NEWS: Escort to Insanity is Contracted!

Sometime last winter, around November time, my editor approached me with a propostion.

“Hey,” she said, “we’re thinking of making a winter anthology for December 2012. We want you to be the headliner. You interested?”

“Sure,” I said. Coz I was.
So then I had a problem. I’d agreed to provide a story. But I had no story.

Last time they asked me for an antho submission, I gave them a Holloway Pack short.

I couldn’t do that this time.

Because, due to the fact the anthology will be released the same day that Blue Moon launches, I have no Holloway Pack happenings that will fit into that slot time-wise.

About that moment, when realisation sank in, my head kinda went ‘Eeeeeeeeeeek!’

Because it meant I had to write a new story. One at fairly short notice. One with an unfamiliar plotline. One set in a ‘world’ I’d had no time to get to understand. One with new characters I knew absolutely nothing about.

But I panicked not. Okay, not much.

I simply took a singular idea that popped into my head … wrote down around 300 words to solidify that said idea would be where the story would start … and kept going back to it and playing around with the folks like they were Barbie and Ken on a bender … and voila …

ESCORT TO INSANITY was born.

It’s different to Holloway Pack. Different cast. Different tone. Different (dare I say it?) supes.

And I just recently signed a contract for it.

So it’s official.

I’m heading up a winter anthology.

MAKE BELIEVE is coming December 2012.

You can find out about the other contributing authors at: Jennifer M. Eaton | Jenny Keller Ford | Terri Rochenski | Kelly Said | Lynda Young

Exciting, no?

All’s Quiet on the Western Front …

I’ve been so seriously busy of late, there barely seems enough hours in the day or days in the week or … you get the picture.

Here’s a glimpse at what I’ve been working on either over the last x amount or weeks or as an ongoing project:

I recently finished editing a full novel-length manuscript for a writer buddy. It wasn’t a chore. It never is if you love the writing. But editing a ms of this length takes time and dedication even if the job’s pleasurable.

I’ve been editing a story of my own–one I’ll get to tell you more about on Wednesday (so look out for a post on that), as well as more sharing I’ve got planned for the 21st.

I’ve been preparing for an upcoming announcement about Darkness & Light—one that will go up on my blog next Monday (14^th).

My Eternal Tour has needed organising in time for July. And with blog stops getting scheduled comes interviews to answer and guest posts to write and emails to stay on top of …

And around all of that, as well as knocking out plots/ideas/scenes for YA’s and Holloway Pack #4 and #5 AND #6, I’ve been working on my next main project: Resonance: Holloway Pack #2.5.

This one totally needs my focus as it will tie up a LOT of loose ends for readers as well as pave the way into Caged: Holloway Pack #3.

It’s also the next manuscript I need to submit to my editor and so I’m pretty eager right now to get this one wrapped up because there are a lot of discussions going on with J.Taylor Publishing about how best to get this one into the hands of the readers. I’m going to keep the ideas discussed so far supersekrit until I know for sure what the marketing plans are, but this one is definitely taking up a lot of my brain space right now.

So, all that being said, forgive me for any moments of quiet. Just know it probably means I’m working hard at trying to sort out the upcoming Holloway Pack stories.

Anyhoo, what have you all been up to lately?

FREEVIEW FRIDAY {ETERNAL}! #FVF

Hey all, and happy Friday. Thank you for stopping by. Today, I’ll be sharing another mini-excerpt from my PNR novella Eternal,  due out in a little over 8 weeks.

Following on from LAST WEEK‘s, still in the forest, Jem has been caught up by pack mate Giles … here’s your taste of Eternal (Giles speaks first):

“The last time Sean found trouble, she arrived in a package of blonde hair and blue eyes.”

“How amusing you are.” I kicked back against his legs, wriggling like a snake to be free. “But this is no laughing matter.”

His arms tightened until he had me pinned, and his breath hit my ear. “I am sure this would be enjoyable if I were not the only one of us naked.”

The pummels I had been on the verge of administering diminished to only the twitch of my fingers as the rest of my body stilled.

His chuckle rumbled against my spine. “I imagined that might work.

Hehehe. Poor Jem. Or maybe you disagree?

I hope you enjoyed this weeks snippet. See you next week for another round of FVF

As I have said before, any and all are welcome to join me in this weekly shenanigan. HOWEVER, if you do so, I URGE you to keep the shared snippets short and sweet. Mine will be a maximum of TEN (10) sentences. To help identification of these posts, I shall be hastagging them (for Twitter purposes) as #FVF. Feel free to knick said hashtag for your own Freeview Friday posts.

Eternal ARC Winner(s) announced …

After almost forgetting to make the draw O_O because I totally forgot the giveaway had ended O_o I finally got around to doing it yesterday. ^_^

So …

CONGRATULATIONS

to

Emma W.

Emma should have been awarded an Eternal postcard to accompany the ARC, but as Emma already has an Eternal postcard (won in a previous giveaway), she kindly asked me to make a second draw for that prize to be allocated elsewhere (thank you, Emma, for that–very generous of you)

So I did.

And Darlene of Darlene’s Book Nook won the signed Eternal postcard.

Congratulations to her.

Here’s a screen shot of the announcement on the rafflecopter form (because I like to provide proof if poss):

HUGE thanks to every who participated. Don’t forget to keep your eyes peeled for upcoming giveaways in the near future.

The P.U.R.E. Blog Tour Stop: And the winner is …

The winning entry has been drawn and contact has been made with the winner

So I’m now pleased to bid

CONGRATULATIONS!

to

Dawn

(comment #11)

Your ‘The P.U.R.E.’ goodies will be mailed to you direct from the author!

A HUGE thanks to all those who participated. Please check back in the future as there will definitely be more giveaways happening throughout the year.

MONDAY MUSINGS: Me and YA! O_O {sneaky peek}

So … I wrote a post a little while back about pseudonyms and whatnot when crossing over from adult into YA.

At the time, I was somewhat shocked that I’d even thought up an idea for a YA novel. Any other ideas I’ve ever had have been adult pnr/uf, and the notion of writing something totally tame (though my stuff is a seriously far throw from erotic) had always seemed nigh on impossible.

But the more I thought about it, the more I believed it could be doable.

And so the basics of a plot for me to start on my first YA novel later this year were born.

I thought that was it. For now. Thought I’d just sit back, work on my current Holloway Pack stuff, give the YA idea time to marinade into something with a fuller flavour.

Yeah, right!

Early hours of Wednesday morning last week, I jerked awake from a dream. In my head, the dream only lasted around 60 seconds. Yet, the memory of the dream has stayed with me every hour since.

So I headed into my thought process of ‘what if ….’

And yeah, you’ve guessed it, before I knew what I was doing, I’d formulated the basics of a plot for ANOTHER YA!

So now I’m DOUBLY in shock.

Because I now believe, without a doubt, that at least one of these YA ideas will get written later this year.

Wanna sneaky glimpse at one of ‘em?

Okay then, I’ll share. But don’t look too closely. This is what my first draft openers look like pre-editing, pre-thinking, pre … well, anything.

Oh, and it most certainly doesn’t have a title yet. Here you go:

Too late, too late, too late.

The steering wheel vibrated like crazy beneath my palms. The screech of the tyres held the tone of a demented violin.

I barely noticed either—not with my vision tunnelled and wholly consumed by the wide eyes staring back at me through the windscreen.

The grey haired lady with her flowing skirt and white cotton blouse and too-frail arms had stepped out into the road in front of my Clio and in a handful of seconds she’d be splattered flat.

Screech.

I inched closer.

Each whump of my heart matched each freezeframed moment and each freezeframed moment took me a fraction nearer.

Her mouth widened.

Any second, her scream would be competing with the tyres, a duet of crescendoed wails of doom.

Screech.

Nearer still.

Screech.

Close enough to see the blackness of her expanded pupils.

Screech.

The busted capillaries across her cheeks stood out like a road map to her final destination.

Screech.

I winced back in my seat, braced my arms for the impact, yelled out my, “Nooooooo!”

Whoosh!

“Indie?”

My body shook side to side.

I blinked.

“Damn, Indie, that was the longest one I’ve seen you have yet.”

Another blink brought bright blue eyes into focus beneath a tousled mop of hair the colour of roasted chestnuts, all wrapped up with a nice strong jawline of a bow. “Logan?”

Luggy, I thought. My voice sounded luggy.

It always did whenever I came out of one of my episodes. Episodes my friends all took to be epileptic seizures. Because that was that I’d made them believe.

Mostly because admitting to the truth would land me in a nuthouse. How could I explain something I didn’t understand myself?

Well, whatcha thunk?

SHOWERS OF BOOKS GIVEAWAY HOP: And the winner is …

THANKS HEAPS TO EVERYONE WHO PARTICIPATED IN THE SHOWERS OF BOOKS GIVEAWAY HOP. 

THE DRAW HAS BEEN MADE, THE WINNER CONTACTED, SO I’M NOW HAPPY TO ANNOUNCE THAT THE WINNER IS:

BRIDGET H.

MASSIVE CONGRATS TO BRIDGET.

DON’T FORGET TO CHECK BACK FOR MORE GIVEAWAYS IN THE FUTURE!

IN THE MEANTIME CHECK OUT:

CLAIRE GILLIAN THE P.U.R.E. GIVEAWAY

&

ETERNAL ARC GIVEAWAY

CHEERS!

FREEVIEW FRIDAY {ETERNAL}! #FVF

Hey all, and happy Friday. You may have noticed I took a break last week. Well, that’s because I wanted to take pause to prepare some new posts for you all. After all, Eternal is due out in less than 10 weeks, so I figured it about time I shared the goods. So starting today, right through until Eternal releases, you’ll get a few sneaky peeks at what’s happening in my soon-to-be-released Holloway Pack Prequel novella.

And to make it a little easier for you, I’ll even link up to the opening 500 words so you can see where you’re coming in from for the showcased snippet (Simply click where it’s highlighted).

And now you know where you are, here you go–written from Jem’s POV–your taste of Eternal; right after Sean has raced off to deal with a problem in the forest and told Jem to go home:

I fumbled on my step into the cotton underwear, ripping at the shoulder straps in my haste to pull them up. With a glance over my shoulder, I spied Giles’s passage, the tumbling strands of his brown hair buoyant with each of his movements.

“Jem!” Suspicion laced Giles’s call.

I pushed one foot after the other into my gown and drew the fabric to my waist.

“Jem!” He shoved heavily-laden branches from his path, ducking and weaving, picking up speed.

I thrust my arms into the sleeves, fed in my shoulders, and reached behind for the woven fastenings.

“Do not do what I think you are about to!”

Though I doubted my secured bow would last more than a handful of steps, I grasped my skirts and bounded into a sprint to the east.

Hmmm, I suppose anyone could have guessed Jem wouldn’t necessarily obey.

I hope you enjoyed this weeks snippet. See you next week for another round of FVF

As I have said before, any and all are welcome to join me in this weekly shenanigan. HOWEVER, if you do so, I URGE you to keep the shared snippets short and sweet. Mine will be a maximum of TEN (10) sentences. To help identification of these posts, I shall be hastagging them (for Twitter purposes) as #FVF. Feel free to knick said hashtag for your own Freeview Friday posts.

WHO WANTS TO WIN AN ARC OF ETERNAL?

I’m MEGA excited to share this giveaway with you all! For the first time EVER I’ve been invited by my publisher to host a giveaway of an ARC of one of my books so I’m muchero happy.

Yep, I have ONE ARC** of my soon to be released novella, Eternal. A Holloway Pack Prequel. Sequel to Instinct. Not due out for over 2 months. Here’s what I’m talking ’bout:

An unmarried woman living in a house of men breeds hearsay and lore. If only the villagers knew the truth.

It’s not Jem Stonehouse’s marital status that brings unwanted strangers to town. Rather, it’s that she is the only female werewolf in existence — a prize to any pack.

Sean Holloway, the love of Jem’s life, has gone to great lengths to protect her. As a new attack becomes imminent, Sean realizes he must take greater measures with Jem’s safety or risk losing her forever.

His first task must be to marry her, but a force greater than the largest werewolf stands in his way.

Her mother.

RELEASE DATE: July 2nd 2012

So do YOU fancy it? Here’s all you have to do:

1) Leave a blog comment below stating why you think you should win.

2) Then take note of your comment number and hop on over to this Rafflecopter Form to validate your entry, where you can find out other ways to enter.

Off you go, go, go, goooooooooooo!

Good luck!

**Please note, the ARC is in E-format.

The P.U.R.E. Blog Tour Stop! Guest post from Claire Gillian + #Giveaway!

Roll up, roll up, because today I’m allowing the delectable Claire Gillian to take over my blog to help promote her recently released romantic mystery The P.U.R.E. 

And if you haven’t yet heard of this debut author, here’s a little more about her awesome book.

No one ever said Gayle Lindley’s first job would be a killer.

Fresh out of college, Gayle’s career path should follow the yellow brick road straight to the top. Thanks to a menial errand gone wrong, a wayward tongue, and a randy supervisor who won’t take ‘no’ for an answer, Gayle’s stuck in corporate hell.

Discovering a company secret only turns up the heat.

The one part of her life not going down in flames is her friendship with the gorgeous but intensely private, Jon Cripps. Jon would make the perfect consolation prize for Gayle’s pity party if dating a co-worker wasn’t career suicide. Then again, with all Gayle has been through, maybe falling in love is the lucky break she needs.

Hitting the cool sheets with Jon soothes her mind and body, but it also enrages whoever’s behind the smokescreen she’s uncovered at work. Someone is willing to kill to protect their secrets, and Gayle and Jon are the targets.

With both her heart and livelihood at stake, Gayle’s early career-limiting moves could turn into life-terminating ones.

I happened to be one of the lucky ones who nabbed an early ARC of this one. It’s a great, fun read with a HOT guy to boot. You can check out my review HERE! Or to add it to your Goodreads pile, simply click on the cover image.

And onward with the show. Ms Gillian, it’s over to you!

Confessions of a Near P.U.R.E.

When I started my career in public accounting, I had next to no idea what to expect. I strutted my 3.7 GPA and Phi Beta Kappa key, wooing four of the best public accounting firms into asking for my hand in employment—three in Atlanta and one in Dallas. Pampered and spoiled, of course I chose the biggest diamond—the one offering the largest salary. At the time, that was in Dallas, Texas, thanks to the oil and gas boom.

I signed and the wooing ended. The high mucky-muck partners no longer called to shoot the breeze and casually inquire if I’d made my employment decision yet.

So, I moved to Dallas, a virtually unknown city, all by myself, and joined the scores of other raw recruits. We eyed each other competitively. Who would weather the longest and seize the brass ring of a corner office and a partnership in the firm? Who would throw up their hands in the early stages? Who would be managed up or out? And along that line of thinking, who would be the PUREs—the previously undetected recruiting errors—that made us wonder, “Who hired that guy?”

Most new hires started in the summer, when business was slow and billable hours a coveted commodity. If you were unassigned to an audit, you were a gopher. You proofread, fetched lunches for partners and meetings, ran forgotten paper files out to job sites so the billable staff remained billable. You made copies and collated for the administrative assistants who were far busier than you. You waited, shifting from foot to foot, as a manager edited a time sensitive memo so you could then run three blocks in high heels, in the sweltering Dallas heat, with your suit jacket on, to deliver the document to the typing pool to tweak. When they finished, you ran the reverse route to deliver the next draft. Repeat as often as needed or until the last typist went home for the day.

Such was the pre-email and fax era, so someone had to do it. Why pay a courier when you had salaried labor sitting around idle? Management didn’t care if we got our suits and crisp white shirts and blouses dirty or shredded our pantyhose or snapped off the heels of our shoes. We were there to work and to look professional at all times—corporate arm candy. All those egos stoked to maximum blaze during the recruiting courtship were quickly doused into soggy, smoky memories.

But if you didn’t keep your ego in check, you could find yourself in PURE territory.

I remember dancing on the edge of PURE-dom when one audit had concluded but my assignment to its supervisor had not. My supervisor, running multiple jobs at once, decided he’d give me grunt work to do for his other job, since possession was nine-tenths of the law where inexperienced staff were concerned. I bristled at first, because a supervisor was only one or two notches above me on the hierarchy, but did as I was told.

The tasks kept coming, doled out one at a time, and at varying intervals. Once he asked me to fetch what I thought was a personal item from his car. As I took his keys, I said, “Shall I wash it for you too, boss, while I’s a-there?”

He said nothing, but fixed me with a cold stare before turning back to his work. I never worked on one of his jobs ever again. I didn’t work for anyone else for a while either. Uh-oh. I’d left an ember of pride still smoldering. Once I smothered it though, I did fine.

Here’s the irony and epiphany of those early work experiences. When I wrote The P.U.R.E., I gave the heroine, Gayle, many of the same feelings and experiences I’d had in my new hire days. I drew from what I knew. Those elements were indisputably authentic, and I was proud enough of my story to submit it to the Daphne du Maurier contest (romantic suspense).

While one judge gave me high marks (thank you!), one gave me much lower marks, commenting at how unrealistic the heroine’s work situation was. “Nobody sends a CPA out to pick up lunches!” she wrote (paraphrased).

Um, yeah they did and do, thus illustrating with a sting that truth sometimes really is stranger than fiction.

I am grateful for those humbling experiences, however. They taught me very early that you’re never too smart, too pretty, too athletic or too talented to be above paying your dues, whether it’s for your career in business, modeling, pro golf or in writing. Pride is all well and good, but it can be like a battering ram, whereas humility unlocks and props open the door. Truly the best piece of universal wisdom acquired from my PURE  salad-days.

Claire Gillian is a number-crunching executive by profession, an after hours writer by passion, and a darkly romantic curmudgeon. Published in short stories and anthologies, The P.U.R.E marks Claire’s official, and debut, transition to the publication of her work in novel form.

While Claire’s writing spans all ages and subject matters, she’s happiest penning romance drenched in humor with a dash of intrigue and loads of spice.

Claire lives in the boggy Pacific NW with her husband and two teen-aged sons.

Huge thanks to Claire for a great post.

Now on to the

GIVEAWAY!

Yay!

Claire is generously offering a muchero coolio prize package to one lucky commenter of a

The P.U.R.E. mug:

AND a couple of signed bookmarks (front and back images shown).

To be in with a chance of entering, simply leave a comment by midnight this Sunday (April 29nd 2012). And if you fancy keeping up with what Claire gets up to, she can be found at:

Website  |  Facebook  |  Twitter | Goodreads

Are YOU looking forward to The P.U.R.E.?