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Fictionista, Foodie, Feline-lover

Thursday, July 14, 2016

The Trilogy is Complete!

Well, almost.  I published Bride of the Midnight King a year ago August, and the sequel, Daughter of the Midnight King in January. Now I'm rounding out the story with The Midnight Queen, which is about Joie, princess of Eindar and the first natural-born vampire in the land. I'm having a lot of fun mashing up fairy tales with my own kind of vampires, but I think Midnight Queen will be the last story in the series. I snagged this cover during the big June sale over at The Book Cover Designers.  It's by Magic Covers. The Midnight Queen will be out in September, just in time to celebrate my birthday.

Tuesday, July 12, 2016

A modern-day Pinocchio?

I read the blurb for Ricardo Henriquez' debut dark fantasy/horror novel The Catcher's Trap over at Dread Central and it feels to me like a dark fairy tale along the lines of Pinocchio. It comes out in November. I'll be waiting.

Monday, July 11, 2016

A Tale of Two Covers

I love free books. And while I'm not what my best friend calls a "greedy grabber" (one of those people who scoops up freebies and never actually reads them), I have been known to actually fill my Kindle to capacity with free and bargain books.  and I have a lot of opportunities to do that because I'm subscribed to a couple of services that email me every morning with tempting books in every possible category. Today, on Freebooksy, Meg Xumei X's book Empress of Mysth caught my eye. It looked like something a little different in the paranormal romance genre, and I'm always looking for something different. (Killer angels!!)

The cover to the left is the one in the ad, and it caught my eye because it looks like an old school Tanith Lee cover. (I still miss Tanith Lee!)  It snagged my attention and then I read the blurb and clicked over to Amazon to claim my free book. Because ... free!  But also because I've read some of X's other books, including The Siren. I like her books. They always have high stakes (like the survival of the human race.) And they don't have cookie cutter characters. So, very much looking forward to reading this book. But when I clicked over, the cover below was the one on offer. And I tell you right now, if I'd seen that shirtless angel photoshop  cover, my eyes would have glided right past it.

I know there's been a lot of talk about "shirtless covers" and I've mostly kept out of it, but here's a real A/B test. To me, the book with the woman on the cover looks more interesting than the book with the shirtless angel. I'm not a prude, not at all. But the book above tells me the book is about a woman who is DOING SOMETHING. The shirtless angel cover tells me that the most important thing is the relationship with the shirtless angel. (Yes, I know it's a fantasy romance, but work with me here.)

Maybe if the guy's wings hadn't been off-center. (Because of the way his torso is turned, the wing on his left shoulder should have been turned as well and it isn't. The model has just been superimposed on the wings and it doesn't look great. In fact, it looks like a bazillion other covers you see in the Kindle book section.

I'm still looking forward to reading the book (which is #1 in one of his categories in the Free Book section right now), but I really wish the author had stuck with the original cover.

Sunday, July 10, 2016

Steampunk Poe!

The annual Bellingham Steampunk Festival is coming up and as always, there are author appearances. This year one of the authors who'll be there is Lindsay Shopfer. I don't know his work, but when I Googled around, I found THIS collection, Merely This, which looks like all kinds of fun. (They had me at "clockwork raven.") I look forward to reading his work.

I like the playful thing the book designer did with Edgar Allan Poe's name. I also like the play of purple against the black and white. Not crazy about the way the title and subtitle are laid in. 

Saturday, July 9, 2016

Fury Rising by Yasmine Galenorn...a review

Fury Rising (Fury Unbound Book 1)Fury Rising by Yasmine Galenorn

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Kaeleen Donovan—her friends call her Kae—is a Theosian, a minor goddess created when her pregnant mother wandered into a patch of wild magic that altered her DNA. Bound to the goddess Hecate, and able to roam the Crossroads where all worlds meet, Kae has a mission to retrieve a stolen artifact that in the wrong hands, could mean TEOTWAWKI. That’s the setup for author Yasmine Galenorn’s latest book and it’s a romp through a Seattle altered by a cataclysmic magic storm unleashed by Gaia before the story opens.
The Portland of GRIMM has nothing on Galenorn’s Seattle, which is inhabited by creatures of both shadow and light, beings who can shift into hawks and work magic, spirit guides, and all manner of creatures that have come from the World Tree and through the various portals ripped in the fabric of space time.
Kae is a typical kickass urban fantasy heroine with her sword and dagger and whip, but though she walks “in flame and ash on a field of bones,” she is also recognizably human and profoundly grateful that she wasn’t bound to one of the death gods of Santeria instead of Hecate, Goddess of the crossroads and of dark magic. And her world includes a day-job (running a cleaning company), which grounds the fantastical in the mundane.
The author has done a lot of world building, which is a treat and as a special gift to her readers, she’s also added the playlist she used for the book, which includes everything from Android Lust to Tingstad & Rumbel. This is the first in a series, and it’ll be fun to see what’s next for Kae, who is known as “Fury” when she’s on the nightshift.




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Thursday, July 7, 2016

An interview with C.J. Warrant




1    C.J. Warrant is the debut author of the romantic suspense novel Forgetting Jane. (Review to come shortly, but trust me, you want to get it!) She stopped by to talk about her book and her writing and her life. 


 You’re an Army brat?  Me too! How do you think that shaped you as a person? Growing up, it was hard to make friends. I had to learn to put myself out there if I wanted them, which helps me now with networking. Also, since we got to travel from Korea, to Japan and then to the states, I met so many interesting people along the way.

2.       If someone gave you an all expenses vacation to anywhere you wanted, where would you go? Bora Bora! Every picture I have seen about that place reminds me of paradise, and I want to retreat to it.

3.       Why is Forgetting Jane set in Wisconsin? I lived in Wisconsin for about a year when I was ten, which drew me to have this story in that state. And all the elements in this story melds together making it a perfect fit.  I knew from the start of Forgetting Jane, it had to be Wisconsin.

4.      You’re a wife and a mother and also have another career outside of writing. How do you balance writing and life? Do you have a daily schedule for writing or do you just fit it into the corners of your time? Actually, I quit the beauty industry and turn my focus onto my family, my writing and myself. It was very stressful and it was affecting my health and connection with my family. I’m a lucky one who has tremendous support from my husband and kids. They encourages me to write and have me time.

Do you listen to music as you work and if so, what was in your playlist for this book? I don’t listen to music when I write. For me, it’s too distracting. But when I’m character building, I do. Depending on the character, I listen to anything from AC/DC to country. I also a big fan of club music, and get a little exercise in when I’m standing by my tall kitchen table typing away my characters…with the blinds wide open!

Picnic by the Lake of Time...out next week!



I have been playing around with a time travel idea for a while, and this novelette is going to be my first in the series. Hare is the opening:

The fifties were not my first choice as a time to seek refuge and 1955 was not my first choice of year, but as I did my research and exercised my due diligence, it became obvious that 1955 was probably the best place to lie low. For one thing, though I needed to hide somewhen fairly low-tech, I didn’t want to go so far into the past that I had to grow my own food and build my own house.
I also needed to pick a year where I could blend in without too much explanation.
The fifties were perfect for that. The decade had telephones and television and indoor plumbing and air conditioning but it didn’t have facial recognition software or stoplight cameras or laws requiring you to prove your citizenship when looking for a job. You might get asked to show your social security card, but it was easy enough to forge one of those with a totally meaningless SSN because in the days before computer databases, what were they going to do, make a long-distance call to another state to check a birth certificate?