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Friday 31 January 2014

SPECIAL ATTRACTION by M.L. Ryan Blog Tour & Giveaway


10 People Who Shouldn’t Read Special Attraction:
1. Anyone who doesn’t understand the awesomeness of puppy breath.

2. Anyone who blushes at the word “darn”.

3. My mother.

4. Your mother.

5. Anyone who believes sex should only occur only between two married adults in the privacy of their barricaded bedroom, with all the lights off.

6. Anyone who thinks the moon walks were a hoax.

7. Anyone who believes Darwin was just kidding.

8. Anyone who thinks women should be seen and not heard.

9. Anyone who thinks white should never be worn after Labor Day.

10. Anyone with a Justin Bieber poster over their bed.


Special Attraction by M.L. Ryan
Book 3 of the Coursodon Dimension series
Genre: Adult Paranormal Romance (18+)

About Special Attraction:
The weirdness continues….

Thanks to a magical transplant from an inter-dimensional enforcer, Hailey Parrish can transform into a hawk. When someone begins dismembering hikers along the Appalachian Trail, the enforcers make use of her feathery talents to pursue the killer. Unfortunately, like most things in Hailey’s life, there is nothing ordinary about the assignment. Their target turns out to be maddeningly elusive, they rescue a stray dog that makes a sewage treatment plant seem pleasantly fragrant, and stopping the murders turns out to be the least of their worries.

Special Attraction, the third book in the Coursodon Dimension series, combines paranormal romance, urban fantasy, a bit of science fiction and a healthy dose of quirky humor.
Source: Info in the About Special Attraction was from the press kit from the publicity team.

Buy Link(s):




About M.L. Ryan:
M.L. Ryan is a professional woman - which is not to say that she gave up her amateur status, but rather that she is over-educated with a job that reflects her one-time reluctance to leave school and get "real" work – and she spends a lot of time in that profession reading highly technical material.

She has many stories rolling around in her head, and she finally decided to write some of them. She prefers literature that isn’t saddled with excruciating symbolism, ponderous dialogue or worldly implications. She also doesn’t like plots so reliant on love at first sight that it makes her feel like her head might implode.

She lives in Tucson, Arizona with her husband and teenage son, four cats, two dogs and an adopted desert tortoise.



$25 Giftcard


Thursday 30 January 2014

SUN & MOON by Lee Strauss & Giveaway


Where did the idea for The Minstrel Series come from?
My husband and I get all of our best life ideas sitting in the hot-tub. We dub them our hot-tub talks and that fact that we live part-time in Germany each year is a result of one of those talks.

It’s also where we came up with the idea for The Minstrel Series. I’m a writer and my husband is a musician. We’re both artists but rarely did our art ever interconnect. Now, with the digital era, a new possibly to do something together existed.

So, we discussed what it could look like to work on a project together. Having been married to a singer-songwriter for almost 27 years, I felt comfortable writing a fictional tale that takes place in that world. I’ve witnessed the song writing process, heard endless hours of rehearsals, live with a recording studio in both of my homes, have been to many, many concerts, sat through hours and hours of sound checks, waited in greenrooms, set up equipment, tore down equipment, toured Europe (there were times when I sang in the band). Know what it’s like to sleep in a different bed every night and meet new people every day.

I was there over the years for countless large venue crowds and smaller house concert crowds, the indoor concerts and the outdoor festivals. Many of my friends are singer-songwriters who work hard to make music their a career. Some find more success than others.

Plus, my son is a singer-songwriter and I always loved a song he’d written called Sun & Moon – “the difference between you and I, is like the sun and the moon…” (PS: I know it’s not grammatically correct, but it’s the lyric and it flows better than the difference than you and me.)

It was the seed to a love story, two people opposite in almost every way, one being the misunderstood artist who follows a dream.

Not only could I write about songwriters, but I could use actual song lyrics (as opposed to making them up myself or risking copyright infringement by using songs owned by a label.) And I could hire my talented friends to sing them. With e-readers it’s easy to include links to the mp3s, and with enhance books it’s possible to include a link right in the text of the book so that the reader can listen to the character sing as they read the story.

The idea was very exciting. And daunting. But I was up for it and started writing Sun & Moon last May. As I mentioned, I live in Dresden Germany for half of the year, which happens to be a very artistic and inspiring place, a perfect setting to begin the series. It takes place in the very neighborhood that I live in, along Alaunstrasse in the Neustadt area of Dresden (if you want to look it up.)

The regular e-edition has links to all the songs – the remake versions for the book, and the original versions by the songwriters – plus a link to the music video of the title song. The print book has QR codes to scan with a smart phone that will open the links. An enhanced book is in the works and eventually it will be available in audio.

Book 2, Flesh & Bone is scheduled for a spring/summer release.


(Book One in the Minstrel Series)

Publication Date: January 26th

If you’re a fan of the movie Inside, Llewyn Davis, ABC television’s Nashville or Colleen Hoover’s upcoming novel, "Maybe Someday", the Minstrel Series is for you!

The Minstrel Series is a collection of contemporary romance novels set in the singer/songwriter world. The books are companion novels, with shared settings and characters, but each are complete standalone stories with a HEA (happily ever after) and no cliffhangers!

Katja Stoltz is a risk-taking singer-songwriter hoping to make it in the indie music scene in Dresden, Germany. Micah Sturm's a brooding uptown banker on a quest.

Driven to the streets, Katja is picked up by Micah - but he doesn't want what she thinks he does. There’s an undeniable attraction between them, a gravitational pull they both struggle to resist. Katja knows she mustn’t fall in love with this handsome enigma. There’s something dark lurking beneath the surface. He could be dangerous.

And even if her life isn’t on the line, her heart most definitely is.

*not erotica - no explicit sex or coarse language

This series is an exciting collaboration between Lee Strauss as an Indie Author and several very talented Indie Singer-Songwriters. Four original songs produced by Norm Strauss are featured in Sun & Moon and are performed by award-winning Canadian singer-songwriter Kim McMechan. MP3 links are included at the end.

Check out the music video!

All the songs from the Minstrel Series can be found at Bandcamp.

The Minstrel Series also has its own Facebook page. Go Like it to follow all the upcoming Minstrel Series news!

Pre- orders now available at the pre-release price of 2.99! (Price goes up after launch)


Meet The Author:
Lee Strauss writes romantic mixed genres set in the past, present and future for YA and adult readers. She also writes light and fun stuff as Elle Strauss. She divides her time between BC, Canada and Dresden, Germany, and enjoys drinking coffee and eating chocolate in both places. Find out more at www.ellestraussbooks.com.



Giveaway:
Lee is giving away prizes to celebrate the upcoming launch of Sun & Moon.


Enter to win a $50 Amazon gift card, MP3s of all four songs featured on Sun & Moon, and a 12 month calendar from Dresden, Germany featuring many of the settings found in Sun & Moon.


Dresden, Germany




Wednesday 29 January 2014

WW28: DARKNESS RISES

WW28 book offering: Darkness Rises by Dianne Duvall

Some nights, she had heard faint footsteps behind her and caught glimpses of shadow stalking her.

Ominous... but the question is, did it scare her?

About Darkness Rises:
Krysta is used to getting the drop on vampires. Her "special abilities" aren't much, but the plan is simple--she plays helpless pretty young thing to lure them in. Then her shoto swords come out and it's bye-bye, bloodsucker. Until one night she finds herself with an unexpected ally. He's a vampire, all right, but different. Mysterious. Handsome. And more interested in saving her skin than draining it.

Etienne has been an Immortal Guardian for two hundred years--long enough to know that Krysta is special. He can't stop thinking about her long legs, even more than her short swords. Then he discovers the vamps she's exterminating have friends in high places, and the Guardians are in danger too. He'll have to accept Krysta's help to save them. The stakes for a mortal are high. But the cost to his heart might be higher. . .
Source: Info in the About Darkness Rises was taken from GoodReads at https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16101233-darkness-rises on 04/12/2013.

WW28
A chance to showcase your favourite!
  • First you grab our Wicked Wednesday pic.
  • Then you grab a book. Turn to page 28. Take the first sentence. And then you post it in your site with a link back to WW28.
  • Come back to Cherry Mischievous - WW28 and give us the url of your post (in a comment at a WW28 post) so that other WW28 readers can find your WW28 offering.

Tuesday 28 January 2014

SUSANNAH SANDLIN BlogTour & Giveaway


Where Do You Get Your Ideas?
Most authors get that question a lot, and usually, our answer is a blank stare because the real answer is not only complicated, but hard to put into words. Which, if you think about it, is ironic coming from people who use lots of words for a living.

For me, ideas for books (or, in the case of “Chenoire,” stories) come from a hodgepodge of useless trivia we have stored in our heads that somehow coalesces into an idea.

For “Chenoire,” I can trace my story idea back to getting lost, watching yet another disaster strike an area I love, and a nonfiction feature article I wrote about bird feathers.

The story takes place in an imaginary crossroads community near Delacroix, Louisiana, in St. Bernard Parish, sandwiched between New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. It’s a vivid spot for me because I once got lost in St. Bernard trying to find a bakery. I ended up on a barely-there road on a desolate piece of land surrounded by water, near a closed-down bar with the appropriate name of “The End of the World.”

Once I found my way back to civilization, it turned into a grand adventure, of course, but I always wonder about the hearty souls who make their homes in that little corner of the state, in a parish that’s seventy-six percent water, mostly brackish marsh, bayous, and wetlands.

My unintended trip to Delacroix stuck with me years later, when I began to think about the story that would become “Chenoire.”

By that time, the parish had gone through yet another disaster. The first one happened back in 1927, when torrential rains in the Midwest sent a badly swollen Mississippi River hurling toward New Orleans with tons of floodwater. There were a lot more rich, important people living in New Orleans than in the poor fishing towns of St. Bernard, so the state decided it was time for a sacrifice. Promising the St. Bernard people they’d pay them for their losses, officials set off explosives on the river levees in the parish, letting St. Bernard go underwater to relieve pressure on the river and spare New Orleans. Then they never paid.

When Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, St. Bernard was, for all intents and purposes, destroyed. Every building was damaged, if it wasn’t gone altogether. Every person was homeless. Every school, every hospital, just gone. It took time and patience and faith to rebuild, but they’d finally gotten back on their feet when the BP Oil Spill occurred in the Gulf and sent the Louisiana fishing industry into a tailspin.

And that was when I began writing “Chenoire,” sending my character Faith, a biologist, into St. Bernard Parish to study some of the effects of the oil spill on the fragile ecosystem of Southeastern Louisiana.

Faith’s specialty came from an article I’d recently written for my day job about bird feathers. Did you know that what a bird eats impacts the color of its feathers, beak, and feet? It was news to me! One of the reason pink flamingoes are pink is because they eat a lot of shrimp. Feathers are mostly protein, and one can even feed birds certain types of food and influence their color.

(It’s not all food-based, of course. There’s species and gender to consider. Male birds are usually more brightly colored than females; females need to blend in with their surroundings to protect their nests, and males need bright features to preen for the females in order to attract a mate.)

Anyway, how the oil spill, the bird feathers, and getting lost in St. Bernard all came together in the story of “Chenoire”? That, I’m afraid is a mystery of synapses and brain short-circuitry. And, of course, my unhealthy fascination with alligators!

About The Book:

Chenoire by Susannah Sandlin
Genre: urban fantasy

About Chenoire:
When Faith Garrity’s twin sister died, she lost a part of herself. Unable to move past the pain, the once-driven ornithologist is at risk of losing her career as well. To save her job, she heads to the oil-ravaged wetlands of Louisiana. There, in the bayou community of Chenoire, she encounters the handsome but guarded Zackary Préjean, still suffering from a great loss of his own.

She’s drawn to Zack, but soon finds that the Préjean family isn’t what it seems… They have dangerous secrets—and deadly enemies. Caught up in a feud that threatens the area’s uneasy truce, Faith and Zack must learn to trust each other. Survival will require enormous sacrifice, but it just might also give them both a way to move on.
Source: Info in the About Chenoire was from the press kit from the publicity team.

Buy Link(s):


Excerpt:
Zack Préjean wiped the blood from his skinning knife onto the faded blue bottom of the apron he wore, scanning the bayou that backed up to his papa’s back porch. Something had drawn his attention, but he couldn’t figure out what.

He’d been working on the small gator for half an hour, figuring to take off enough fresh meat for dinner and prep the rest to deal with later—it was too small for the skin to be worth much. The calls and caws of the birds and cackles of swamp hens soothed him, and God knew he needed soothing. Spending the whole month of gator season at Chenoire wasn’t what he wanted to be doing. But Papa had asked him outright for help, and he had to honor that.

Finally, he figured out what had caught his attention; the bayou was too quiet. He wedged the knife through his apron ties, covered the gator with a towel, and closed his eyes to focus on what he could hear. Footsteps coming from the path leading down to the house—heavy ones, stirring up a whiff of anger.

Zack tripped on his way through the kitchen, catching his toe on the edge of a chair because he’d been staring out the front window instead of watching where he was going. All this family time must be getting to him, because for a moment he swore he’d seen not a man on the path that angled toward the small circle of houses where the Préjeans had lived for generations.

No, he thought he’d seen an angel.

Except angels didn’t stomp their feet, curse like sailors, and swat at bugs, which is what this one appeared to be doing. What the hell was a woman doing on foot way out here at dusk?

Crossing his arms over his chest, Zack leaned against the frame of the front door, silent and still, waiting to see what trouble she brought. She looked like a city woman, and city women always brought trouble.

He couldn’t keep the grin off his face. Whatever else she was, his citified swamp angel was pissed off and dirty as sin. Bits of mud flaked off what might be a long, lean pair of legs underneath the grime that covered her from her shoes to the bottom of her khaki shorts—or maybe they were mud-covered black shorts. Hard to tell. Her hands flew around her head, batting at what Zack knew were probably the armies of tiny no-see-ums that swarmed near the small stand of trees this time of day. Occasionally, she swatted at her own head, giving her short blond hair a disheveled look he’d mistaken for a halo.

“Damned gnats. I’m gonna—” The angel finally spotted him and stopped in her tracks, dark-blue eyes growing wider as her gaze dropped from Zack’s face to the vicinity of the knife.

He cleared his throat and stifled the laugh that threatened to escape. “You lost, Angel?”



Meet The Author:

Susannah Sandlin
Susannah Sandlin writes paranormal romance and romantic thrillers from Auburn, Alabama, on top of a career in educational publishing that has thus far spanned five states and six universities—including both Alabama and Auburn, which makes her bilingual. She grew up in Winfield, Alabama, but was also a longtime resident of New Orleans, so she has a highly refined sense of the absurd and an ingrained love of SEC football, cheap Mardi Gras trinkets, and fried gator on a stick. She’s the author of the award-winning Penton Legacy paranormal romance series, a spinoff novel, Storm Force, and a new romantic thriller beginning this month with Lovely, Dark, and Deep. Writing as Suzanne Johnson, she also is the author of the Sentinels of New Orleans urban fantasy series.



Giveaway:

  • 1 $25 Amazon gift card
  • 2 $10 Amazon gift cards
  • 2 Author swag packs- open to US Shipping (books, swag)

Monday 27 January 2014

Book Blitz – ‘Naughty Little Bedtime Stories’ by Tamara Soana


Naughty Little Bedtime Stories
By-Tamaria Soana
Anthology of Steamy Short Stories  

Bedtime stories that will heat up your night.

Naughty Little Bedtime Stories contains twelve short stories that will arouse your senses. You’ll find stories that contain light bondage, food play, ménage (m/m/f), and other erotic events. Each story has a different setting and couple who explore all things naughty in and out of the bedroom.

Content Warning: adult language, graphic sexual situations.


   




About the Author-
Tamaria Soana is middle aged, but just feels her life has begun. She writes sexy contemporary romance stories that always end with a ‘happily ever after’. Growing up she loved to read and make up new places in her head to escape to. In her late teens she began writing short stories and poetry; it wasn’t until her late thirties before she began to spin a full story.

She’s married and a stay-at-home-mom of two beautiful young girls, they reside in Western New York. Cuddling up with a good book under an electric throw is her way to escape the cold Buffalo nights. Besides writing, she co-owns Shades of Rose Marketing and hosts a talk show on Talkshoe called Live with Tamaria ~ Giving authors a voice.
 


Guest Post: MARGO BOND COLLINS

Writing about the Deep South
My novel Waking Up Dead is set in a small town in Alabama—the main character, Callie, dies in Texas and wakes up dead to haunt someplace she’s never been. I wrote it while I was teaching at a college not far from Birmingham, Alabama. As I’ve mentioned in a number of interviews, the idea for the book came to me as I was driving to work one day; I remember seeing just a wisp of fog move across the statue in the middle of the town square. The statue was of some Civil War figure (I was living in Alabama at the time), and I remember thinking that it looked oddly ghostly. In between teaching classes that day, I started writing Callie’s story. It took me less than six weeks to finish that first draft—her voice was just incredibly strong.

But the setting made a strong impact on the story, as well. The Deep South is, I think, a haunted place—it’s haunted by its history, I think, and that history continues to have an incredible impact on its present. The history of slavery and racism still influence everyday interactions in the Deep South, even when people don’t always realize it. At the same time, southerners of all races are fiercely proud of their home, even with all of its haunted past, and that also influences everyday interactions. I think that to some degree, Waking Up Dead illustrates my own experiences as an outsider coming in to small-town Alabama. While I lived there, I met wonderful people and made great friends, but I also saw deeply ingrained attitudes about race and gender that fulfilled some of the negative stereotypes about the South.

Writing about the Deep South—or for that matter, about any place with a rich history—means examining and integrating that history into the setting and events of the story. In Waking Up Dead, the characters must solve a decades-old murder and in the process, face the ways in which a culture’s attitudes have influenced people for generations. Ultimately, I think that’s the only way to deal with history that we might find unpleasant: bring it into the light, own it, and exorcise the ghosts it brings with it.

Waking Up Dead by Margo Bond Collins
Book 1 in the Callie Taylor series
Genre: urban fantasy

About Waking Up Dead:
When Dallas resident Callie Taylor died young, she expected to go to Heaven, or maybe Hell. Instead, she met her fate early thanks to a creep with a knife and a mommy complex. Now she's witnessed another murder, and she's not about to let this one go. She's determined to help solve it before an innocent man goes to prison. And to answer the biggest question of all: why the hell did she wake up in Alabama?
Source: Info in the About Waking Up Dead was from GoodReads at https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18428064-waking-up-dead on 23/11/2013.

Buy Link(s):


Book Trailer:


Excerpt:
When I died, I expected to go to heaven.

Okay. Maybe hell. It’s not like I was perfect or anything. But I was sort of hoping for heaven.

Instead, I went to Alabama.

Yeah. I know. It’s weird.

I died in Dallas, my hometown. I was killed, actually. Murdered. I’ll spare you the gruesome details. I don’t like to remember them myself. Some jerk with a knife--and probably a Bad-Mommy complex. Believe me, if I knew where he was, I’d go haunt his ass.

At any rate, by the time death came, I was ready for it--ready to stop hurting, ready to let go. I didn’t even fight it.

And then I woke up dead in Alabama. Talk about pissed off.

You know, even reincarnation would have been fine with me--I could have started over, clean slate and all that. Human, cow, bug. Whatever. But no. I ended up haunting someplace I’d never even been.

That’s not the way it’s supposed to work, right? Ghosts are supposed to be the tortured spirits of those who cannot let go of their earthly existence. If they could be convinced to follow the light, they’d leave behind said earthly existence and quit scaring the bejesus out of the poor folks who run across them. That’s what all those “ghost hunter” shows on television tell us.

Let me tell you something. The living don’t know jack about the dead.

Not this dead chick, anyway.


Meet The Author:
Margo Bond Collins is the author of Legally Undead, first in an urban fantasy series coming in 2014 from World Weaver Press (http://worldweaverpress.com/), and Waking Up Dead, a paranormal mystery forthcoming from Solstice Publishing (http://www.solsticepublishing.com/). She lives in Texas with her husband, their daughter, several spoiled cats, and a ridiculous turtle. She teaches college English online. She loves paranormal fiction of any genre and spends most of her free time daydreaming about vampires, ghosts, zombies, werewolves, and other monsters. See her website at www.MargoBondCollins.com, email her at margobondcollins@gmail.com. Like her on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MargoBondCol... or follow her on Twitter: @MargoBondCollin and @vampirarchy


 
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