Honor and Shadows – Jessie Mihalik

Honor and Shadows is Out Now!

Happy pub day to meeeee! 🎉 I have to celebrate extra hard because Halloween was a big bust at House Mihalik—not a single trick-or-treater darkened our doorstep, and I’m sad. I just wanted to see all the kiddos in their cute costumes and hand out the totally excessive amount of candy I bought. 😭

More candy for me, I guess. And Mr. M. I’m going to need backup to get through it, lol.

But back to the book! Honor and Shadows is the short story that was a preorder bonus for Hunt the Stars, so you may have already read it. The edited version did grow by about 4k words (up to 14k), but it didn’t change too much plot wise, so you can skip it if you want.

But if you do want to buy it, it’ll only cost you 99 pennies, so it’s a veritable bargain! Read it while you munch on leftover Halloween candy and/or recover from a sugar coma, whichever is most appropriate. :)

Honor and Shadows Cover, featuring a woman in silhouette against a space background.

Honor and Shadows is a 10,000-word prequel novelette set just before the start of Hunt the Stars.

The original rough draft was written as a bonus for preordering Hunt the Stars. This is a short action/adventure story with the Starlight’s Shadow crew before they meet the Valoffs.

Captain Octavia Zarola needs an infusion of credits—fast—if she’s going to keep her close-knit bounty hunting crew paid and fed. Tracking down an escaped embezzler on a backwater planet should be a piece of cake, but bounties are rarely as easy as they seem.

As the crew closes in on their quarry, the hunt becomes entangled with a local criminal overlord, and Tavi will have to decide what’s more important: money or honor, and how much she’s willing to risk for either one.

Get your copy!
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Apple Books | Kobo | Google Play

Print books are still rolling out. The Amazon version is up now, but the version for independent bookstores and BN is working its way through the system.

That said, the print books are expensive for such a short story because they’re print on demand. I’m not getting rich on them, promise. :) If you do buy one, it’ll match the other Starlight’s Shadow books, and I did spent a stupid amount of time sweating the details, so I hope you like it!

Honor and Shadows, Plus a Tiny Capture the Sun Snippet

October 11, 2022 / Capture the Sun, Honor and Shadows, Snippet, Writing

Honor and Shadows, the prequel short story set just before the start of Hunt the Stars, is out in just three weeks on November 1!

This was a bonus story for people who preordered HTS, and while the edited version is a little bit longer, it didn’t change too much, so if you got the preorder bonus, don’t feel like you need to buy it. But you can if you want! I won’t stop you! 😂

Honor and Shadows is a 10,000-word prequel novelette set just before the start of Hunt the Stars.

Captain Octavia Zarola needs an infusion of credits—fast—if she’s going to keep her close-knit bounty hunting crew paid and fed. Tracking down an escaped embezzler on a backwater planet should be a piece of cake, but bounties are rarely as easy as they seem.

As the crew closes in on their quarry, the hunt becomes entangled with a local criminal overlord, and Tavi will have to decide what’s more important: money or honor, and how much she’s willing to risk for either one.

Preorder now!
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Apple Books | Kobo | Google Play

Print books are coming, but I’d really only recommend them if you absolutely adore print, because print-on-demand is expensive, especially for a story that clocks in just under 14k words. (Yeah, I know the official text says 10k, but that’s because I didn’t update it after I edited the story.)

The print books should, if everything goes to plan, be the same size as the trad books, but I haven’t gotten a proof yet to confirm. Fingers crossed!

And now why you’re here: a little peek at Capture the Sun. I’m editing it now, so I shared a couple of very tiny snippets on Twitter yesterday, but here’s a slightly longer look at each of them. They’re not copyedited, subject to change, etc, etc.

Snippet the first:

I was traveling under a false name, so even if he was on the lookout for me—which I very much doubted, my hubris wasn’t that high—he wouldn’t know I was back on Valovia. And Zenzi’s population was over two million, so the odds that we would accidentally meet were incredibly slim.
Still, I crossed my fingers to ward off bad luck.
Nilo had his own gravity, much like a black hole, and in this, at least, I was smart enough not to be drawn in a third time—no matter how much I was tempted by his charming grin and sly wit.

Snippet the second:

I schooled my face into sharp amusement. “Did you forget that I speak Valovan? I’m not your treasure.” No matter how much the endearment made my heart race.
His expression softened and his thumb slid over the sensitive skin above my pulse. “Are you sure?”
It took a mighty effort, but I managed to pull my wrist away from his intoxicating touch. “Yes, I’m sure.”
“We’ll agree to disagree,” he said, echoing my words back to me.

Lexi and Nilo are so much fun! I kind of forgot how much I love this book because parts of it felt like such a slog (thanks, burnout!), but now that I’m editing, I’m delighted that I wrote it, lol. And my editor agrees! She told me it was “absolutely the perfect book for Lexi and Nilo” and if that’s not high praise, I don’t know what is. :)