RITA ® Award-Winning Author of Fantasy Romance
//
Release day for Season of Seduction and Five Golden Rings is tomorrow!
To celebrate, the five of us with stories in the anthology and sponsoring a chat and giveaway. Whee! Our prizes are copies of the anthology (OF COURSE), plus gift cards to Wolferman’s Gourmet Desserts – order online and they SEND YOU NOMS. It’s brilliant.
You can enter via the Rafflecopter below. Or just stop by the chat and say hi!
//
The Romance Reviews is having their Year-End Splash party and my Q&A is featured today! Head on over for a chance to win a copy of Five Golden Rings!
//
First off, I have a short story out in the world! Pearl marked the beginning of my attempts at speculative fiction. It was published in Aeon magazine, back in Spring 2008. My editor at Aeon, Bridget McKenna, is starting her own business doing ebook covers, formatting and design. She contacted me and offered to produce Pearl, to build her portfolio. I think she did a great job! So here it is, one of my early efforts, for just 99 cents at Amazon and B&N. It’s a sci fi story, with a lot of sexual tension, but not really a romance. Fair warning!
A bit of an addendum, Bridget wrote up her side of the story, too, which is really interesting.
Then, since today is the second Monday in the Rogue’s Pawn giveaway…
the winner is….
Amy Remus!
Yay Amy! I will sign and send a PAPER COPY of Rogue’s Pawn for you! If anyone else wants to try for one of the remaining three copies, the rules are here. Join in the fun and obtain a RARE hard copy of this book!
//
At last! The cover for Rogue’s Possession!
Release day is October 7, but you can preorder it at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
And today is the first drawing for the entries for a print copy of Rogue’s Pawn! Two entries are here. And here are two more:
and
And the winner, via Random.org is…
Carien!
(Who totally stacked the deck with three entries.) Amy, yours moves on to the drawing next week! For anyone else who wants to play, there are four hard copies of Rogue’s Pawn left! Rules are here.
//
So far there are two entries in the Rogue’s Pawn Giveaway, and this is my favorite. Of course, the other is only slightly less brilliant:
You’ll note that both of these are from Carien at Pearls Cast Before a McPig, so she stands to win Monday’s Cover Reveal drawing unless the rest of you plan to get busy this weekend! I know you all are thinking about it, cuz you’ve told me so. Make those fun ideas into reality! I totally want to see the Rogue Prawn interpretations.
Tomorrow I’ll be featured on the Dear Author blog for their August Extravaganza. Nice way to say goodbye to August. ~waves nostagically~ Stop by if you can!
Also, if you’re looking for a great local writers and readers conference this fall, check out Fiction Writing in the Digital Age, taking place in Las Vegas this October. Among others, my Kensington editor, Peter Senftleben, and my agent, Pam van Hylckama Vlieg, will be there. I’ll be giving what should be a very fun cross-genre workshop:
More than Wham, Bam, Thank-You M’am – Wooing the Female Reader
Over and over, statistics show that more women are reading fiction than men, particularly on e-Readers. With the overwhelming success of works like Fifty Shades of Grey and Twilight, it bears examining just what female readers are looking for – and what they’re buying. This workshop will examine how romance can be used to both attract readers and illuminate characterization. Sexual attraction can both entice and ratchet up the overall tension of any plot. Jeffe Kennedy, award-winning author of numerous series of erotic romance and fantasy, will walk participants through examples from literature and movies, to illustrate what women really want from a story.
Small conferences like this are great for meeting the industry folks in a more informal way. And besides, Vegas Baby! You’ll also see on the schedule that there are a couple of signings, so if you’re in the area, stop by and say hello!
//
What’s this?
Oh yes. You know.
Or, at least, the small community of rabidly passionate Rogue’s Pawn fans (you know who you are) are doing little chair dances right now.
That’s right. I haz hard copies. And I’m giving them away.
So, here’s the deal. I only have these five. These are the ones that Carina printed for the final judges in case the book finaled in the RITA awards. Since it didn’t, Carina sent these to me. There were also five books that went out to the first round judges, so they’re out there swimming in the world (or have gone to the big recycling bin in the sky). Otherwise, these are all there is for now. Do you know what that means? YES!
*Collector’s Item*
Now, because these were printed for the contest, they’re not high quality. They’re mass-market paperback sized and have all the same content as the digital book, but it doesn’t look or feel like a standard mmpb. Fair warning.
That said, I want you guys to have them, so you have something physical to hug and cuddle.
Yes, I know how you people are.
In celebration of the sequel, Rogue’s Possession, launching on Monday, October 7 and the cover reveal happening this coming Monday, September 2, I’m sponsoring a giveaway scavenger hunt.
Okay, so, the question of the moment is:
What do you have to do to get your paws on one of these for your very own collection?
Show your love. I want pictures. Send me a photo of Rogue in the wild, with you or without you. It can be just his name on a piece of paper or a lovely man with the sign around his neck. Or be creative – find your own Rogue! You can also print out one of the two covers and take your picture with that. Or show me what you think Rogue’s “possession” might be.
Then post the picture – Twitter, Facebook, your blog, in the comments here – anywhere at all and be sure to tag me. If I don’t comment or reply, be sure to ping me so I’ll see it. Use the hashtag #ILoveRogue.
Each Monday, I’ll draw a winner, on:
9/2
9/9
9/16
9/23
9/30
For every picture you send me, you get another entry “ticket.” Anyone who doesn’t win in the previous week will get added to the next week’s drawing. International is fine – I’ll pay the pound of flesh to ship this to you.
On release day, 10/7, we’ll do something super-special. More than just copies of Rogue’s Possession, though we can do that, too. In fact, let me know what you want and we’ll make it happen!
I’m so excited about this sequel finally coming out, and hearing you all making excited noises, too, just heightens the fun!
Now, hie thee out there and post some pictures!
//
I’m over at Here Be Magic today and all weekend, talking about disabled heroines (can you think of any?) and doing a Happy Birthday to Me Giveaway! So hie on over, should you be so inclined!
//
Okay, here are the books available for the giveaway! (The three stacks of horizontal ones.) You should be able to click on the pic to enlarge, if you can’t read it here. If you still can’t read the author names and book titles, ping me and I’ll tell you. The winners from yesterday’s author photo contest – and thanks so much to everyone who helped make such a tough decision! – selected via random number generator are:
Angela E. Taylor
Misty Evans
Keena Kincaid
Yay! Each of you gets to pick a book and I’ll mail it to you! If any of these three pass, I’ll move on to the next random number. For the rest of you, there are 17 books there and I’ll be doing giveaways of them over the next several weeks until they’re all gone. First come, first served.
In fact, I’ll select one commenter on today’s blog to win the book of their choice!
So, we watched The Host last night. This is the movie made from Stephenie Meyer’s book of the same name, totally apart from her Twilight series. I haven’t read the book, though I heard many people liked it, some more than Twilight. It was a good story – about aliens that are sort of parasitic, that implant themselves into human bodies and take over their consciousness. In many cases the resident human spirit dies. In others, they’re shoved so far down that they can’t communicate. In one case, with a Louisiana bayou girl named Melanie, she can communicate with the alien, the Wanderer – or Wanda as they come to call her – and eventually influence her choices.
I don’t think the rest is spoilery, but stop reading if you don’t want to know what comes next.
Melanie/Wanda flees to the hiding place of Melanie’s small resistance group. Melanie’s lover is there. There’s interesting conflict because he believes Melanie’s spirit is dead and Wanda is just tricking them. Eventually he comes to see that Melanie really is still in there and Wanda herself falls in love with another guy.
The story pivots on this idea – that Wanda falls in love with Earth, with humans and with this particular man. The outcome of the story hinges on it.
But I’m not sure it’s convincing.
Knowing how well Meyer creates a completely believable love-affair between wildly different people/beings, without the useful assistance of sexual interaction, I suspect the book pulled this off. I’m tempted to read, just to see. If anyone here has read it, I’d be interested to know. The movie didn’t convince me, however.
I’m wondering if this isn’t why so many romantic movies don’t work. For all that writers are frequently chastised that a picture is worth a thousand words and that movies can convey so much more with one sweep of the lens, movies fall down on portraying the subtler emotions. Especially love.
Falling in love is such an internal change, complex and difficult to chart. The best romance novelists manage to do this without us realizing it. We fall in love right along with the characters, until it’s so obvious to us that they belong together that we can’t see it any other way.
I think A Room with a View managed to do this – where we knew they loved each other before the characters did. I’m not sure many other movies do.
Thoughts?
//
The lovely Amy Remus is hosting a giveaway for Platinum over on her review blog today. Stop by and say hi!
//
Did you know that today is Marco Polo Day??
Oh, come on. Yes, you did. You celebrate every year, don’t you?
So, fellow author Voirey Linger came up with a little game for today. Here’s the repost from her site:
January 9, 1324, Marco Polo slipped the bonds of this world and drifted into history. He explored Asia, established trade routes with China, and launched a summer game loved by millions.
To celebrate his life and his game, we are launching Marco Polo day on Twitter. The rules are simple. Follow the players listed below from your Twitter account. When one of them yells MARCO you hit reply and @ them with POLO. First to respond will win an ebook. If you’re not following, you can’t win.
You can see a list of participating authors here.
As for me, three times today I will yell out MARCO! on Twitter. First to reply with POLO gets a digital copy of any of my books – including PLATINUM, which isn’t on sale until February 25.
Sounds fun, yes?
Let’s Play!