Love Bytes is excited to welcome author Rhys Ford to their blog today, to talk about her new release “Dim Sum Asylum”. Rhys talks about writing the novel shares the 6 th part of the serial story the complete tour is telling and she brought a fantastic giveaway for our readers!
Welcome Rhys 🙂

Thank you for joining me on the Dim Sum Asylum tour! And a huge thank you to the blogs who are letting me rent their space for the day!

Now a little bit about Dim Sum Asylum the novel. It was originally a short story in Charmed and Dangerous, a fantastic anthology created by JCP. When I was invited to contribute, I couldn’t type yes fast enough and so, the original short Dim Sum Asylum was created. Other authors have taken their contributions and expanded on them, delivering full length pieces but I hadn’t planned on doing that… mostly because of time.

Then Lynn West, the Editor in Chief of Dreamspinner Press, said to me; I want that story. One does not simply turn down Lynn and to be honest, I really enjoyed writing Roku. There was a lot about the world and his life I couldn’t fit into the short story and expanding Dim Sum Asylum would give me that chance.

So I folded it into the queue and after a few months of unstitching the short story and weaving in the pieces I’d always longed to put in, Dim Sum Asylum the novel was born. This is my first urban fantasy romance and I had a blast writing it. A lot of romantic tension, a bit of suspense and murder plus a whole lot of magical creatures and fantastical people. Oh…and there’s Bob the Cat.

It is available on June 9, 2017 at Dreamspinner, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online book stores. I hope you enjoy reading the story as much as I loved writing it.

Did I mention this blog stop’s giveaway? Because there is one. Comment, Rafflecopter or however the blog chooses to run its contest and enter to win a $20 gift certificate to the online store of your choice!

This tour is a serialized story featuring Roku MacCormick, the lead in Dim Sum Asylum and will be told over the blog tour stops. AND there is a separate giveaway on each stop so be sure to follow the short story, enter to win and grab a copy of Dim Sum for your ereader or bookshelf!

Wok This Way (A Dim Sum Asylum Short) Part 6

The spell was a… doozy.

I couldn’t follow what she did and having only a rudimentary understanding of how to manipulate chi and energy, I only had about a half a second to figure out I was going to be a smear on the Market floor if I stood there much longer. I dove, hoping the noodle stall would give me enough cover but I was wrong.

Because the whole damn floor lit up in runes and arcane markers and wherever I touched one, my skin burned like it was being sucked on by raging fire ants.

Luckily I came armed and Agnes Murgatroid wasn’t going to know what hit her.

People were screaming, feet pounding past my head and I’d lost sight of the wok cook nearly the moment I dove behind his stall. I wasn’t the only one affected by her magic. It seemed like she’d laid down a skin trap on the floor, probably in an attempt to protect herself should someone raid her but like all things Murgatroid, it was done half-assed but overpowered. Small flaming jets sprouted up from the centre of some of the arcane sigils, the magical force she’d used to power her spell overloading the net she’d cast. The spurts of blue fire was ran from warm to prickly hot but Murgatroid didn’t seal her runes and the spell flowed out of the trap and into the crowd, a Medusa head of scalding licks and fly-paper, trapping everyone between two of the runes in its molasses-sticky web.

Clusters of people were caught on her spell lines, fighting the invisible threads holding them in place and while the jets slowly bled off as the spell stretched out past its boundaries, Murgatroid unfortunately scribed them under areas were no magical fire should ever come into contact with…like the Bucephalus peppers stacked up in a barrel near the hot sauce stall. They popped and sizzled, breaking out into a dancing jig of stars and crackling seeds. The fumes from the ignited peppers were stealing the air, choking the people stuck in Murgatroid’s spell.

“Shit, Murgatroid,” I slapped at the fiery sensation crawling over my thighs then shoved my hands into my pockets, grabbing as much of the salted black tea leaves I’d stashed there. “Time to break you.”

Storing components was tricky, especially since it was a crapshoot on how a witch or caster constructed their spell but the basics were exactly that… the basics. Knowing Murgatroid was a hedge witch, I stacked the deck in my favour by tossing a bit of dried sage into the mix but that was a Hail Mary at best, hoping she stuck to traditional witch spell lines and didn’t go off into some cultural tangent I couldn’t anticipate.

There was always that chance with her and now wasn’t the time for me to start experimenting with nullification mixtures.

“Aggie! Run!” A scrawny guy with two wispy trails of beard on either side of his mouth screamed at Murgatroid. He’d popped up from the taco stand, wielding a pair of tongs and a cabbage head. “I’ll cover you!”

I assumed that was Randy, the alleged boyfriend and owner of the food stall and my guess gained further weight when he tossed the cabbage directly at me. Since it fell short by five feet, bouncing twice before rolling to a stop at Murgatroid’s feet, I didn’t think the Chinatown Wraiths were going to be signing Randy up to field for them any time soon.

There was a gun in my holster but I didn’t like to use it, especially since the Market was crowded, thick with people unable to go more than a few feet away from where they’d started. I couldn’t see Murgatroid for a second then I spotted her fuzzy head bobbing along the back row of stalls as she wove around people to escape.

I broke out into a run and zigged when I should have zagged.

Something in her spell triggered my fae blood. It could have been her own hybrid nature fueling the casting or perhaps the Gods’ sick sense of humour decided now was the time to pull out every drop of my mother’s heritage in me because three feet into the chase, my sub-dermal wings illuminated and I staggered beneath the searing light, blinded by colours coating my vision.

It was going to be a guess as to where I was going to be in a few yards but I kept running, dinging and bouncing off of stalls, toppling over displays and generally bumper-car-hitting everything in my path to keep what I thought was Murgatroid in my blurry sight. It was hard with the sheen of rainbow pulling at the corners of my eyes. The light turned everything into a stained glass mosaic and while pretty, it made chasing down a rogue hedge witch damned near impossible.

She appeared in front of me, a slip of mingled colour and stinking of magic, back pedaling away from something or someone but I didn’t care what pushed Murgatroid back into my path. One final flare of sparkling rainbow across my eyes and I growled, wishing I could see well enough to shoot her… at least in the leg. Murgatroid grabbed my hair and I got a bobbing vision of glasses, a sneer and then a slap of fuzziness across my face when she tried to dodge around me.

Then she kneed me in the balls and the gloves were off.

Gasping around the sick pouring into my mouth, I threw the handfuls of tea at the slender, blonde tie-dyed blog in front of me and began chanting hard, pouring all of myself into the counterspell when the damned witch kneed me again..

Follow the whole story on the Dim Sum Asylum Tour:

June 1 Rainbow Gold Reviews

June 2 Sinfully Gay Reviews

June 5 MM Goodbook Reviews

June 6 Joyfully Jay

June 7 It’s About the Book

June 8 Love Bytes

June 9 The Novel Approach

Welcome to Dim Sum Asylum: a San Francisco where it’s a ho-hum kind of case when a cop has to chase down an enchanted two-foot-tall shrine god statue with an impressive Fu Manchu mustache that’s running around Chinatown, trolling sex magic and chaos in its wake.

Senior Inspector Roku MacCormick of the Chinatown Arcane Crimes Division faces a pile of challenges far beyond his human-faerie heritage, snarling dragons guarding C-Town’s multiple gates, and exploding noodle factories. After a case goes sideways, Roku is saddled with Trent Leonard, a new partner he can’t trust, to add to the crime syndicate family he doesn’t want and a spell-casting serial killer he desperately needs to find.

While Roku would rather stay home with Bob the Cat and whiskey himself to sleep, he puts on his badge and gun every day, determined to serve and protect the city he loves. When Chinatown’s dark mystical underworld makes his life hell and the case turns deadly, Trent guards Roku’s back and, if Trent can be believed, his heart… even if from what Roku can see, Trent is as dangerous as the monsters and criminals they’re sworn to bring down.

Dim Sum Asylum by Rhys Ford Available on June 9 at Dreamspinner, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online book stores

About Rhys Ford

Rhys Ford is an award-winning author with several long-running LGBT+ mystery, thriller, paranormal, and urban fantasy series, including Murder and Mayhem, a 2016 LAMBDA finalist. She is published by Dreamspinner Press and DSP Publications.

She’s also quite skeptical about bios without a dash of something personal and really, who doesn’t mention their cats, dog and cars in a bio? She shares the house with Yoshi, a grumpy tuxedo cat and Tam, a diabetic black pygmy panther, as well as a ginger cairn terrorist named Gus. Rhys is also enslaved to the upkeep a 1979 Pontiac Firebird and enjoys murdering make-believe people.

Rhys’ Blog: www.rhysford.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rhys.ford.author

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Rhys_Ford

Rhys Ford’s books can found at Dreamspinner Press (http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com), DSP Publications (https://www.dsppublications.com/) and all major online book stores.

Rhys generously brought a fantastic giveaway with her!

Enter the giveaway to have a chance to win a $20 Amazon GC
a Rafflecopter giveaway