Month: April 2015

Cover Reveal – “Spring into Love”

Cover Reveal – “Spring into Love”

 

Spring Into Love: 11 Hot Contemporary Romances
From SENSUAL to SPICY this boxed set of ELEVEN
contemporary romances includes BESTSELLING and AWARD-WINNING and USA TODAY
multi-published authors.
If you like variety in
your books these ELEVEN authors
provide your heart’s desire from SWEET and
FUNNY to DEADLY and SEXY
SPRING INTO LOVE will warm your heart and your bed. This is a limited time offer,
so grab your set today! ONLY 99c!
 
~~Purchase Links~~

;

Barnes & Noble: Coming Soon 
 
~~Books Included~~
Happy Endings – Chantel
Rhondeau

;

Tasting Los Angeles- Kimmie
Easley
Taming Romeo – Rachelle
Ayala
Consolation Prize – Abbie
St. Claire
Sweet Ride! – Bonnie
Edwards
Liveon ~ No Evil – Stacy
Eaton
Everybody’s After Love –
Lyssa Layne

;

Betrayed – Jade Kerrion
Finding Forever- Michele
Shriver
Love Unleashed – Marcia James
Kiss Me, Dancer – Alicia &
Roy Street

;

 
~~Purchase Links~~
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Paranormal Love Wednesdays – weekly blog hop

Paranormal Love Wednesdays – weekly blog hop

Paranormal Love Wednesdays is another great blog hop – you can discover new writers (or check out ones you already know about, like me!).

Here’s a little something from the first Dream Series novel, DREAM STUDENT:

…Sara is in the stands, watching a basketball game, watching herself down on the court cheering for a tall, dark-haired guy who’s getting ready to take a shot.  Watching herself, watching someone else who’s dreaming about her…

It’s him.  The guy at the table under the fighter plane is the guy on the court.  The one from the dream.  It’s definitely, absolutely, bet-my-life-on-it him.  That’s impossible, isn’t it?  It wasn’t real, he wasn’t real.  It was just a stupid, weird dream.  But he’s sitting right over there!

And so what?  I’m in uncharted territory here, but I know it has to mean something.  I didn’t just dream about him.  I was inside his head, or he was inside mine.  Whichever.  There was him, and then there were the nightmares.

At least the dream with him, as weird as it felt, wasn’t all creepy and horrible.  Actually, if you take away the weird, it didn’t feel bad at all.  So if the nightmares are making me crazy, maybe this guy will–what?  Make the nightmares stop?  Make me sane again?  I don’t know, but I have to find out.

 

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Author Spotlight – Jude Knight and “Farewell to Kindness”

Author Spotlight – Jude Knight and “Farewell to Kindness”

I’ve got a great indie author to introduce to you today.  Please say hello to Jude Knight:

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Jude Knight writes strong determined heroines, heroes who can appreciate a clever capable woman, villains you’ll love to loathe, and all with a leavening of humour.

You can follow her all over the Interwebs:

Follow Jude on Twitter: http://twitter.com/JudeKnightBooks

Friend Jude on Facebook: http://facebook.com/judeknightbooks

Subscribe to Jude’s blog: http://judeknightauthor.com

Subscribe to Jude’s newsletter: http://judeknightauthor.com/newsletter/

Follow Jude on Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/judeknight

 

Her book is “Farewell to Kindness”

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For three years, Rede has been searching for those who ordered the murders of his wife and children. Now close to end of his quest, he travels to his country estate to be close to the investigation.

He is fascinated by the lovely widow who lives in one of the cottages he owns. A widow who pays no rent. A widow, moreover, with a small daughter whose distinctive eyes mark her as as the child of his predecessor as Earl.

Six years ago, Anne blackmailed Rede’s predecessor at arrow-point for an income and a place to livein hiding from her guardian’s sinister plans for her and her sisters. He no longer has legal rights over her, but the youngest sister is still only 18. He cannot be allowed to find her.

Rede is everything she has learned not to trust: a man, a peer, a Redepenning. If he discovers who she is, she may lose everything.

To build a future together, Rede and Anne must be prepared to face their pasts.

You can buy it everywhere:

Kobo: https://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/farewell-to-kindness

iBooks: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/farewell-to-kindness/id974225678

Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/books/1121346576

Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/522691

Amazon Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Kindness-Golden-Redepennings-Book-ebook/dp/B00TXRW4KA/

 

I’ve also got a great interview with Jude:

Who is your favorite author?

I have different favourites for different reasons. Terry Pratchett, for his word play and his ability to use absurdity to cause me to think again about things I took for granted. Grace Burrowes, for her intricately interconnected fictional world, where the heroes and heroines of books appear as secondary or peripheral characters in others. Ursula Le Guin, for her rich relationships between characters, and for how characters in her books grow and change. There are so many others.

How do you describe your writing style? Use no more than two sentences.

I’ve never described my writing style. One of my reviewers said: “Her writing somehow manages to be both lush and controlled. She creates lovely, descriptive scenes that open up the place and time without overwhelming with historical detail, and the use of language is period-appropriate and provides an “old-fashioned” flavor that lingers.”

Why should we read your book?

Read Farewell to Kindness if you like stories with intricate plots, a surfeit of villains, lots of action, an interesting historical setting, appealing protagonists and secondary characters, and a happy ending. Candle’s Christmas Chair, my novella, is a simpler book, and a sweeter one.

Have any of your characters been modelled after yourself?

I suspect I put bits of myself into all my characters, even my villains. And bits of other people I know. In the end, though, the bits combine to form someone new.

If you could exchange lives with any of your characters for a day which character would you choose and why?

I’d rather not. I’m hard on my characters. But if I had to be one of them for a day, I’d choose Min Bradshaw in Candle’s Christmas Chair. She was frustrated at not getting credit for her work, but she had work that she loved. And she had a family who loved her.

What books have most influenced your life?

The Word for World is Forest, by Ursula Le Guin, opened my eyes to how a writer could protest a contemporary wrong by writing speculative fiction. Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas remains one of my favourite books of all time (yes, I know it is a radio script, but I still reread it at least once every year). His facility with language and his sense of humour blow me away every time I read it. Skallagrigg by William Horwood, which is a gruelling and difficult read but the best insight into closed in syndrome ever written. Again, it shows the power of fiction. Non-fiction can describe from the outside. Good fiction takes the experience inside, and makes you the person in the story. And the Slightly series by Mary Balogh because she was the first historical romance author I read after a drought of years, and the Slightly series was the one I started with. I then read everything she had published, scouring bookshops and the libraries. I moved on to other authors, and — after eighteen months of gorging on the genre — began Farewell to Kindness.

Beatles or Monkees? Why?

The Beatles, because they were original, and because they kept reinventing themselves. I remember another rock band being asked where they wanted to be in 10 years time. They said ‘looking back at the work we’re doing today, and being embarrassed by it.’ I like that. In 10 years, I want to have improved. I want to be doing something better than I’m doing now.

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cover Reveal – “Judging June” by T.J. West

cover Reveal – “Judging June” by T.J. West

COVER REVEAL
JUDGING
JUNE
By
T.J. West
Cover
Art: Cover to Cover Designs
Photo
Credit: 6:12 Photography by Eric McKinney
Cover
Model: Matt Palumbo
Back
Photo Credit: MH Photography

Back
Cover Model: Derienne Briggs

Hosted by: Coast to Coast Book Besties 

and Pardo Consulting NYC

 

Blurb:

June Tyndall and Phillip Caffrey are polar opposites.

June is a free spirit that owns and operates her own music label. She has tattoos, piercings and dresses like the rocker she is and the brand she represents.

Phillip is an architect. He is clean cut, prim and proper guy that works out at the gym and dresses in fine tailored suits.

There is nothing about June that Phillip finds attractive, especially her graphic body art. She isn’t the typical woman he goes after.

One drunken night leads June and Phillip into each others’ arms and bed. But for every action there is a reaction, and sometimes life changing consequences.

Will Phillip finally look past the image and see June for who she is? Or will he continue judging June and accept the consequences?

Can opposites truly attract?

STALKER LINKS
 
Twitter: @AuthorTJWest
 
Amazon: Author Page
Follow TJ West’s Blog


Check out TJ West’s other books…..
  
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Sneak Peek Sunday

Sneak Peek Sunday

Good morning, and welcome to Sneak Peek Sunday!  Lots of great indie authors (like me!) share six paragraphs from a new or forthcoming book.  So here’s a preview of my new book, out May 22, FEVER DREAM:

The dealer pulls the next card out of the shoe, and before he even starts to turn it over, I know what it’s going to be.  He flips it over, and I groan right along with everyone else at the table when I see the five of diamonds.

It’s unbelievable.  I’ve been losing steadily for the last half hour, and now here’s $2,000 more gone, just like that.  I did everything right!  The dealer had a three showing, and I had – could you ask for anything better? – two aces.  So I split them.  And I doubled down on both.  I got an eight on one, and a nine for the other.  Nineteen and twenty.  With the dealer showing a three.

The dealer turned over his second card.  Another three.  Then came a four, a two and another four.  Sixteen.  And then the five.  Twenty-one.  Everyone loses, including me.  I had $8,000 just a little while ago, and I’m down to $1,000 or so now.

I feel a hand on my back, and I turn to see my husband standing behind me.  “I leave you alone for five minutes,” he says, shaking his head.  The sight of him in his tuxedo, martini in hand, almost manages to distract me from my losses, but not quite.

“This whole thing was your idea, remember?”  When I mentioned to him, back in September, that I wanted to have an annual fundraiser for the hospital, he immediately suggested a casino night.

“I hope you’d be more careful if it was real money,” he answers, laughing.  He’s right, of course.  I just got so caught up in the game that I forgot the stakes aren’t real – and they’re less real for me than anyone else here.  Whoever winds up with the most chips at the end of the night wins a prize, but as the hostess of the evening, I’m obviously not eligible to win.  I still hate losing, though.  Especially in such a ridiculous way.

 

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Who knew? Something the Dream Series has in common with Game of Thrones

Who knew? Something the Dream Series has in common with Game of Thrones

OK, maybe I’m overselling it a little bit…

But there’s an interesting interview with George R.R. Martin, and one thing he says is this:

And pretty soon, you’ve written hundreds of pages and a week has passed, instead of the six months, or the year that you wanted to pass. So you end a book, and you’ve had a tremendous amount of events — but they’ve taken place over a short time frame, and the eight-year-old kid is still eight years old.

I’ve had the same thing happen in writing the Dream Series books.  Especially as the series has progressed, I find that the stories really tend to get compressed in time.  DREAM STUDENT takes place over a a six or seven week span, and DREAM DOCTOR does as well.  The new book, by contrast, FEVER DREAM, happens over just less than two weeks.

I can promise that one thing I do not have in common with Mr. Martin (besides millions of fans and truckloads of money delivered regularly by the nice people at HBO) is that you won’t have to wait five years or more for the next book.  I promise!

 

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Why Did I Like It?

Why Did I Like It?

I watched a movie the other night that I really enjoyed, and I don’t honestly know why.  I think that if I could figure it out, there might be a lesson there I can take advantage of in my own writing.

The movie was Whit Stillman’s “The Last Days of Disco”.  It takes place (exactly as you’d expect from the title) in the late 70’s, in New York City.  The story follows a group of young men and women fairly recently out of college, all over-privileged, all over-educated and all with far too high an opinion of themselves.  Their romantic and professional misadventures are played out against the backdrop of a Studio 54-ish club that’s incredibly popular (until it’s inevitably shut down by the cops thanks to rampant drug use, money laundering and other activities that take place in the backrooms).

The acting is all great – the cast includes Kate Beckinsale, Chloe Sevigny, Chris Eigeman and a name that may not be familiar but ought to be, Matt Keeslar (who would go on to star in “The Middleman” as well as playing Feyd in the Sci-Fi channel adaptation of “Dune”).  And the script is very sharp and very smart.

That all sounds great, so why am I questioning why I liked it?  Because every single character was unsympathetic to some degree.  And because I am not a fan of the late 70’s.  And because the trouble of rich, self-centered young Manhattanites is not a subject I am especially interested in.

Yet, even though I didn’t actually like any of the characters (and, were I to meet them in real life, I would try to get away as fast as possible), and I don’t have any love for their world or their era…I was drawn in by them, and I wanted to know what would happen, and, honestly, I didn’t want their time to end.

I can say almost exactly the same about the other Whit Stillman film I’ve seen, “Metropolitan”.  I just wish I could figure out what it is that he did to capture and hold my interest for two hours.

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