Thanks so much, Andy, for letting me visit here today! This is the fourth stop on my blog tour to discuss my new novel, Pilgrimage. And since my characters, Mike and Goran, spend the book on a pilgrimage, I thought it would be fun for us to follow along.

Having been zapped to an alternate universe, Mike must visit a series of shrines to a death god. The second shrine he visits is at a cemetery outside the small village of Ugolin:

Just past the village, a narrow pathway twisted through a flower-speckled meadow and skirted a small hillock before passing under an elaborate iron archway. Mike thought this was strange, because there was no wall or fence, just the arch. Once he was through the archway, he saw hundreds of small metal bowls with lids. They were laid out in careful rows, and the vegetation between each row had been flattened by trampling feet.

“What is this place?” Mike asked, looking around in bewilderment.

“Garden of the dead.” Goran’s mood was unusually somber despite the fact that he still swayed a bit from the ale.

“Garden of— You mean it’s a cemetery?”

“It’s where the ashes of the dead are kept.”

Weird. Although once Mike thought it through, it wasn’t any weirder than preserving corpses, sticking them in expensive boxes, and burying them. “The shrine is here somewhere?”

Goran wordlessly gestured at an extra-large bowl near one corner of the garden. It was big enough for Mike to sit in, if he wanted to, and it had no lid. When he drew closer, he saw that the insides of the bowl were badly stained. His stomach lurched. Blood. He startled when Goran set a hand on his shoulder.

Since we don’t have any photographs of this shrine, my 10-year-old daughter has made us an illustration:

Join the Pilgrimage

To celebrate the new book, I’m doing a giveaway. Two people will each win a signed print copy of Pilgrimage, plus a $10 donation to a charity of their choice. All you have to do to enter is leave a comment here or on any of the other tour stops. Make sure you leave your email address! Each stop you comment on earns you an entry. I’ll randomly choose the winners  on February 14 at noon Pacific time. Click here to see a complete list of tour stops.

Blurb:

Fiscal analyst Mike Carlson is good with spreadsheets and baseball stats. He doesn’t believe in fate, true love, or fantasy. But then a fertility goddess whisks him away to another world. A promise has been broken, and if Mike is ever to return to California—and his comfortable if lonely life—he must complete a pilgrimage to the shrines of a death goddess.

A humiliating event convinces Mike to hire a guard to accompany him, and hunky Goran is handy enough with a sword, if a little too liberal with his ale. A man with no home and no family, Goran is deeper than he first appears. As Mike learns more about Goran, his disbelief wavers and his goals become less clear. Contending with feuding gods, the challenges of the journey, and his growing attraction to Goran, Mike faces a puzzle far harder to solve than simple rows of numbers.

Pilgrimage is available in print and e-book versions from Dreamspinner Press , Amazon, and  all major booksellers.

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Kim Fielding can be found at her blog: http://kfieldingwrites.blogspot.com

On Twitter: @KFieldingWrites

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