Cover Goodness: Rocky Mountain Angel by Vivian Arend

Vivian Arend revealed her newest cover today. Cowboys!!! A dripping wet cowboy, to be exact 😀

Rocky Mountain Angel

Sometimes even Angels must learn to fly… 

Six Pack Ranch, Book 4

Allison Parker needs a convincing excuse to come home to Rocky Mountain House. A hopelessly romantic reason that won’t let her mother suspect the truth—that Allison has discovered Mom is keeping a terrible secret from the family.

Gabe Coleman is struggling with two of the roughest parts of ranching: dealing with his bull-headed mule of a father, and making enough to pay the bills. When his old friend Allison offers to help him develop his ideas for organic ranching—in trade for pretending to be her fiancé—it sounds like the perfect set-up.

Yet the deception leads them in an unexpected direction, where their shared daily hells are erased by nights of heavenly distraction. It’s not supposed to be real, but once the gates are opened, there’s no denying they’ve found in each other a little bit of Paradise.

To break free of the past and face the future, though, will take more than temporary pleasures. It’ll take putting their hearts on the line.

Warning: Tortured hero with a guardian-angel complex, grief-stricken heroine willing to sacrifice everything for family. Break out the tissues, this trip to the ranch is a heartbreaker on the way to the HEA.

November 20, 2012

www.vivianarend.com

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The Fun of A Scary Villain by Lauren Dane

The life of Lark Jaansen, hunter in Clan Gennessee, has been shaped by violence and unrest and it defines her future. Well-trained and resilient, she’s met her militaristic match in Simon Leviathan, a warrior not of this world. Locked in mutual admiration, and a desire so hot it burns, Lark and Simon have something else in common: they love the dark, and as a shadow is cast over their world, they’re each coming into their own.

A mysterious war has been waged among the Others. As witches and humans turn against each other, as fae retreat in fear, and as vampires rise, Lark and Simon discover that an unseen force is behind it. A single, hungry entity older than recorded history has returned to gorge on the magick of his victims. He is the Magister, nothing less than the end of time. Finding him is Lark and Simon’s first hope. Surviving him is their last.

 

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I’ve written quite a few villains over the time I’ve been writing. They’ve been (among other things) crazy vampires, abusive ex-husbands, stalkers, the werewolf mafia, dictators and magick junkies.

But with Chaos Burning, I went into some uncharted territory with a villain that defies description. The Magister is an ancient enemy that has been  used for generations as a scary story to get kids to bed at night and to keep them behaving.

No one alive knows what it really is, what it looks like or even what it does. Lark and Simon just know it’s behind all the disappearances of Others all across the country. It’s not just a big bad, it’s a big bad they know relatively nothing about except it’s a big bad of a kind that tends to end entire worlds.

The challenge then is to convey a sense of fear over the Magister without a lot of specifics. I gotta say, this to me, was a challenge, yes, but a really fun challenge.

I thought a lot about what it is that scares you as a child. It’s all stuff you can’t see, stuff lurking in the shadows, in the back of the closet, under the bed. That’s what I tapped into with the Magister.

To me, the heart of what is scariest is the imagining about just exactly what is behind the door, or under the bed. I love scary movies and horror novels. I love the thrill of being scared like that. There’s a way out, it’s not real, but for that time I’m watching the movie or reading the book, I can suspend that knowledge and let myself be scared. It taps into that kid in me and I think that’s why I loved this story so much.

My characters feel that fear. They know the Magister is the uber big bad. And later on in the book they know its minions are bad too (though there’s also a shroud of mystery about them as well). I wanted the reader to be right there with Lark and Simon as they tried to work out not only what the Magister is, but how to stop it.

In the end, I have to say the Magister has been my very favorite villain, certainly the scariest. I hope my readers think so too!

 

One lucky reader who comments on my blog will be randomly selected to win a twenty five dollar gift certificate for Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble – winner’s choice.  Good Luck!

 

Lauren Dane

www.laurendane.com

http://www.facebook.com/LaurenDane

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DFRAT – Elisa Paige’s Path to Publishing

It wasn’t that she feared death. She just despised losing.

Genetically engineered warrior Sephti would go to any lengths to destroy the fae that made her their killing machine. Finally escaping servitude, she has meticulously planned revenge against her former masters, and time is running out. The last thing she needs is to be taken captive by a man who hates the fae as much as she does—and thinks she’s one of them.

Sephti learns her captor is Koda, an ancient Native American guardian determined to save his people from annihilation by the fae. Though he seems to loathe everything …

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My path to being published started with getting angry during a tour of an equestrian center – long story – and ended with an 82,572-word rant. It occurred to me after I wound down, that my diatribe about exposing children to unsafe training conditions might make a decent book. So I queried the top U.S. equestrian publisher, figuring it was like buying just one lottery ticket. If I was meant to win, fate or karma or dumb luck would do its thing. An unheard-of three days later, Deborah Burns at Storey Publishing contacted me and my horse book began its path toward publication. Cue the happy dance.

I blissed-out, focusing on nonfiction – what could be better than writing about horses? Then, in late 2008, two short sentences sprang into my head. Through mid-January, these words repeated like the lyrics to “100 Bottles of Beer,” over and over and over:

 It wasn’t that I wanted to live forever. I just didn’t want to die.

Mowing the yard?

It wasn’t that I wanted to live forever. I just didn’t want to die.

Standing in line at the grocery store?

It wasn’t that I wanted to live forever. I just didn’t want to die.

Developing an analytical strategy for identifying the necessary human capital to meet a Fortune-100 company’s enterprise-wide goals?

Yammer yammer yammer.

I began to wonder:  who would say such a thing? Under what conditions would this sentiment make sense? And did I need professional help?

“Passing Time,” the first of three versions of what would become Stealing Time, was born when I gave in and started writing:

It’s funny looking back, but right up to the moment the doctors diagnosed the sharp pain in my stomach and gave me their shocking news, I’d never thought about my own mortality. Not even once.

Like my nonfiction rant, this effort didn’t begin with an eye toward publication. I just wanted the friggin’ voice in my head to shut up. But somewhere along the way, I got hooked on story-telling. Maelstrom was the next in what was meant to be a trilogy, along with Shadowplay. But then a series of events led me to readjust my plans. After coming this-close to selling Maelstrom to a large publisher, BookStrand picked it up, first distributing it digitally and then in mass market paperback. They also published the sequel, Shadowplay. At about the same time, Carina Press gloriously accepted Stealing Time. After it was distributed digitally and in audio, Carina signed its sequel, Killing Time, which was published in August 2011, also in digital and audio formats. All the while, I continued to write and query agents. My manuscript, “Honor Bound,” went through the query wringer and wound up getting signed with the Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency. Cue the heavenly choir.
I’ve had the great fortune to meet some amazing people, like Stephen King’s former editor (fan-girl sigh) who did me the honor of reading Shadowplay pre-publication and giving a few treasured pointers. I’m a huge admirer of Carina’s Angela James and am so grateful for the way she champions writers, especially us newbies. Melissa Johnson at Carina and Lisa Hiley at Storey are the kinds of editors – intuitive, wildly talented, and wicked-fun – all writers dream about, and I’ve been blessed to work with both. It’s an understatement to say that I’m thrilled to be repped by Ethan, along with the likes of John Scalzi, Christine Warren, Andre Norton’s estate, Amanda Ashley, and James Tabor.

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To read more about Elisa Paige and all her books, visit www.elisapaige.com. And for a chance to win a pdf copy of Killing Time, just leave a comment below. Good luck! 😀

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