My penultimate A to Z blog challenge post. What a month! Doing 26 posts in a month seems like a mini NaNoWriMo–but I’m pleased with the background bits I’ve been able to share about Dust to Blood. So today’s post reverts to language study, and another one of the very early phrases any beginning student … #AtoZChallenge – Y is for Ya ne ponimayu

I won’t claim I’m not cheating a little with today’s X entry for the A to Z blog challenge, but the Cyrillic spelling and pronunciation for the word of the day could easily be represented by an X (update: Here it is in Cyrillic, so you know I’m not lying: Хорошо). So I’m running with … #AtoZChallenge – X is for Xarasho

I struggled again, coming up with my 23rd entry in the A to Z blog challenge. There wasn’t anything obvious in Dust to Blood that would work for a W entry–until I took a step back with the help of my husband. He was right to point out that the backdrop for this story is … #AtoZChallenge – W is for Cold War

I’m grateful to the A to Z blog challenge for showing me the whole daily blogging thing isn’t as big of a grind as I had worried it might be–so long as you have a useful framework and a way to build your posts ahead of time for a more guaranteed timely release. The timing … #AtoZChallenge – V is for Vasily

I’m getting to the tail-end of the A to Z blogging challenge with this entry for U. This was another easy one: the final third of Dust to Blood takes place in Central Russia up and down the spine of the Ural mountains. When we lived in Moscow, I remember some colleague of my dad’s … #AtoZChallenge – U is for Urals

For my twentieth entry in the A to Z blog challenge, I’m returning to a Russian word: tovarishch. The word was appropriated during the Bolshevick uprising in 1917 to designate egalitarian standing within the Communist party. This one should be familiar to anyone with middling knowledge about the Cold War, as there was a great … #AtoZChallenge – T is for Tovarishch

Release Date is here! (Pardon me while I go SQUEEEEEEE and run in circles for a moment.) phew And now back to business: It’s the nineteenth day of the A to Z blog challenge, whereby I’m supposed to say something about Dust to Blood that starts with S. The obvious thing would have been to … #AtoZChallenge – S is for Red Slaves

My eighteenth post in the A to Z blog challenge was obvious from the beginning. Dust to Blood posits strange religious practices begun under Grigori Rasputin as part of the reason Ivan and his cohorts have dust as blood–and no memories much older than the timeline of the book. Rasputin was a charismatic mystic active … #AtoZChallenge – R is for Rasputin

I struggled for a long time coming up with my 17th post for the A to Z blog challenge, following my theme of introducing my new book, Dust to Blood. There aren’t a lot of words that begin with Q in the first place, and I wasn’t going to cheat at this late stage. Then … #AtoZChallenge – Q is for Quest