Swift for the Sun by Karen Bovenmyer Cover Reveal, Guest Post, Excerpt & Giveaway!

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Hi guys, we have Karen Bovenmyer popping in today with her upcoming debut novel Swift for the Sun, we have a brilliant guest post, a great excerpt and a fantastic giveaway, so check out the post and click that giveaway link! <3 ~Pixie~

Karen Bovenmyer - Swift for the Sun Cover

Swift for the Sun

by

Karen Bovenmyer

Benjamin Lector imagines himself a smuggler, a gun runner, and an all-around scoundrel. A preacher’s son turned criminal, first and foremost, he is a survivor.

When Benjamin is shipwrecked on Dread Island, fortune sends an unlikely savior—a blond savage who is everything Benjamin didn’t know he needed. Falling in love with Sun is easy. But pirates have come looking for the remains of Benjamin’s cargo, and they find their former slave, Sun, instead.

Held captive by the pirates, Benjamin learns the depths of Sun’s past and the horrors he endured and was forced to perpetrate. Together, they must not only escape, but prevent a shipment of weapons from making its way to rebellious colonists. Benjamin is determined to save the man he loves and ensure that a peaceful future together is never threatened again. To succeed might require the unthinkable—an altruistic sacrifice.

Release date: 27th March 2017

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Karen Bovenmyer!

I had a great time discovering Benjamin’s world while writing SWIFT FOR THE SUN. Some of my favorite finds include:

The Oxford English Historical Thesaurus

For me, one of the most entertaining rabbit holes to go down while writing historical fiction is the Oxford English Historical Thesaurus. Don’t get me wrong—looking up period costumes, proper nautical terms, and international politics of the 1820s Caribbean is fun too, but there’s something magical about the thoroughness of the OED. Some of my favorites include:

  • To “puggle” (1863) is “to push or poke a stick or wire down (a hole or aperture) and work it about in order to clear an obstruction, drive out an animal, etc.” There is no word in the thesaurus that approaches its elegance. It also wasn’t used until 40 years after the events of my novel, and had to be stricken from the text. I’ll let you guess where.
  • There are no less than 80 names for “buttock” from 700AD to 1962. Some of my favorites include bahookie (1939), bumfiddle (1675), catastrophe (1600), paddock (1475), and bewscher (1400). 
  • When I found out “scallywag” was’t used until 1843, OED came to the rescue with 83 options under “good-for-nothing.” Vagabond and ragamuffin are easy—but why not consider delightful options such as shackerell (1420), ragabash (1609), shabaroon (1699), flabergudgion or slubberdegullion (1611).

International Idioms and Proverbs

My book stars an American who finds himself with a rather salty and international group of smugglers, pirates, and spies. I didn’t only want to have creative insults in Icelandic, Portuguese, and French—I also wanted idioms, jokes, and proverbs.

  • In Iceland, if you want to tell someone their idea is a quick fix that won’t work in the long run, you say “Það er skammgóður vermir að pissa í skó sinn” (Peeing in your shoes will only keep you warm for a short while).
  • A Portuguese does not “give up,” he “takes his little horse away from the rain” (Tirar o cavalinho da chuva).
  • In France, if you arrive at the most awkward moment possible, you show up “like a hair in a soup” (Arriver comme un cheveu sur la soupe).

Rodrigo y Gabriela

I played all four Pirates of the Caribbean soundtracks on shuffle and repeat while working this novel. I found the guitar duo of Rodrigo y Gabriela particularly inspiring and discovered a whole genre of amazing Mexican acoustic guitar previously unknown to me. Two very talented Haitian musicians play in several important scenes in SWIFT FOR THE SUN and, in my mind, they are playing something like “Tamacun” or “Hanuman.”

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Excerpt

Chapter 1. Dread Island

The storm billowed across the evening sky, a dark bank of clouds coming fast from the southeast, as if God were drawing a curtain between us and Brazil.

“Captain.”

The Sea Swift jumped forward under an enormous press of sail, and I held tight to the gunnel to keep my feet on deck. The deep blue Caribbean waters rose quickly and swelled, tinged with the gray rage of a tempest sea.

When I didn’t answer, the first mate, Black Miguel, repeated himself sharply. I abruptly remembered I was, in fact, his captain—a manthe crew thought was Benjamin Swift, infamous smuggler and gunrunner—and no longer the boy I’d been when I left New Orleans.

“Furl the sails,” I said, hoping that sounded wise as I studied the full-bellied canvas. I’d been captain of the Sea Swift for three weeks, and apart from sharing a first name, mulatto coloring, and general good looks with the real Captain Benji, I still barely knew a halyard from ahawsehole.

“Clap on, both of you! You heard Captain Benji. Close-reef the topsails and furl the rest,” Black Miguel shouted my modified order at thejolly lads amidships. The two sailors, Carlos the Whistler and Joaquim One-Leg, brothers, both as skilled with rope and tackle as they were with song and jest, hauled hard on the lines to raise the mainsail.

Umdoistrês,” Carlos sang out the rope, Joaquim echoing him, and I was delighted when they followed with the opening lines of“Marujo Português,” a sea song about the joy a Portuguese sailor has for his profession. Yards of canvas folded up, neat as bed linens, and more men climbed high in the rigging to fold back a corner of the topsails—a precaution that nevertheless kept some wind in thecanvas as we ran before the gale.

There was no sign of the Sea Fury, our sister ship, but she’d put in for repairs and was a few days behind us. Black sheets of rain fell across the horizon behind the roiling cloud bank. It was easily the largest storm I’d seen during this, my first, short voyage at sea.

“Is there anywhere nearby we can safely berth and take shelter from the storm?” I asked, the last line of Carlos’s song—ameaça de carinhosas marés, the threat of loving seas—echoing across the deck.

Black Miguel shook his head. “We’re too far south of Barbados and too far north of Trinidad….” He pinched his chin in the way I recognized from many nights of cards together in the captain’s—my—cabin that meant he was considering a risky wager.

“Go on,” I urged him.

He ran both hands through his close-clipped curly, black hair. All the men wore their hair short aboard ship to discourage lice—nogentleman’s ribboned queue on either of us, not that I was any more of a true gentleman than I was a smuggler. Miguel pulled me aside and lowered his voice. “We’re not far from Dread Island, but… well, you asked for a safe port. There’s nothing safe about that skull-and-bones stretch of sand.”

I laughed. “Skull and bones? As in a Jolly Roger? Miguel, we’re gunrunners. What do we have to fear from a pirate island? Likely we’d meet fellows in arms.” Some of the associates I’d met before we left port I was certain were other gunrunners and malefactors—as wasthe chief smuggler I met over a game of billiards, a Scotsman named Edwin James, who swore he’d make me a rich man for my investment.

“No, in a literal sense. Dread Island is a place where men die. No man who sets foot on her sands returns to his ship. Dark spirits haunt that place.”

“This is the age of reason, s—Miguel.” I had to stop myself from adding his gentleman’s honorific. Aboard ship he was first mate, and no gentleman, and even though we were having a private conversation, it was best not to fall out of the habit. “Superstition does not become lettered men.”

Miguel gestured to include the seamen climbing through the rigging, hauling ropes, binding the sails tight against the storm. Sailors were as famous for their superstitions as they were for whoring and gambling.

“Well, yes. But we don’t have to tell them where we are mooring,” I said.

“Because they are not learned, do not take them for fools. Every man who sails the Caribbean knows to steer clear of Dread Island. And,moreover, even I have heard the stories. Pirates, merchants, and navy men alike avoid the place, even when in need of freshwater and food. Cursed or not, all die who set foot there.”

I stared at the forbidding storm, and my instincts, what few I had, urged me to make for the island with haste. “Miguel, look at how fastthose clouds are moving. We need to make berth.”

Miguel shook his head, loosed a juicy curse in his native Portuguese, and then dashed off for the sextant to take our latitude using the last of the setting sun. We argued fiercely about it under our breaths so the men wouldn’t notice dissention between us, nor where we were making a heading. I felt something pulling me to Dread Island, the strains of Cowper’s hymn sounding in my head:

God moves in a mysterious way 

His wonders to perform;

He plants His footsteps in the sea 

And rides upon the storm.

“Look here.” Miguel pointed to a small arc on the chart, northeast of a speck of an island in the Lesser Antilles. Here be shoals. “We’d need gentle or no winds on a clear day to navigate those. Our best hope now is out to sea.”

I looked again at the clouds, which had thickened into a solid wall of wisp and fury.

“So be it,” I relented as thick drops of rain slapped against my face and shoulders. “Sail on.” Yet I could not help but feel the island waswhere the Swift needed to go.

“Yessir.” Miguel hopped to, shouting orders to furl the close-reefed topsails to ride out the storm.

The wind had been blowing us south by southeast, away from the Lesser Antilles and out into heavy seas in the wide Atlantic, which would make dodging the powerful and fast French marines easier. Considering the devastating shipwreck of the Medusa and Napoleon recently in his grave, the capitaines had something to prove about France as a naval power and were particularly vicious to anyone they suspected of illegal activity. With a southeastern wind, we’d reach the coast of South America in two days, but the storm threatened to push us back the way we’d come, amid the volcanic once-islands the sea was slowly grinding down into shoals. Only luck and a skilled hand would keep us safe, so I left the command of our crew chiefly in Black Miguel’s capable hands, lest I reveal myself as a lubber.

“Get below, Captain,” Miguel said as rain started to drum the planks. Men were still in the rigging, struggling to let out the reef and furlthe too-full topsail. The sea had slowly become more violent, but, much to my surprise, my uneasy stomach made no answering rumble. It seemed I’d finally adapted to the rolling of the ship. I watched the frantic activity around me and realized for the first time in my life, I was part of something bigger than myself. I had always wanted to be a sailor, and now, in truth, I was. I was a man of the Sea Swift and, ultimately, as captain, she and every rough, unlettered, jolly soul aboard was my responsibility.

“No. The men need their captain. I’ll stay above decks.”

Black Miguel rose one elegant black eyebrow—his hair was the only thing dark about him. In every way, he had looked and spoken like a well-bred, if well-tanned, Portuguese gentleman in New Orleans, and Edwin James, the handsome Scotsman who had brought me into this adventure, had failed to explain the reason behind the nickname when he introduced us. It really wasn’t fair; from the moment Miguel Maria’s feet touched the deck of the Swift and he introduced me to the crew, he’d moved through rigging and hauled ropes like a man born to it. Miguel did everything like a man born to it—dancing jig, sawing the fiddle, playing a brilliant hand of cards, fixing thebungled orders during my first few weeks and preserving my identity for the men. He was my right hand, and I knew well I would not long have managed this farce without him.

Miguel nodded, his lips twitching upward in a habit I’d come to associate not only with amusement but approval. “As you say, Captain. Hold fast, and keep your wits ready.”

A shout drew our attention. The mizzenmast topsail had broken free of the reef and flapped wildly in the gale. Rain came down in sheets,and I held tight to the mainstay to keep my feet as the deck pitched on an angry sea. Miguel shouted, and more men climbed the rigging, Carlos among them, to wrestle the sail back under control and furl all the reefed sails, which even I could see were now taking on far too much wind. The storm grew fiercer, and I was needed to retie lines for the bowsprit—a feat I accomplished with a line wound around one arm to keep me aboard despite the waves crashing over the gunnel and washing across the deck. I lost track of time in the work, and then a resounding crack drew every eye to the mizzenmast. The still-flapping topsail pitched overboard with twelve foot of spar, and Carlos, holding tight to the lines, disappeared under the heaving waves.

“Man overboard!” Miguel’s commands thundered through the racket of storm and sea, and the crew dashed to stations, but then the ropes ran out of give.

The ship groaned alarmingly and yawed hard to starboard, pulling against the broken topsail, which was now acting as a massive rudder,and I slammed hard into another man assigned to the bowsprit, Big Swede Erik, who knew even less English than Portuguese, every word of it a viler curse than the last. He held fast to me with one thick arm. Then Miguel was on hand with an ax, chopping at the ropes that attached us to Carlos’s doom, Joaquim screaming for his brother.

The storm and the wreckage pulled against each other, near capsizing the ship, and another man fell past me to splash into the sea. Shouts and thrown ropes followed him. The Swift gave another mighty pull against the fallen topsail, and the deck tilted so sharply I thought we were done for certain. Then, with a splintering crack, another topsail tore free, this time from the mainmast, sweeping men and wood overboard as it fell. A line snapped tight, caught Miguel in the chest, and slammed him hard against the mainmast. Blood ran red from his mouth and over his chin.

I picked up Miguel’s ax. There was nothing to do except chop the lines that anchored us to the wreckage spinning the Swift in churningseas. I am not ashamed to admit I cried as I cut the lines, pervaded by a bone-deep feeling that Miguel and all hands were doomed regardless. I had delayed too long in making the decision to ride out the storm rather than make for Dread Island. Every dead man was my fault. When I cut the line holding him against the mainmast, Miguel slumped to the deck and slid into me.

“What do we do?” I screamed at him over the storm and splintering wood, the shouts of drowning men and a loud grinding coming fromthe hold beneath us.

“Pray, preacher’s son.” He coughed a splash of red into his fist and looped a rope around my waist, then tied it fast to a barrel on thedeck. “You were never much of a sailor, even if you are the spitting image of Captain Benji,” Miguel said, snugging a bowling knot under my arms, “but I damn well hope you can at least swim.” Then he cut the barrel free, as a scream of splintering wood growled up from below decks, a jolting crash that even I knew meant we had run up on shoals, and then I was overboard and falling through a chaos of rain and sea and splinters.

#

I do not clearly remember the passage of that awful night—a tumult of wave and wind and the yells of drowning men and the splinteringSwift. My body was battered and buffeted by water and shattered wood and other bodies. The sea tossed and turned me; I did not know up from down. Taking a breath meant water as often as air. I hauled myself along the rope until I wrapped both arms around the barrel, andthen all was darkness and aching hands and fingers.

The storm seemed to last an eternity, until I thought I had drowned and this was, in fact, hell. There came a sudden calm in the storm, and I looped my rope tighter around the barrel, tying my body to it as best as I could, because I did not know how much longer I could hold on. Other wreckage bobbed in the chop around me, but I could not make out if any of the shapes were survivors. Then the rage of thestorm returned, tossing me with such ferocity I lost all sense of the man I was. I was naught but an animal striving to live until thestruggle abated with death’s embrace.

I floated in darkness, nigh insensible, praying for an end, praying for the other sailors of the Swift, until I felt something solid against myfeet and, kicking out, discovered it was sand. Thanking God, I struggled through the surf, forcing my tired body away from the sea and up onto a beach, until I couldn’t haul both myself and the barrel farther. My hands were too weak and battered to untie the ropes, so I stayed where I was and gave myself over to exhaustion.

I woke in dawn’s first light—the false dawn that turned the sea beautiful shades of silver-gray—and took in my surroundings. White sand stretched in a crescent to either side, lapped gently by glittering waves. Pieces of the Swift littered the shore and the water, drifting closer,then back.

I did not see another man, living or dead.

My hands were chafed and torn from holding the rope and barrel that had been my salvation. I thought of Miguel and his last act, saving me, a man who knew nothing and was nothing, while Miguel and the crew of the Swift—men I believed good and true, despite being smugglers—faced destruction and death. And yet I, the son of a white preacher and a mixed schoolmarm with no claim to fame other than a striking resemblance to a famous smuggler, lived. Despair crashed over me, ill-fitting the beauty of my surroundings and the gentle susurrus of the sea. Deep loss pulled at my heart and soul. My first voyage, my first real responsibility, had ended in horror, as Father had always said it would.

The sun was somewhat higher in the sky as I mastered my feelings, gathered my wits, and untied myself from the barrel. I took stock ofmy surroundings. Coconut palms arched over a white beach, a thick forest of mangrove and fern dark shadowed behind them, with thegreat indistinct cone of a mountain shrouded in wisps of fog beyond that. I had the clothes on my back and nothing else; my saber and pistol were gone, belt and all, as was my coat and hat. I had only my battered shirt and britches, not even shoes. I sifted through thesmithereens of the Swift, the command that had cost me everything, and found nothing of value except the wood, as kindling.

Not even kindling was useful, because I had no flint and tinder, but I pulled each piece up onto the beach, regardless, as if by doing so, I could conjure up Miguel and Carlos and Joaquim and the rest of the hearty, gambling, laughing seamen I’d known.

I had a vague feeling someone was watching me, and thought perhaps it was God.

As the sun rose in the sky, so did my want of drink, and I realized that, though I’d been spared from the sea, I was not spared from thedangers of thirst, nor hunger, nor exposure. My skin was lighter than first-generation mixed but darker than a white man’s, no matter what my father claimed to avoid paying North Carolina’s mulatto tax on me. Any man, whatever color his skin, burns in the sun of the tropics. I needed shelter, food, water. I had the barrel to which I’d been tied, but nothing to open it with. In any case, it did not feel heavy enough to contain water—not even the green, scummy water aboard ship—so a source of freshwater was my chief concern. It was time to leave my small camp of wood and barrel, and explore the island. I used a large, round leaf from a sea grape to keep the sun off my shorn head and out of my eyes and set off in search of salvation.

As I walked the curve of the beach, staying mostly in the shade of the palms to stop the sand burning my feet, I saw more wreckage scattered along the shore—pieces of spar and rigging, sailcloth, other unrecognizable things—then a shallow impression in the sand, as if a man had lain there. I ran forward, swearing as I scorched my feet and apologizing to the Almighty as I did so, to find that there had, indeed, been another survivor. The shape of his hip where he’d rested, the sweep of his thigh, the impression of knees as he rose were clear imprints in the sand, as were his footsteps leading away. I ran after his prints and struggled up a low dune cresting in a rockformation, but the trail ended at a dark pool of wet sand. I felt the wetness, and my hand came away red.

Blood.

Climbing the dune and rocks elevated me above the beach as the last of the fog dissipated. A great volcanic cone rose from the island’s center, pitted and sunken at the rim, giving the mountain the faint look of the empty eye sockets and gaping jaw of a human skull, thebraincase truncated and open to the heavens.

Confronted with this ghastly vision and the evidence at my very feet, I could not doubt that I was marooned on the isle Black Miguel had mentioned. The beach of skull and bone.

Dread Island.

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About Karen!

Karen Bovenmyer earned an MFA in Creative Writing: Popular Fiction from the University of Southern Maine. She teaches and mentors students at Iowa State University and serves asthe Nonfiction Assistant Editor of Escape Artists’ Mothership Zeta Magazine. She is the 2016 recipient of the Horror Writers Association Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Scholarship. Her poems, short stories and novellas appear in more than 40 publications and her first novel, SWIFT FOR THE SUN, an LGBT romantic adventure in 1820s Caribbean, will be available from Dreamspinner Press on March 27, 2017.

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4 thoughts on “Swift for the Sun by Karen Bovenmyer Cover Reveal, Guest Post, Excerpt & Giveaway!

  1. This sounds exciting! Thank you for this post, sharing excerpt and cover of your upcoming book, Karen – it looks gorgeous by the way, congrats! I enjoy this kind of behind the story stuff from a story, often be a learning point for me.
    Looking forward to your book release!

  2. I love this kind of settings, reminds me of when I started to read mf for the very first time. I look forward to reading your book, congrats!

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