Guest Post and Giveaway with L. K. Rigel

Welcome to the second stop on the Bleeder blog tour.  Keep reading for the guest post, a giveaway of this great novel, and a chance for $100 gift card at the tour's end.   

Thanks so much to Marlene and Book Lover & Procrastinator for hosting Bleeder on its blog tour. BL&P’s trivia question for the $100 giveaway is about totems, so I thought I’d post about tattoos and totems in the world of Apocalypto.

In the Apocalypto series, female fertility was once nearly destroyed. When the goddess Asherah made select girls fertile in order to save humanity, some started having children before they were old enough.

This enraged Asherah. She wants her chalices, as she calls them, admired and pampered. Impregnating a bleeder before she was 18 was bad for the girl and, worse, an act of disrespect to the goddess.

So Asherah decided to give each bleeder a “totem” when they came of age to indicate that they were blessed and ready for action, so to speak. The bleeder has the totem tattooed on her left arm during the Rites of May, the week of celebration and ritual when bleeders become consecrated chalices.

The totem represents something significant about the chalice’s essential nature and serves as a touchstone. She can meditate on the image and discover deeper self-understanding. Jordana’s totem is a mongoose. I love this, because her completion tattoo is a copperhead snake – a natural enemy of the mongoose.

 Another kind of tattoo in Apocalypto is the service tat. Every city has its own symbol. For Garrick, the symbol is a black raptor talon. Allel’s symbol is a honeybee. The symbol of Luxor is a red dagger. The princes of the cities have their symbol tattooed on their clavicle when they become king.

As a bleeder completes each contract to provide royal children to the cities, she tattoos the city’s symbol somewhere on her body to commemorate the service. Every bleeder/chalice is required by Red City to complete at least three contracts for two children. Celia of Allel has twelve tats when Mal meets her.

The bleeders call the tattoo for the final contract their “completion tattoo” and always have it put on their left cheek. This shows the world that they are in retirement from breeding.

There is another tattoo no one really talks about: the pink rosebud. This is put on the forehead of “proof-of-service” children – children that chalices have outside of contract to prove their fertility and thus raise their contract prices.

You can find Bleeder at the following places:
                                                                                Amazon

                                                                                B&N

                                                                                Smashwords

To enter my giveaway for an e-copy of Bleeder, just leave a question or comment for the author and an email address.  Giveaway ends July 17th at 11:59 cst.  The winner will have 48hrs. to respond to an e-mail.

Here is my question for the random drawing.

If this doesn't work go here.

The next blog stop: July 11 – vvb32 Reads

For a full tour line-up, visit here

LK Rigel lives in California with her cat, Coleridge.  She was once a singing waitress, scored the independent science fantasy karate movie Lucid Dreams, and was a reporter for the Sacromento Rock 'N Roll News.  Her BA is in humanities and religious studies.  Her work has appeared in Literary Mama and Tattoo Highway.  Her short story "Slurp" will appear in Anne Frasier's 2011 Halloween anthology Deadly Treats published by Nodin Press.