The weekend of Free Books!

Like sci fi? Dystopian? Fantasy? Sci Fi and Fantasy Romance?  Then you're in luck. there's a 90-book giveaway going on this weekend over at Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Promotions. Click here and start downloading.

Free!!!Whipping Boy by Katherine Tomlinson

I'm getting ready to release the sequel to my short mystery novel Whipping Boy and thought I might whip up some interest by giving the digital version of the first book away free. You can find it on Amazon here.

Interview with Amelia Mangan

Amelia Mangan is a writer originally from London, currently living in Sydney, Australia. Her writing is featured in many anthologies, including Attic Toys (ed. Jeremy C. Shipp); Blood Type (ed. Robert S. Wilson); Worms, After The Fall, X7 and No Monsters Allowed (ed. Alex Davis); The Bestiarum Vocabulum (ed. Dean M. Drinkel); Carnival of the Damned (ed. Henry Snider); and Mother Goose is Dead (eds. Michele Acker & Kirk Dougal). Her short story, "Blue Highway," won Yen Magazine's first annual short story competition and was featured in its 65th issue. She can be found on Twitter (@AmeliaMangan) and Facebook.

You’re originally from London. What brought you to Sydney and how long have you been there?

My dad went to prison for fraud when I was seven, so my mum and I came over here to stay with my grandmother. I've lived here ever since (in Australia, not with my grandmother), so that makes twenty-six years come August.

You’ve published a number of short stories, was it hard for you to transition to longer work like Release?

Yeah, longer work's tougher, no question. First drafts of short stories usually take me about ten days to complete, which means it's out of my system quicker and I can move on sooner. The thing about longform work is that you really need to be sure you like these characters and this world enough to soldier on with them for months, maybe years at a time, and even if you do like them enough to do that, there's gonna be points where you get thoroughly sick of them and begin to cast longing glances at your notebook full of ideas for other novels. But if the idea is genuinely good - and bad ones will reveal themselves relatively quickly; they're unsustainable and blow over like cardboard - then it's worth pursuing to the end.

Was Release your first novel? How long did it take to write?

It's not the first novel I attempted, but it's the first I ever finished. I'm a little embarrassed to say it took eight years, mainly because I was at university and then did the postgrad thing and, basically, life and physical exhaustion got in the way for a bit. At one point I came dangerously close to just destroying the file and salting the earth behind it, but reason (I won't say sanity) prevailed.

Do you have a “process” for writing? A certain number of pages a day? Or words a day? Do you write on your birthday and holidays? Take weekends off?

I try to do at least five hundred words a day, but if I don't meet that, I don't sweat it (unless I'm on a deadline, of course). My feeling is that, even if you only get one sentence down in a day, you're a sentence ahead of where you were the day before. And I hate that whole "REAL WRITERS WRITE EVERY SINGLE DAY OF THEIR LIVES NO EXCUSES I DON'T CARE IF YOUR WHOLE FAMILY DIED" thing that's become prevalent in writing communities; I see how it can be useful to some who find it difficult to actually sit down and do the work, but too often I see it used as a stick for writers to beat themselves with when they fail to meet that self-imposed standard. And writers don't need any more excuses to hate themselves.

Do you listen to music when you’re writing? What’s most often on your playlist?

Not while I'm writing - I need silence for that - but adjacent to writing, absolutely. Everything I've ever written has a playlist; a few of the ones on Release's (Irma Thomas' "Ruler of My Heart", Wanda Jackson's "Funnel of Love", the folk song "In The Pines", Patsy Cline's "Walking After Midnight") made it into the text. The style and tone of the music on each playlist varies according to the style and tone of, and emotional state I want to evoke with, each individual story, but PJ Harvey seems to show up on all of them eventually - which, seeing as how she's my favorite musician, is not entirely surprising.

Character interview: Yalira of Bride of the Midnight King

Portrait of Yalira by Joanne Renaud

As part of the March Mayhem promotion, artist/rwiter Kat Laurange is hosting a "character interview" with Yalira, the heroine of Bride of the Midnight King. It's a lot of fun to answer questions in the voice of a character you've created, and I hope readers will enjoy it. You can see the interview on Kat's blog here.

Interview with Lynne Connolly

  From now until the end of the month, enter the March Mayhem contest sponsored by Joanne Renaud, Kat Laurange, Donna Thorland, Lynne Connelly and Kat Parrish. Details and entry form here.

Lynne Connolly writes historical romance, paranormal romance and contemporary romance. She loves the conflicts and complications that come about if someone lives their life to the full.
She has her own blog, but she also blogs for The Good, The Bad and The Unread, the UK Regency/Georgian writers' blog and The Raven Happy Hour.

She lives in the UK with her family and her mews, a cat called Jack. She also enjoys making and decorating dolls' houses. She visits the US at least once a year, attends conferences and has a great time.

Did you read historical novels as a child? If so, do you remember any favorites?

        Yes, I loved them! I loved, and still do, Elizabeth Goudge’s “The Dean’s Watch.” All her historicals are marvellous, but that one especially. I devoured all the books by Georgette Heyer, Norah Lofts, Jean Plaidy, Phillip Lindsay and others. Everything I could get my hands on.

You’ve said you love all eras of history—particularly Tudor and Georgian England. If you could live during any era in any place, where would it be, and what is it about that time/place that attracts you?

1754 London. I’m in love with that era. Really, it’s pure love. The liveliness of the people, the developments in the law and policing, the beautiful houses, the sumptuous clothes, the fact that men still wore swords every day, and weren’t afraid of their feminine sides, the literature - the 18^th century was bursting with life.

Interview with Donna Thorland

 From now until the end of the month, enter the March Mayhem contest sponsored by Joanne Renaud, Kat Laurange, Donna Thorland, Lynne Connelly and Kat Parrish. Details and entry form here.

Author Donna Thorland earned an MFA in film production from the USC School of Cinematic Arts, has been a Disney/ABC Television Writing Fellow and a WGA Writer's Access Project Honoree, and has written for the TV shows Cupid and Tron: Uprising. The director of several award-winning short films, her most recent project aired on WNET Channel 13. Her fiction has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. Her Revolutionary War novels are published by Penguin NAL and she writers urban fantasy for Pocket under the name D.L. McDermott. Donna is married with two cats and splits her time between Salem and Los Angeles.

Her latest novel, the Dutch Girl, is available here and in bookstores natiowide. It is part of her "Renegades of the American Revolution" series of historical fiction.

You have a degree in classics and art history. Why the American Revolutionary period rather than ancient Greece or Rome?

I wanted to write swashbucklers and it seemed to me that the American Revolution was crying out for stories like that, particularly with a female protagonist.

If you could live during any era in any place, where would it be, and what is it about that time/place that attracts you?

Kitchen Magic and Paranormal Fiction

In The Truth Cookie by Fiona Dunbar., the young heroine falls heir to a very unusual recipe book and hijinks ensue. I write a lot of food-related articles and have written and ghost-written a number of cookbooks in my career. And I have always thought there was something magical about the alchemy that occurs when you put ingredients together in a certain order. (And as any baker knows, if you get certain ingredients out of order, instead of something delicious, you're often left with a mess.)
here's a delightful middle grade book called

Kitchen Witchery. I haven't really seen any paranormals that feature heroines whose power is domestic. there's Annette Blair's "Accidental Witch" trilogy that begins with The Kitchen Witch. And there's ... not much else. At least that I can find. Even GoodReads, which has lists for EVERYTHING wasn't much help on this one. I find myself intrigued by the possibility of writing a paranormal story where the witch's magic is based in herbcraft and plants and ingredients that go into everyday food. What if you had a (literal) magician in the kitchen of your restaurant? What if you ran a catering company and your food could literally work miracles? What if you were the "lunch lady" at a school where kids were committing suicide and you could help them? What if you volunteered at Meals on Wheels and your bag lunches and hot entrees could cure?  And of course there's all kinds of malevolent magic that can be worked through food. There was a reason rulers used to employ food tasters!
Yet another thought to add to the potential plot file.