They’ve been alive forever. They’ve been bored for some time. And now they’re showing it.

Congratulations to Ronel Janse van Vuuren on the completion of her dark fantasy series, Irascible Immortals!

Smoke on the Water

Immortals + Boredom = Catastrophe

Something old and dangerous is awake and influencing the immortals to act in ways they’d only imagined.

First, small things like Odin, Anubis and Mab going on separate vacations and leaving their seats of power open for the taking. Then, Yue Lao, Cupid, Bast, Apollo and a Kitsune messing with the lives and memories of mortals. It grows to pandemonium when Pan and Poseidon upend the world, creating the Warp – and a free-for-all where it comes to the immortals’ wildest fantasies. Especially the twisted fantasies of Baba Yaga and her Nightmares, Morrígan and her love of War, and Isis who has no qualms unleashing hell on Earth to get Osiris back, plunging mortals even deeper into danger.

Thankfully, some immortals are older and wiser than others, catching on that everything isn’t as it seems… But damage control, trying to avoid the Apocalypse of all realms, and discovering who the ancient evil is, takes more magic, wit, and sacrifice than they could’ve dreamt possible. Can the unlikely grouping of Hel, Aphrodite, Set, Thor, Loki, Apollo, Freyja, Ra and Ammit save the realms?

Scroll up to buy now and enjoy the hilarity, disaster and more that ensues when bored immortals let loose.

Universal Book Link: https://books2read.com/u/mYk6AG

Interview

When I heard that each book is a 30-minute read, I needed to learn more.

Let’s talk about your creation of the series. Did I read correctly that each book is a 30-minute read? If so, how did you choose that format? That sounds unique and interesting.

I was talking to my optometrist about reading whichever series I was bingeing at the time, and she said she had like five minutes a day to devote to reading which meant that long books and series just didn’t work for her. Which got me thinking about how much punch a short story can give in a limited amount of time…

I had already written “Breaking the Habit” and submitted it to an anthology. (The first three books are featured in the “Grumpy Old Gods” anthologies.) From there, it was easy to build the world and the characters that inhabit it. Going from various gods and immortals being bored and just having a bit too much fun messing with humans to bringing about destruction was just a case of indulging my inner psychopath. LOL. I was listening to a Nightwish album and “Symphony of Destruction” came up and it just clicked: Pan and Poseidon clean up their domains, cause havoc among humans, and whatever happens next isn’t their problem.

Various gods and goddesses vied for my attention, so I wrote about the ones I’ve always wanted to write about (like Isis reuniting with Osiris).

At first, it only built to no-one doing anything to fix the Warp (the result of Pan and Poseidon’s competition) and adding to the mayhem. But after a while, I realised that I didn’t like things hanging there without any conclusion. That’s when I wrote a couple of stories to end the series and published them all together in “Smoke on the Water”. I stuck with the short format (which I recently heard is called a “mosaic novel”) so even in the collected edition, each story can still be read on its own.

Going from mayhem to fixing it, meant finding an antagonist behind it all. It was fun finding someone that is even more powerful than ancient gods like Ra. It also worked well with foreshadowing I (unintentionally) added in the first book.

We live in a world with short attention spans, limited free time, and a lot of competition for said attention and time, so we need to work with what we have.

I used my warped sense of humour, the need to focus on fixing Climate Change, and remembering that we should live and not just exist, to add different layers to this series.

It was a fun experiment in length, character POV, and world-building.

FREE BOOK!

The first book in the series is free during the Smashwords read an ebook week 2-8 March. Here’s Ronel’s profile link: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/Ronel_Jansevan_Vuuren

Author bio

Award-winning Dark Fantasy author Ronel Janse van Vuuren writes about kick-ass heroines, the duality of being human and loves to use folklore to underscore her point.

She’s a Rottweiler pack leader, chicken wrangler and horse servant.

All of her books are available for purchase from major online retailers.

Find Ronel online: https://linktr.ee/miladyronel