(referring back to the previous blog post — contest to win ebooks or the newest Defender adventure or audiobooks (which are currently in process))

To help you write that filk, with the required title of, “All The Boys I’ve Loathed Before,” below is a sample of the current rough draft of the Defender novel with the same title, to be released (hopefully!) December 1:

M’kar was only eight years old, but she had learned to be definite and certain about many things in her short life. She loathed the brutal storms of late summer, when not even land-cart travel was safe. She loathed nearly all of her cousins. She loathed being the only daughter of the bloodline. And she especially loathed Ke’jor and Ke’niq, sons of the Rissor clan, who had gotten themselves stranded — so they claimed — on her clan’s lands just hours before the latest series of storms stomped across the landscape. Well, maybe she didn’t loathe Ke’niq, but he was a boy, and she rarely had a chance to talk privately with him. She enjoyed meeting and playing with him because he despised her cousins and doing so infuriated his cousin. Ke’jor was constantly demanding her attention and shoving his younger cousin aside. M’kar loathed Ke’jor more than anything or anyone in her short life, because he told her at least ten times every day that she was going to marry him when they were grown up. He laughed every time she said no. He laughed more when her father took her knife away before she could give Ke’jor a dishonorable scar. She loathed him. Simply and fiercely.

Correction. She loathed him equally with the source of the shrieking and wailing and banging that would begin soon on the gates of the main doors of the clan house. Even sitting in the high tower in the southern wing of the clan house, she could hear the growing shrieking and the wailing of doog horns approaching the gates on the northern side of the sprawling house. Fifteen stories high, and ten levels below ground, with nearly one thousand rooms. Doog horns were clear enough indication of who was stupid and stubborn enough to approach the gates while the storm still prevented land-cart travel, forget about air-car travel. Air-cars were grounded until winter had passed. Yet another self-appointed prophet or holy man had decided to earn the favor and protection of the ancestors before the winter storms settled in, and came to demand yet again that the half-blood girl be handed over to him, for the good of the planet. M’kar made a bet with herself on exactly when she would hear the thuds of fists and scrolls, and the clatter of prophecy sticks against the outer gates. She sighed and headed for her parents’ suite of rooms in the western wing, but she didn’t hurry. They weren’t home. The coming visitor probably knew that. She made another bet with herself on which of her many uncles and great-uncles and cousins had let the crazy, filthy old man know her parents were gone, and which ones would be lying in wait, hoping to catch her. “Hoping” being the operative word. She had the scars and resulting honor tattoos to prove that she wasn’t easy prey, not for kidnappers or assassins.