{Guest Post} Daniel Cohen - Masters of the Veil

Welcome to the unveiling of Masters of the Veil by Daniel Cohen. His novel releases on March 1, 2012 and is published by Spencer Hill Press. Anyone read Half-Blood by Jennifer L. Armentrout...same publisher.

Synopsis:

Life can't get much better for Sam Lock. Popular, good-looking, and with a future as a professional football player. Every guy at Stanton High School wishes he were Sam.

That is, until his championship football game, when Sam accidentally links with an ancient source of energy known as the Veil and reveals his potential to become a powerful sorcerer.

Sam is whisked off to Atlas Crown, a community of sorcerers who utilize the Veil as a part of everyday life. Once there, he trains beside a mute boy who speaks through music, an eternal sage who's the eyes and ears of the Veil, and a beautiful girl who's pretty sure Sam's an idiot.As it becomes clear Sam's meant for power magic-the most feared and misunderstood form of sorcery-people beyond Atlas Crown learn of his dangerous potential. An exiled group of power sorcerers are eager to recruit Sam, believing that he is destined to help them achieve their long-held goal. If they succeed, they could bring about the downfall of not only Atlas Crown. but all humankind.

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I'm super excited about this book because it contains two of my favorite things Magic and Football (I'm from Texas...so yes, we capitalize Football.)

Today we are going to meet Glissandro Thicket, a super cool character from the book, and learn a little about the magic he possesses.

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GLISSANDRO THICKET

Glissandro is a tall, lanky, curly-haired sorcerer on the brink of adulthood. He was born without the ability to talk, but he somehow (to the astonishment of the sorcerer community) found a way to speak through playing music on his horn.

Glissandro is truly talented, has a kind heart, plenty of wisdom, but he’s shy and lacks the self-esteem to shine as bright as he could.

Here’s Glissandro telling the story of how he came to have his horn:

“When I was younger, I was different from everybody else. Everyone else could speak, but I couldn’t. No one picked on me, but that made it worse, because that meant I had no one to direct my disappointment at—nobody but myself. I hated being different. It was easy enough to get my message across: I drew words in the air with my second-skin*. They came out sparkling gold, but I was still not the same. It wasn’t even the talking that bothered me; it was the singing. I heard others use their voices to create beautiful music, and I couldn’t. I tried to sing, but I ended up choking. I spent a lot of time in the woods and in the library by myself, thinking. One day I went deep into the library, deeper than I’d ever been, and found an old, moldy book in the wall. There was nothing special about it, and I don’t know why, but I knew I had to read it. Most of it was in a language that was spoken before my time, but some of it I could understand. That book taught me some dangerous things, one of them being how to do a dark drape**. I knew it was against the rules to change yourself with the Veil, but I wanted to sing, more so than I wanted to follow the rules.

"I went into the woods and reached far into the Veil, farther than I had ever gone before, and attempted to drape myself. I vomited because the pain in my head was unbearable. When I opened my eyes, there was a terrible creature before me. A skull-wolf, something I'd only read about and seen pictures of, but recognized immediately. It sank its teeth through my second-skin and deep into my hand. It was excruciating. It tried to drag me away, so I grabbed the horn on the bottom of its chin with my other hand and kicked it in the face to try and get away. I fell back, along with its horn. The skull-wolf ran away and everything went black.”

* A second-skin is a hand covering that allows a sorcerer to “grip” the Veil. Essentially, it’s how you do magic.

** A drape is a type of grip where you wrap the Veil around an object to give it magical properties.

I’m going to stop there because I don’t want him to give too much away :) Thanks everybody for taking an interest in my work!

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I want to thank Daniel for dropping by Better Read Than Dead today and giving us a glimpse into what we can expect in March. I can't wait!!!
 
Daniel A. Cohen was just your average business student. Microeconomics, finance, marketing… you name it, he had to do a PowerPoint presentation on it. One dark and stormy night, he was bitten by the radioactive realization that memorizing business jargon could possibly be the most boring activity known to man.

After gaining eagle-eye vision, abs that could grate cheese, and a talent for imagining things (including his cheese-grating abs), he wrote his first novel and began his epic battle against the formidable business jargon. He continues to fight the good fight by playing saxophone and writing YA fantasy, forever hoping his Veil trilogy will help inspire others to join his cause.