Dad just keeps me under his thumb. But..." He swept his hand through the rising water again, adjusted the tap. "I honestly don't know what he'd do if I fought him on it. I wonder, lately. I've never even seen him get angry, not even once. Just, I know how he feels about it. And he knows I don't like to leave the river."

"Did he ever say anything about that?" Adam asked.

"No. School counselor tried to send me to therapy for it once. Dad told him to piss off, said if I liked the water, what was wrong with it?"

That would explain a lot about Leith. Not for the first time, he was sure not for the last, Adam was a little bit ashamed to want to thank Mr. Marshall for his unorthodox parenting. And yet, "That's it?"

"Yeah. Always seemed to make sense to him. There are some things we just... don't need to talk about, I guess." He put his hand under the tap and let it rush into him. It flowed over and around him normally at first, splattering wildly up and out and finally plummeting into the tub. But then the splashing died down, as if some unseen forcefield contained it or the water pressure had suddenly lessened. The water collected in Leith's palm, shimmering like clear mercury for an instant before it continued in powerful little waterfalls between his fingers. The volume and velocity hadn't changed, only the turbulence of the route.

Adam shivered, skin pebbling. No matter how often he saw it, he couldn't quite get his head around it. Leith's casual defiance of the laws of physics was instinctively disturbing, but not troubling. It excited Adam's brain like an unexpected change of time or key in a song -- Stravinsky or The Beatles -- or a beautiful image he couldn't make sense of -- Escher or Dali. Weird and magnificent and revealing.

At the same time, it was subtle enough that Adam could buy why no one at school, or even on the team, had ever remarked on it; those things, the weird, magnificent, revealing ones, were the things that people always ignored for the sake of their own comfort. Anyhow, sometimes miracles stopped seeming extraordinary if they happened every day.

But Adam couldn't imagine Leith ever striking him as anything less than extraordinary, and therefore always noticed.

Yeah, I know, I cut out before they get to the good bit -- and oh, they do get to the good bits, promise. Here's a picture of two hot guys (who look nothing like Adam and Leith, but whatever) in a bathtub to make up for it:



There, that's better.

Anyhow, it's sort of the opposite of contemporary fantasy. Instead of taking the real world and making it fantastic, it's taking the fantastic and making it real. It's contemporary. But weird.

And then there's all the love, of course. I'll bring you some of that in a week or two, whenever I get the edits sorted. <3 Also, coming soon: comic book updates. Yay, comics are awesome!

I pretty much just found this out, but thanks to USPS tracking I know my contract is delivered, so that seems official to me. My next book. It's a thing.

It is not the usual superpowered love*, though I guess depending on your definition, there are... sorta superpowers in it. It's called By the River, and it's part of a project I've been working on for a while now, all about elementals. There's more info on the overarching project at the Elementals page, but for the new book's unofficial blurb and some pretty pretty Astro art, you can check out the By the River page directly. Also, I did mention this one last month in my WiP Wednesday series, so if you want a sneak peek at some woefully unedited bits, you can find the old post here. But there will be proper excerpts once we get cracking.

I'm really excited about this one for a lot of reasons. So excited I'm not actually making a lot of sense, so I'm just going to make a list in an attempt to organize my scattered brainspasms on the subject.

1. Yay, new project! My love of writing fae-type things is well known to my friends or those familiar with  KV Taylor, but between this and the Fairy Compacts stuff coming up this summer, my fae-love is exploding everywhere. (Hey, it's messy, but... we have glitter?)

2. Yay, swimmer MC! Another thing I've done loads of before, but not as Katey Hawthorne. I was a swimmer from the ages of 7-18--my single tiny athletic accomplishment in life is that I lettered all four years and was team captain in high school. No, I am not a natural athlete, but I do love me some sports, and it's the one nearest and dearest my heart. And just in time for some sweet, sweet summer Olympics action. Woo.

3. Yay, hometown! So yeah, my small town West Virginia tendencies are well known in any guise, but this one actually takes place in a re-named version of my hometown. Geographically, hell, even emotionally, Ashton = Wellsburg. River rats, reprazent.

*More of that soon, promise!