Straight Chatting from the Library: Ba'al from Dark Cotillion by Hadena James

This post is part of a virtual book tour organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. Hadena will be awarding a $25 Amazon GC to a randomly drawn commenter during the tour. Click on the tour banner to see the other stops on the tour.

Ba'al, one of the characters in her book, is at The Library today to chat with us.

READ THE CHARACTER INTERVIEW

What is your favorite book today?

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

What are you reading right now?

The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty

Do you have any bad book habits?

Leaving them open and face down on tables

E-Reader or print? and why?

Both. E-readers don’t ruin. Print books just smell nice.

One book at a time or multiples?

One at a time. I have eternity and I read fast. I don’t remember what I did before books became fashionable.

Dog-ear or bookmark? (don't worry—Librarian Judith won't hold it against you—much)

Table tops, bookmarks, scraps of paper, coasters, whatever’s handy, I would never dog-ear a book. Gabriel would try to kill me.

When do you do most of your reading?

When there is nobody trying to destroy the world.

Favorite place to read?

My recliner in the living room. I can still be in the thick of life and read.

Do you loan your books?

Only to those I really trust to handle them properly. Some of my books are very old and easily damaged.

Favorite book to recommend?

Anna Karenina because everyone should suffer through it once.

READ THE BLURB

Brenna Strachan is half-Demon, half-Witch and it’s the eve of her 30th birthday. This means that she will stop aging and come into all her Demon powers. But there are forces at work hoping to keep her from Maturing. They must kill her in the short time that she is mortal. If they fail, she will take her place among the most powerful beings on Earth. What will it cost her to survive?

READ AN EXCERPT

“I met him once,” Gabriel took a long drag off a cigarette. His eyes were glassy, searching for some long lost memory. Until that moment, I had been reading a book, and was completely clueless whom he was talking about. Especially, since he did seem to be talking to me, as opposed to talking to some imaginary person in the room. He hadn’t spoken in well over an hour. His mind had been preoccupied with other things, possibly my safety, possibly not.

“Who?” I asked, after I put the bookmark in between the pages.

“Conan Doyle.” He made a motion towards my book. I had been reading Sherlock Holmes stories.

“Was he as bright as Holmes?”

“No one is as bright as Holmes, except Mycroft, and even that could be debated.” Gabriel stretched and yawned, before turning his vivid green eyes on me. “Pleasant man though.”

“I see,” I frowned at him. “Decided to break the silent treatment?”

“I figured it wasn’t doing me any good to sit here chain smoking and trying to ignore you into submission, since you seemed to be rather casually reading.”

“I’m slightly disturbed that it took you so long to figure it out.” I tossed the hard back onto the coffee table. It made a satisfying “thunk” sound as it hit the wood.

“You shouldn’t do that to your books.”

“No, I shouldn’t do that to your books, my books are nice hard bound editions that can be purchased at any local book store.”

“Someday, your books will be like my books.”

“Gabriel, no one’s books will be like your books. What is it with Angels and book hoarding anyway?”

“We all have our idiosyncrasies.” He gave a shrug.

MEET THE AUTHOR

I’ve been writing for over two decades and before that, I was creating my own bedtime stories to tell myself. I penned my first short story at the ripe old age of 8. It was a fable about how the raccoon got its eye-mask and was roughly three pages of handwritten, 8 year old scrawl. My mother still has it and occasionally, I still dig it out and admire it.

When I got my first computer, I took all my handwritten stories and typed them in. Afterwards, I tossed the originals. In my early twenties, I had a bit of a writer’s meltdown and deleted everything. So, with the exception of the story about the raccoon, I actually have none of my writings from before I was 23. Which is sad, because I had a half dozen other novels and well over two hundred short stories. It has all been offered up to the computer and writing gods as a sacrifice and show of humility or some such nonsense that makes me feel less like an idiot about it.

I have been offered contracts with publishing houses in the past and always turned them down. Now that I have experimented with being an Indie Author, I really like it and I’m really glad I turned them down. However, if you had asked me this in the early years of 2000, I would have told you that I was an idiot (and it was a huge contributing factor to my deleting all my work).

When I’m not writing, I play in a steel-tip dart league and enjoy going to dart tournaments. I enjoy renaissance festivals and sanitized pirates who sing sea shanties. My appetite for reading is ferocious and I consume two to three books a week as well as writing my own. Aside from introducing me to darts, my SO has introduced me to camping, which I, surprisingly, enjoy. We can often be found in the summer at Mark Twain Lake in Missouri, where his parents own a campground.

I am a native of Columbia, Missouri, which I will probably call home for the rest of my life, but I love to travel. Day trips, week trips, vacations on other continents, wherever the path takes me is where I want to be and I’m hoping to be able to travel more in the future.

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