Ellora’s Cave Kindle Editions Catching Up — Good News for You.
Ellora’s Cave have been slowly converting all their back-list books to Kindle editions and uploading them to Amazon for the last six months or so. That job is complete, and now the titles are beginning to pop up on Amazon as Amazon catalogue and build pages for them.
Unfortunately, there’s no rhyme or reason to the order Amazon are producing the back titles. All I can do as an author is go in every couple of weeks and search “my pen names + Kindle” and be delighted if new editions pop up.
Recently there has been a rash of my back-list titles blooming on Amazon, so I’ve been busy adding the links to the book pages here on the site.
The other good news is that now Ellora’s Cave have done the heavy lifting on the back list titles, every new title they produce will appear as a Kindle edition approximately two weeks after release at Ellora’s Cave. If you’re a Kindle owner, you’ll be up-to-date in no time.
Here’s a list of all my books that have Kindle editions. Click on the images to jump to the Kindle pages. I’ll continue to monitor Amazon for new editions and link them to the book pages as they appear.
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Book Tour for Carson’s Night is Shaping Up
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I’ll be giving away books at each of the tour stops, and I’ve got a couple of new tour locations this time around. Fresh meat! We’ll have to show ‘em what chaos truly means. :)
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Vampires and Body Fluids. I Was Just Wondering.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/27953587@N02/ / CC BY 2.0
Depending on which fantasy author is your cup of tea, the vampires you love to adore have certain powers and properties. Charlaine Harris’s vampires are truly dead and magic-driven, and when they cry, they cry tears of blood. Her explanation, and it was a very sensible one, was that they imbibe only blood, and therefore what they excrete when they cry must therefore be blood.
I’m currently working my way through the Anita Blake series, and haven’t reach a point where any vampire has been put under dire emotional stress, so I’ve yet to find out what Laurell K. Hamilton’s theory might be. So far, though, her vampires have proved to be intimidating and aloof, so it’s hard to imagine that they’d ever reach a point where they’d need to break down and have a good cry.
But they do have sex.
And that brings me neatly to the point I’ve been wondering about.
I’m smack in the middle of writing my…sixth erotic vampire novel. Actually, I’m much closer to the end of it than the middle, but I digress. Fact is, I’ve been writing a heck of a lot of sex scenes involving vampires and humans, and quite naturally, my thoughts have touched on this subject. I guess I’m going to have to get blunt and unladylike here if I’m to make sense, aren’t I?
If Harris’s vampires only have blood in them, what do they produce when they climax?
There we go. Did you just go “ugggh?”
Food for thought, huh?
In later Sookie Stackhouse books, there were sex scenes that featured ejaculate from a vampire and I’m pretty sure it was your standard, human-looking substance because she didn’t specifically describe it as being different in any way. So in this case, Ms. Harris broke with her own theory.
Fact is, if vampires are the undead, then an erotic author writing vampire stories should probably answer this theoretical question and set up her vampire universe properly before she starts writing. Ejaculate is part and parcel of sex scenes, afterall. I don’t think it matters which way an author answers the question and sets up her vampire universe, as long as the theory makes sense, and the stories remain consistent with that theory.
Which just goes to show I probably have either way too much time on my hands (not possible), or I take story-telling far too seriously!!
Moi?
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My Romantic Suspense, Dead Double, Is Out Today!
It’s been so long since I did a straight romantic suspense (although there’s sex in this one too — just not enough to qualify for Ellora’s Cave status!). Anyway, Dead Double is out today with Cerridwen Press — never thought the day would get here.
Here’s the blurb and a fresh excerpt for you.
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A reclusive Iranian genius will give the west the secrets to cold fusion, but only to Micky Wilde, who once charmed him. But Micky is dead. Logan Wilde is forced by his organization to used Sahara Taylor-Hughes, who is Micky’s double only in appearance.
Sahara’s gentle soul puts Logan in an agonising dilemma. How can he equate the appearance of the woman he hated with the woman he’s falling in love with?
As Sahara is drawn deeper into the operation and closer to Logan, she battles her own history: everyone she has ever loved has died and left her alone, and Logan works in a field where life can be brutally cut short. Can she give her heart to this man?
Zaram, a renegade terrorist, learns of the cold fusion plans. He will hold the western world to ransom if he gets them first. Logan must help Sahara beat Zaram, collect the plans, and make sure she stays alive, or else lose his mind…and his heart.
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Excerpt
He moved awkwardly around the apartment, while Sahara sat at the table, her leg under her. She noticed that Pippin had chewed at the chives there too and sighed, before turning her attention back to Logan Wilde.
“You look tired,” he said. “Did you get any sleep since I left?”
“I could say the same thing about you,” she said and thought it would have been an understatement. The man looked like he had aged ten years in the last few hours. He was dressed all in black now and it seemed to emphasize the beginnings of tired circles beneath his eyes.
She got to her feet, rinsed out the coffee pot and dug in the cupboard for a coffee filter. She got out the real coffee, not Caro. She wanted caffeine and lots of it, as soon as possible.
“I don’t want coffee, if you’re making that for me,” Logan said from behind her.
“It’s for me,” she said shortly. She heard the snap in her voice and tried to soften it. “Besides, you look like you could use some.” She glanced at him. In the better light in the kitchen section of the apartment, she could see signs of strain in his face that hadn’t been there that afternoon. The lines around his mouth seemed deeper. So were the crinkles at the corners of his eyes. And the riveting quality of blue had lost some of its edge. It made him look older and worn. “You look ill-used,” she added.
His eyes widened a little in reaction. Surprise? But he didn’t follow her lead. Instead, he moved over to the table and sat in the plain kitchen chair and pushed his hand through his hair, making the black shock fall back over his forehead once more.
“Why don’t you take off your jacket?” she suggested. “It must be stifling in this weather.”
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“It’s still nearly eighty degrees out there. I’m sure.”
He stripped off the light jacket and she realized why he had hesitated. He still wore the gun harness over the shirt beneath. She busied herself with spooning coffee and cleared her throat, hating the reminder of his business.
When she returned to the table once more, she had her reaction under control. He was staring at her again but not like a man absorbed with memories.
“What?” she asked, prompting him.
“I suppose I can see why everyone else is so convinced you’re Micky,” he said slowly. “It’s there on the surface, sure enough.”
She gave a nervous laugh. “What’s underneath, then?”
He sat up straighter. “I should get down to business.” But instead of getting to business, he looked around the apartment. “How long have you lived here?”
“It’s been nearly ten years now.”
“You’ve always owned the store?”
“I built it from scratch,” she said and didn’t bother to hide the note of pride in her voice.
He took a deep, visible breath and the thought struck her, he’s putting this off. The realization sent a finger of fear through her. To make this man reluctant to deal with it, the matter had to be horrendous.
“Tell me,” she said quickly. “Get it out.”
Instead of doing as she suggested, he pointed behind her. “Your coffee is done.”
She hissed a small curse under her breath, got up and made two cups of coffee, dumped the cream and sugar on the table and placed a mug in front of him. Then she sat again, stirred in the cream and sat back. “Now,” she said.
But while she had moved around the room preparing the coffee, he had regained his control. His expression was urbane, neutral. “Thanks,” he said, picking up his unaltered cup and sipping from it.
He got to his feet and moved to the counter to lean against it. It forced Sahara to swivel in her seat to see him properly.
He put the coffee aside like a man getting down to business. “The man in your store today was Seoc Roderic. Or at least, that’s the name we know him by. He’s a well-known go-between—someone who collects messages or objects from one party and delivers them safely to another. In our world—my world—couriers are minor players, barely above notice when tracing lines of power. But Seoc did know Micky, my ex-wife. This afternoon he was utterly sure you were Micky, even after looking at you up close and talking to you. I spoke to him tonight and he’s still convinced you’re Micky.”
“Even though Micky is dead?” Sahara asked.
Logan grimaced. “Seoc knows that in our business, death is a slippery state. So many agents reported dead have turned up alive somewhere else in the world, with a different name, sometimes even different faces.” He shrugged.
“But your wife was not a-an agent, right?”
“She was known to a lot of people and so she had power of a sort. She floated on the edges, just as Seoc did. I think, sometimes, she was drawn to the romanticism of it.” His mouth turned down. “She didn’t see the real side of what we do.” Logan crossed his arms and took a deep breath.
And Sahara thought, Here it comes.
The blue eyes pinned her to the chair. “We want you to be Micky—just for a while.”
Sahara jumped, even though she had begun to suspect what Logan was about to say. “Why would you want me to do that? You said she wasn’t an agent.”
“No, she wasn’t. But she knew a lot of people and one of those people is a man who is hiding out somewhere in the world, a nuclear physicist from Tehran, called Malik. He has something he wants to give to Micky…and only Micky.”
“What?”
Logan pursed his lips for a second. “The working plans for cold fusion.”
Sahara clutched her cup. “Cold fusion? They know how to do that now?”
“Malik does,” Logan said dryly. “And he will only share with Micky.”
“But why are you so anxious to get the plans? Surely other scientists…”
Logan shook his head. “Malik is a gifted genius. Iran’s version of Einstein. Western nations are generations away from even getting close to what he has created. Most have shelved the idea—they don’t think it’s feasible. Oh, they all agree it’s theoretically possible, just not something worth tackling. Like faster than light travel—it’s the stuff of science fiction as far as they’re concerned. So Iran has been quietly working on it, using Malik’s talent. And it seems they’ve solved it, and now they won’t share. But when you get the plans from him, they will be shared—with every nation in the world.”
“That’s incredible,” Sahara breathed. “This is really happening? They’ve really done this? Figured out cold fusion?”
“We have good reason to believe they have.” He took another breath and almost seemed to push the words out, as if he were hurrying to speak them. “You meet Malik at a location that he will give us, say hello and take the plans from him. That’s the full extent of your involvement. There shouldn’t be any complications. It’s not even like Malik is looking for payment. Straight in and straight out again. You’ll be gone maybe a week.”
“It sounds simple enough,” Sahara said, sipping her coffee. “And for cold fusion…that is worthwhile, isn’t it?” She looked up at him, hoping he would agree with her, for in truth she felt completely out of her depth. They were asking her to collect the secrets to nuclear fusion, for goodness sake!
She dredged her memory for what she knew about fusion power. It was a subject she knew a little about because of the clean power it would provide. “Once it’s understood how to recreate fusion, then there’d be clean power for everyone, right? No more radiation damage, or nuclear slag heaps and spills. Free energy for the asking.” It was a huge thing. A worldwide revolutionary thing.
She realized her hand was shaking and put the cup down.
“I would be with you every step of the way, of course,” Logan said, as if she had not spoken at all. His arms were still locked over his chest. “And even though you would not see it, security would be tight. The tightest—to protect you.”
“Is there a need for such high security?” she asked. “You just said that it was simple. In and out.”
“You would have to change your appearance just a little,” Logan continued, again as if she had not spoken at all.
Sahara stared at him, her heart pattering. What was going through his mind right now, to distract him so much? It was almost as if he were speaking the words like a preset dialogue. Something written down and memorized.
“The hair, mostly,” he continued. “And you would have to learn names and facts from Micky’s past.” He took a breath and it lifted his chest and arms. “Your clothes too.”
“Logan—” Sahara began, trying to interrupt him.
“And Micky spent a lot of time with some very powerful people. You’d have to learn how to deal with them. We’ll be moving in embassy circles—”
“Logan!”
He stopped and looked at her and she knew that at last he was really looking at her.
“You’re scaring me,” she said simply.
“Good.” He grabbed the back of the chair he’d been using and turned it around and straddled it, sitting so that he was only a few inches away from her. “You should be scared.”
“What? But…you just said…”
“Don’t say yes to this, Sahara. It’ll kill you.”
Confusion was making her dizzy. “But Logan, you just—”
He pushed his hand through his hair again. “I know what I said, damn it. You think I don’t have bosses? Supervisors? A chain of command?” He grabbed her wrist. His expression was earnest, the blue eyes drilling into hers. “Say no. Don’t do it.”
“But you said I’d be perfectly safe.”
“So was Micky, for heaven’s sake!” He jumped to his feet and strode over to the counter. Back. Looked at her and spread his hands. “You’re always safe until you’re not. And Micky at least had the measure of these people. She knew what she was involved in. You’re a-a complete innocent. They’ll chew you up alive.”
“Thanks,” she said dryly.
“That’s not what I meant, exactly.” He pushed his hands into his pockets and became still. The blue eyes were looking into hers again and this time she knew she was looking at the real Logan. The one behind the façade. “What I do mean is that I don’t want you to do this.” His voice was low, curling around her spine, stroking her insides until they quivered. “I don’t want you to do it, because it’s dangerous. Because it’s the sort of ‘easy’ job that got Micky killed. And because they won’t tell you that.”
She clutched her coffee cup more to hide the trembling in her hands than anything else. “They forced you into this, didn’t they? Forced you to ask me.”
“It’s complicated.” He was hedging.
“They were going to ask me one way or the other, though,” she guessed.
He hesitated, then nodded.
She stood up, so that she was closer to his level and closer to looking him in the eye. “My mother died when I was eight and my father died when I was twelve. My foster parents died when I was sixteen. I think I’ve learned how to take care of myself well enough. And you’ll just have to take care of the rest of it for me, because you’re right, I really don’t know your world. And every time I see you, I learn a little more and like it a little less.”
“Sahara, don’t—”
She laid her hand on his arm and was bombarded with sensations—heat, softness, the hard muscles beneath, the size of his forearm under her fingers. She pushed the sensations away, anxious to make her last point. “You’ve warned me. That’ll have to do. This needs to be done.”
He took a deep breath, calming himself. She could see him pulling on the restraints, bringing himself back to a calm state. “Why are you agreeing to this?” he asked and his voice was rough.
Because you didn’t lie to me this time. The words pushed at her lips but she held them back. “Because the world needs fusion power,” she said. It was part of the truth, anyway.
“You’re doing this for your country?” Disbelief tinged every word.
“Why not?” she shot back. “You’re so jaded, you’ve lost the ability to believe in ideals?”
“I’ll give you three weeks and you won’t have to ask me that anymore. You’ll understand all too well.” His tone was infinitely bitter.
“Then why are you doing it, Logan?”
He looked like he was on the verge of answering. His lips parted, as he stared at her. Then he turned away and grabbed his coat. “Let’s go.”
“Now?” She could feel her eyes widening.
“Yes.” He shoved his arms into his coat with snappy movements, not looking at her.
“But I need to pack…my personal things…”
“You won’t need anything. It will all be supplied.”
“But my shop! I can’t just walk out and leave it unopened, unattended!”
This sensible appeal finally halted him. His lips thinned as he considered the matter. “The lady this afternoon—”
“Tiffany.”
“She knows the workings of the store?”
“Tiffany flew back to London tonight.”
“Is there anyone else who could run the store?”
“I have a shoestring budget, Logan. I do it all myself.”
He remained still, thinking it through and in the silence, Sahara could feel an old excitement coursing through her. It took her a moment to recognize it and when she did, it was with a jolt.
This was the sort of drop-everything-and-go moment her father had often provided. A competition halfway around the world, in two days time? No problems, mate. There’s a Boeing to Heathrow in three hours, we can make it…
With the recognition came a sweet-sour ache of remembrance. She’d always thought she’d hated being picked up and shuffled off in this way, that roots, family and stability—home—was the bedrock she craved. Yet now she faced another such moment and she was tingling with the idea of it. With chagrin, she realized that this had influenced her agreement, even before she had recognized it. Because of it, she tried a token protest.
“I can’t just up and leave, Logan. I have a cat and bills and…and a life.” It sounded pathetic, even to her. But then Howard’s harsh prediction lit up in her mind like a neon sign in the dark. She spoke more firmly. “Someone must run the store. If I don’t open, the whole business will stall. I have rent to pay, insurance, taxes. I won’t just fall behind, I’ll have to shut up entirely.”
Logan was studying her and it seemed that he didn’t quite understand.
“If my business shuts up, then I lose the apartment over the top too. It’s not just my income, Logan. It’s my whole life.”
He pushed his hand through his hair. “We’ll take care of it. Somehow. Give me your keys and I’ll make sure someone comes in to run it.”
“Really?”
“I promise,” he said firmly, heading for the door of the apartment. “That’s the one thing I can guarantee—you won’t lose money in this deal.”
His voice was sour enough to curdle milk.
______________________
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New Cover for Carson’s Night. Wowee! I Just love, love, love it!!
The cover of my new erotic paranormal romance from Ellora’s Cave arrived today.
With Ellora’s Cave, you do get to fill in a cover questionnaire, so there is some hope that what the Covers department delivers has something to do with your story. I’ve heard and seen total horror stories where the cover had absolutely nothing to do with the story, and the marketing department insisted on the book going to the stores with that cover anyway.
I’ve even worked with publishers who have dealt with my own books in a similar fashion, but I’m not about to tell tales here.
Anyway, even despite putting in cover questionnaires, sometimes, if you don’t answer the questions completely and properly and your powers of description aren’t precise enough, what you get back can still be bewilderingly off-base. Artistic interpretation can be a wonderous thing.
So far, I just seem to be either dead lucky, or a good describer, because the covers I get back from Ellora’s Cave’s Covers department have been uniformly brilliant.
I just got the cover for Carson’s Night.
Not only is it great, the characters are so damned bang-on perfect I almost want to cry. They’re Carson and Tally personified, and the attitude they’ve struck on the cover is almost eirie — it’s what Carson and Tally would do. Expressions and all. Even the scruffy, 1977 style hair looks right and Tally is so beautiful it makes clocks run backwards.
Sigh…
I’m at the 90% mark on the sequel today. I’ve put off the gym, eating and most social contact to finish, but the arrival of Carson’s cover has just thrown me for a loop.
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Hero Moment of the Week — Lots of Heroes that Missed the Ship. Battlestar Galatica failed on many levels.
Jamie Bamber as Lee Adama in Battlestar Galatica
I guess I’m venting a bit this week. Because I don’t watch television, I tend to be almost a year behind everyone else when it comes to catching up with TV series.
So I’ve only recently got to watch the debacle that was the series finale of Battlestar Galactica.
I was going to be a bit kinder in my description but I’ve cruised around on-line to see what everyone else thought of it, and discovered that it’s not just me being a princess about what was one of my all-time favourite science fiction series ever being totally screwed over at the end.
So for today, let me enumerate how they missed the boat when it came to the many romances they were hinting at or outright stating. I feel the romances deserve a critique of their own. Battlestar Galactica spent plenty of airtime developing meaty romantic storylines for five years. If the writers were going to step into the romance ring, and play with the big kiddies then they get to take their licks like we romance writers all do:
First, Admiral Adama and President Roslyn: It was refreshing to see an older couple get a romance, but they wimped out at the end. The lack of commitment until after she died felt spineless on Adama’s behalf. He’s an Admiral. A commander of men. Once they’d figured out their feelings for each other, then the commitment should have been total. So I was shocked when he slipped his wedding ring onto her hand when she died. If he really felt that way, why didn’t he do that when she was alive? It’s a small thing, I know. But it was one more thing about the ending that really bothered me.
Galen/Sharon Valerii/Cally: I ended up really liking Galen, even though he’s the least romantic hero of all the heroes in the series. He went through hell, emotionally, and just kept persevering, and stuck to his guns and his principles. And his loyalty to the Admiral. So the fact that he ended up alone at the end of the series and walking off into the sunset just sucked. He rejected everyone. It was so out of character it stank. And it was such a stupid story idea, too. Thirty seconds of survival instinct would tell you that living on your own decreases your chance of survival by several hundreds of percent points. But Galen heads north into the colder parts of the world by himself. Ugh. After fighting so hard for two different races, he just gives up? Give me a break. He just killed the woman who murdered his wife. He’s passionate, full of fire. As they killed off the two women he loved, he should have got even the beginnings of a new romance, the hint of a relationship. He should have been surrounded by people and love, not turned into a hermit. They really blew this romance, big time.
Caprica Six and Gaius Baltar: I hated this romance. Period. Baltar was obsessed about Caprica to the point where he betrayed his race willingly and knowingly, and at the end of the series, he was rewarded by getting her back. He learned a lot of things in between, sure, but by getting her back at the end, all it tells him is that it was okay to do the worst thing you can possibly do as a human being in order to impress a woman you’re obsessed with, because it’ll win the girl in the end. Viewers won’t notice his single small act of nervous bravery at the end. They’ll just see five years of selfishness and self-interest, lying, cheating, and magnificent self-absorption. And he still got the girl. And that’s what the series showed thousands of gullible guys out there, too: Do anything you have to do to get the hot chick. It’s worth it.
The best/worst for last. Lee Adama/Starbuck (Kira)/Sam Anders. I had high hopes throughout the first part of the series that Lee and Kira would get together and the writers were dangling this deliberately. There were plenty of very broad hints, tension, looks, and romantic I am, I wanted to see it happen. Then in the middle of the series, Lee and Kira actually do get together for a night and confess they love each other…and Kira bails, afraid of her own feelings, and rushes off and marries Sam instead.
Okay, I can see how the writers would feel that they’d backed themselves into a corner and resolved the Lee/Kira thing too soon and needed to throw a spanner into the works, in the form of Sam. But they never got back online. The storyline spluttered and died after that. Sam turned into a Cylon baseship supercomputer, Lee married Dee, who killed herself, and Kira, at the end of the series, turned into some sort of resurrected Angel/Black Death Messenger who decided she’d done her duty and simply disappeared when Lee turned around to look at some mountains.
Say what?
This was absolutely the most disappointing and farsical of all the romance storylines in the series. The Lee/Kira romance had the potential of having us all chewing our fingernails every week for the entire series, as they figured their feelings out. There was plenty of raw material there, and the writers didn’t even need to drop into clichés to do it. These two characters were fresh, original — hell, Kira sucker-punched her CO over a friendly game of poker in the first week of the series and ended up in the brig — that’s how original they were. And the series itself was constantly pushing the envelope, so the situations themselves were unique, so just playing the romance out against that unique background would make the romance itself original.
Instead, they killed what could have been one of the primary story backbones. The Sam/Kira thing didn’t do much for me at all. I kept waiting for the marriage to fail so she could get back to Lee, frankly.
Instead, all the potential story lines evaporated into nothing at all. In the finale, Lee Adama didn’t even look particularly upset when Kira disappeared. Just wistful. She was supposed to be the secret love of his life, for god’s sake!
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Like I said, the ending of the series failed on so many levels, but when it came to the romance storylines, Battlestar Galactica really, really blew it. You can hold up your finger and point out that it was a science fiction series. Yes, it was. But they chose to write romances into the series, and if they elected to put romances into the series in the first place, then they should have dealt with them properly, and not half-assed them. It’s as if they’re too embarrassed by the deeper human emotions, like love, to deal with them properly. Blowing up cylons and mountains of technical shit is just fine, but when it comes to feelings…ugh.
I think the way they fumbled it made them look stupid.
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My Erotic Paranormal Romance, Carson’s Night, Will Be Out on April 2, 2010.
Carson’s Night, the erotic paranormal romance I stayed up all weekend to finish, recently, and sold to Ellora’s Cave, now has a release date: April 2, 2010. Just under one month away.
I’ve already started arrangements for a book tour, and as soon as I have confirmed dates, I will build a temporary book tour page here on the site. Naturally, I’ll be giving away books at each tour stop, so make sure you take note of where I’ll be visiting for those dates. I’m trying to add in some new blogs, so it’s not the same blogs as usual this time.
I’m also waiting on a new cover from EC, and I’ll post that as soon as I get it. Meantime, I’m using one of New York’s finest as a temporary cover. Handsome chap, huh?
I’m three-quarters of the way through the sequel to Carson’s Night right now, as it happens…I should get back to it. I’m on the down-slope to The End.
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It’s August 1977 in New York City and the weird sculptor Moss Alex Meinhardt lies dead at the foot of an ugly gargoyle he’s half-completed. Natalia Grey’s demon hunter father is also dead, and his new partner, the astonishingly sexy Carson Connors, can’t remember how it happened.
Carson isn’t sure what role he has played in Natalia’s father’s death, but after one look at Natalia, he does know that guilty or not, he’s doomed.
Natalia must take up her father’s sword and her heritage as a demon hunter and figure out what happened this night, for the gargoyles Meinhardt carved have life they should not have without the help of dark forces she and Carson must defeat—once the gargoyles have risen, of course. But the night is hours away yet…
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6 Things I wish I’d Known About Getting A Literary Agent When I First Started Writing Novels.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/desireedelgado/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
1. Agents are just as hard to land as publishers, if not harder.
You have to knock yourself out marketing your very best work, making yourself look wonderful, over and over again, in order to win the heart of an agent. It’s exhausting. They’re looking for a long term commitment and are harder to convince.
2. Agents really want to believe in you.
They’re not cynical, or they wouldn’t be in the business (for much longer).
3. Agents aren’t mind-readers.
They want you to sell them on your talent and potential, but they don’t know anything about you. You have to tell them who you are. You have to give them the information they need to know you have what it takes. They can’t operate in a vacuum.
That means you need to know what skills you have that are marketable. Do your research. What makes you hot? What makes your manuscript different? Tell the agent that. This is what they’re going to want to know, along with the basic demographics of what genre you’re writing, etc.
4. Agents genuinely love novels and reading and are looking at you as the next potential New York Times Bestseller.
Even as you’re pitching your book, they’re thinking potential markets. Every element you introduce eliminates or opens up potential markets in their minds. They’re also looking at you as a person and how you pitch, your appearance, personality, enthusiasm and energy, presentation…the whole package, in fact, and assessing you as Bestseller material. It’s not a conscious assessment, because they’re actually listening to your story pitch. But subconsciously, the assessment is taking place, and an agent generally starts out with positive expectations.
5. Once you have an agent, you don’t get to relax.
You can’t let your professional standards slide just because you have an agent now. That’s a quick way to jeopardize your working relationship. Like marriage, treat this partnership with kid gloves. It can last a lifetime with care and feeding and both of you can profit.
6. Agents can become friends.
The books and experts say keep it strictly professional, but even professionals can become friends over the long term. As long as the boundaries between work and play are well defined, you can be friends.
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The Resurrection of the Historical Romance Portal.
I had the good fortune in October last year of being asked to co-host the Historical Romance Panel at Ellora’s Cave’s inaugral reader’s convention, RomantiCon.
The convention was a total blast, but the panel itself was slotted into one of the most strategically awkward places you could get: The last hour before the most eagerly anticipated bookfairs of the year. Everyone was gulping down lunch and grabbing their spot in the lineup before the doors opened up for the bookfair in the hour that we were scheduled for our panel.
On top of that,writing historicals is one of the most research-heavy, tomb-ladened sub-genres known to romance writers. No way were we going to do it justice in the shortened 45 minutes they chopped us down to.
So we got really smart and before we even got to the conference, we built a web portal holding all the live links, reference materials, recommendations, articles and resources we regularly use for our own research and provided that to attendees at the conference so they wouldn’t have to write anything down when they were there. They could just visit the portal when they got home and everything would be linked up for them.
When I had my big website blow out a few months ago, the portal got lost in the shake-up. Panel co-host Kathleen Coddington was kindly going to host it for us, but I’ve managed to get my act together and resurrect the portal again on the new site here. It doesn’t look quite as royal purple as it used to, but all the same information is there, and all the links are working again.
Click here to jump to the History Portal.
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6 Paranormal Sites Off the Beaten Romance Track.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/logosinberlin/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
If you’re like me, you’ve probably got a dozen or so paranormal romance websites and blogs that you visit on a (semi)regular basis, or you’ve subscribed to their RSS feed. But if you find you’re getting burned out on an aspect of paranormal romance, and can’t seem to find something “different” then try hunting in new territory. If you look in related-but-different places, you might find the fresh, new titles and authors you’re looking for.
Here are x interesting, high ranking paranormal-related sites and blogs to get you started. They’ll at least give you a new perspective on the paranormal genre.
Vampires
The blog/site covers anything and everything to do with vampires, period. You have television shows, movies, books, magazines, and articles on all aspects of vampirism. The books they review and feature are not exclusively romance, so you may trip over something new and interesting there.
SciFiGuy
Even further out on the left field, Doug Knipe’s SciFiGuy at first sounds like it couldn’t possibly be of interest to a paranormal romance lover, but if you like the urban fantasy subset, then you’ll love this site. Doug features erotic urban fantasy occassionally, but even better, he has an Urban Fantasy report that he puts out every Saturday, for those who can’t get enough of fangs and fur in familiar places.
The Torch
And yet even further in the outfield, The Torch looks like a straight science fiction convention at first glance, but they cover a huge amount of fantasy – both paranormal romance and hard urban fantasy — in all the different media. You won’t find the same old names and titles here, and you’ll be keeping up with all things fantastic at the same time.
Werewolves
Werewolves is the sister site to Vampires, both run by Darkness.com. Like Vampires, it covers anything and everything to do with werewolves, so if furry Alpha heroes are your thing, you’ll love this site.
The Galaxy Express
Devoted to all things SF (Science Fiction) Romance related, The Galaxy Express do touch on Steam Punk, Urban Fantasy and Classic Fantasy in their search for really good romance within the traditional boundaries of the Science Fiction genre. That means you might often find titles and authors mentioned on this site that don’t generally pop up on the more general romance oriented sites.
Fantasy Art
Although the blog is devoted to stunning flights of fantasy imagination in graphic form, it also features fantasy — including urban fantasy — books and their authors. The site is fascinating all on its own, even without the books.
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