Showing posts with label urban fantasy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label urban fantasy. Show all posts

Wednesday 3 July 2013

Young Adult Paranormal Adventure on Sale

HIDDEN
(Marchwood Vampire Series #1)

on sale this week


In this spellbinding novel, two teenagers living a century apart discover dangerous secrets that draw them into the past — and toward their destruction. The legend of the vampire has never been so gripping…


SALE PRICE: $0.99
$3.99
  75% off 
nds July 5th 2013 

Monday 11 June 2012

Absolution Giveaway Winner


I'm pleased to announce the winner of 
the ebook copy of Absolution is...

RON A SEWELL
Hey Ron, please can you use the 'Contact Me' page to send me your email address.

Congratulations!

Friday 1 June 2012

ABSOLUTION TOUR - Guest Post and Giveaway!

Today, I'm privileged to be hosting the Absolution Blog Tour
featuring an Ebook Giveaway and Guest Post


Louis Corsair is the author of urban fantasy crime novel, Absolution

In 1947, a gangster murders private investigator Raymond Adams.
In 2011, he’s brought back to life for 24 hours to solve the supernatural murder of
a Hollywood Adult film star.

When the son of a Pit Lord is murdered in Hollywood, the celestial beings in charge of the Four Realms ask Raymond Adams to figure who did it and find the victim’s missing soul. Without memories of his life, he accepts the case to gain eternal peace. But the job is daunting:

24 hours to nab a killer...
24 hours to find a missing soul...
24 hours to unravel the victim’s exotic private life...
24 hours to stop a plot to send the universe into chaos...

With only the help of a possessed cop and a medium, Adams must trek through a Hollywood underground filled with pornography, prostitutes, the homeless, and sadists, along with supernatural monsters. But can he solve the case when his own haunting memories keep surfacing, telling him exactly what kind of man he was in life?


To win an ebook copy of Absolution,
leave a comment in the box at the bottom of this post.
Easy peasy!

Here's Louis' thought-provoking post on crime fiction:

Shalini was kind enough to let me use up some of her space for my thoughts. Particularly, on something that was related to my novel, Absolution, a detective mystery and an urban fantasy. I begin:

These days, playing the news on the television is an invitation to writing crime fiction. Not a day goes by that someone here or there wasn’t murdered in the most heinous way. The murder of a wife, family, self, strangers, permeate and fester in our society. Anger seethes in these stories and it bothers you to some degree that they are real and not the stuff of fiction. All writers of crime fiction, mystery, etc. attempt to capture the reasons behind these grotesque acts. I did too.

Simple as it seems, I mean there are murders galore each day here in Los Angeles, this is not so. Trying to work out a murder in fiction is counter-intuitive. You write a story as if you didn’t know who committed the crime and why, but of course you do. Somehow you must forget. You lay out the clues, present the witnesses, the victims, their lives, hoping the reader will follow along; the smallest glitch leaves a reader stranded, unable to make sense of the rest of the action. To say that writing mystery is easy is the biggest lie there is.

I read the essay “The Simple Art of Murder” by Raymond Chandler after finishing a draft of Absolution. Needless to say, it influenced the drafts that came after it. In it, Chandler criticizes authors of the classical mystery novel for lacking realism. There are puzzles the reader must solve, the whodunit, which turns murder into a game. I agree with him that these authors do not give the act of murder enough respect. But let me explore what these authors were trying to do.

Agatha Christie and others like her, tried to tackle the problem of mystery writing by bringing the reader into the action. Instead of just having her detective figure things out, she wanted the reader to put things together too. In one of her best known novels, And Then There Were None..., her detective leaves it up to the reader to figure out who the culprit is. So that in the end if you can’t figure it out it really is because of your faculties. As Hannibal Lecter said, everything you need to solve the murder is right there on those pages.

Like I said above, to make a game of something like murder is just not right. It makes murder detecting a fun activity so that by the end you feel like you earned a reward for solving the crime. In real life, detectives rarely ever feel like this and each new murder disgusts them. Their minds suffer. How does Poirot stay so un-changed by the multiple murders he has had to solve in Christie’s novels? It’s just too fantastic to believe.

Let me move on to the hardboiled guys, the best known are Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler--though there are numerous others. They gave the act of murder its due respect and each crime revealed some of the dark nature of humanity.

These writers attempted to solve the problem of mystery writing by not worrying about it. In a Chandler novel, you get a mini puzzle, but he drowns it in the complex nature of the crime. In the end, the puzzle doesn’t even matter, just what it says about human beings--The Big Sleep famously leaves one of the many murders in its pages unsolved and without any clues as to who might have done it. The detective too is changed by each new crime. They become jaded, cynical, wondering why humanity is the way it is.

Between the two, I think that Hammett succeeded at creating a real human being in Sam Spade, than Chandler did with Marlowe. Phillip Marlowe is too good to be true. He always follows his moral compass. He never leaves a dame without protecting. He’s a knight in shining armor, smoking a cigarette. Sam Spade would screw you over if the circumstances were just right.

Do you see the problem with this type of mystery fiction? Marlowe and his contemporaries are just not believable enough. Their treatment of murder is excellent, but the protagonists lack something. I would have enjoyed Marlowe more if he had been a divorced man with children trying to understand him and a wife who sometimes loved him but felt mostly that he was a lost cause. Detectives have wives in real life. They have children. Some have substance abuse problems. They have racial prejudices even though they are, deep down, the “good guys.” They are all around human beings with enormous flaws.

And besides that, don’t the plots of the hardboiled novels seem incredibly fantastic? The crimes reported on television lack this air of fantasy. Some crimes, the most difficult to hear about, occur to satisfy urges and many times without any real reason at all. This is an observation, not true criticism. I would rather read any Chandler novel than watch the news if you gave me the chance. The complexity of the plot is permissible and necessary when you compare it to the simplistic nature of some mystery fiction.

So we come to our modern era of mystery writing. Today’s writers have overcome the problem of the loner detective who seems to have no life except detecting. In the novel, A King of Infinite Space (in the top ten for the Kindle UK Amazon list), the author, Tyler Dilts, has Detective Beckett trying to solve a murder, nothing different here--Dilts was one of my teachers so don’t mind the plug for his book.

But this detective has lost his wife and his existence seems meaningless after the fact. There is a murder, treated with due respect, and a puzzle that drives the plot. But the story lacks the fantastic nature of the Marlowe novels--ultimately, the crime was committed for a simple reason. The concern in A King of Infinite Space is with the individual who struggles to find meaning. 

Ah! Existentialism in mystery fiction. This is an evolutionary step. The writer solves the problem of mystery writing by looking at the crime through a different lens. You don’t have to follow along. The crime is secondary.

It is now that I finally come to the Urban Fantasy Mystery novel. This sub-genre has been popularized and re-energized recently thanks to writers like Jim Butcher. But because it is a budding genre, it’s leaning on its predecessors heavily. Marlowe returns in these novels because he’s so easy to get behind. The plots are mostly simple, saving the complexity for the magic system. The whodunit element is not hard to figure out, but it seems inconsequential when compared to the fantasy elements. We have not reached the place that current non-urban fantasy mystery writers have reached. We look at the darkness of things, except we mean it literally.

In fact, I could say that this type of Urban Fantasy is just another form of Epic Fantasy. But we who dabble in this type of fiction are not just wasting our time. We do have some relevance. These novels look at the dark nature of human mythologies, which is why you sometimes find Angels and Demons in them and gods and demigods. But this is an investigation for another day. I have rambled on enough.

I hope that if you do try Absolution, you will try to fit it into the categories I’ve created here.


Thank you, Louis. I really enjoyed your post. It made me think - which is quite something for a friday morning!

You can find Louis Corsair in the following places:
Blog     Goodreads     Facebook

Absolution is available from the following stores:
And grab it quick because it's only $0.99/£0.77 for as long as the tour lasts!!
Amazon US     Amazon UK     Barnes & Noble      Smashwords     Paperback on Amazon

Don't forget to leave a comment below for the chance to win an ebook copy of Absolution

Saturday 14 April 2012

Thicker Than Blood Release Date



I'm happy to announce that book 2 in the Marchwood Vampire Series
will be released April 17th 2012


Chilling and fast-paced, Thicker Than Blood is the supernatural sequel
to Hidden. It combines passion and drama with a historical twist.


Aelia lives in 6th century Byzantium. She is sixteen years old and her life is about
to change forever. She doesn't yet know it, but she holds the fate of thousands
in her hands and her actions will echo across the centuries.

Fourteen hundred years later the lives of Madison and Alexandre are once
again plunged into danger. To save Madison, Alexandre is forced back to a
world he thought was dead and buried. But time is running out.
The chase is on...


On April 17th it will be available as an ebook from Smashwords and from Amazon for Kindle.
It may take a while longer to distribute to other outlets. The paperback will be available by the end of April.

Wednesday 4 April 2012

First 5 Chapters -Try before you Buy (YA Paranormal)

Here's the next volume of First 5 Chapters available free from Smashwords



Read the first five chapters from these
YA paranormal/fantasy authors:

Hunting - S.M. Hineline
Hidden (Marchwood Vampire Series #1) - Shalini Boland
Coexist (Keegan's Chronicles #1) – Julia Crane
Progeny Of Innocence - Patti Roberts
Ties To The Blood Moon - Robin Waldrop
Fire Sprite - Lenore Wolfe



Click here to download for free


Tuesday 20 March 2012

First Bitten by Samantha Towle

Walking home after a night out drowning her sorrows with her best friend, Carrie, Alexandra Jones stupidly takes a phone call from her cheating ex-boyfriend, Eddie, and in her anger hurls her phone into the forest before her.

But when Alex goes to retrieve her phone from the undergrowth, she and Carrie come face-to-face with a monster they never even knew existed, a Vârcolac (a nightmarish vampire-werewolf hybrid) and he's in search of fresh blood. The next thing Alex knows, she is staring at the impossibly handsome but mysterious Nathan who has helped bring her back to life, but not to the life she left.

To her horror, she discovers she has now become a blood-drinking Vârcolac herself and  is the only female of her kind, with the potential for breeding a whole new army of Vârcolacs if they can only track her down and press her into service.

And while Alex gets to know Nathan and his shape-shifting family as they offer her the protection she so desperately needs, unbeknown to all of them, the Vârcolacs are getting closer



What I thought:

I'm ultra-excited to have found such a brilliant new series! First Bitten is Book 1 in The Alexandre Jones Series and I devoured it in a day. I don't want to give anything away, so all I'll say is it has all the elements to make up the perfect urban fantasy: a very real and sympathetic main character, a terrifying supernatural situation and the hottest love interest you could imagine. It's all these things, without being  at all predictable and I can't wait for Book 2!

Congratulations, Sam Towle, looks like you've got another page-turning bestseller on your hands.


Links:

Friday 2 March 2012

The Forever Girl Book Tour - Guest Post & Giveaway


I first met Rebecca Hamilton on Authonomy, a writer's site run by Harper Collins. We chatted and bantered on the forums and then she gave me some very insightful advice on writing, specifically to do with a character's viewpoint, and how readers will often connect more fully with your protagonist if you write from inside their head and show events unfolding purely from their point of view.
Out of the hundreds of excerpts I read on the site, Becca's is one of the one's which stuck out most vividly and I'm beyond excited to see her novel has finally been published. It's on my kindle to read asap!

GIVEAWAY!!!
Rebecca has kindly agreed to give away an ebook copy of The Forever Girl  to one lucky winner. And if you live in the US, you'll also get this fantastic Forever Girl scented candle - gorgeous! 


All you have to do to win is leave your name in the comments box below.

The Forever Girl
Sophia Parsons’ family has skeletons, but they aren’t in their graves... Solving the mystery of an ancestor’s hanging might silence the clashing whispers in Sophia's mind, but the cult in her town and the supernaturals who secretly reside there are determined to silence her first. As Sophia unknowingly crosses the line into an elemental world full of vampire-like creatures, shapeshifters, and supernatural grim reapers, she meets Charles, a man who becomes both lover and ally. But can she trust him? It’s not until someone nearly kills Sophia that she realizes the only way to unveil the source of her family's curse: abandon her faith or abandon her humanity. If she wants to survive, she must accept her who she is, perform dark magic, and fight to the death for her freedom.



Rebecca Hamilton On Writing

I probably spend about 10% of my writing time actually writing. Writing is the easy part. All you have to do is follow your emotions, put your imagination to paper, and keep asking the ‘what if’ questions you’d never want to answer yourself in real life.

Beyond that, there’s listening to your beta readers, rewriting, trading critique, re-writing, revising, editing, copy-editing, proofreading, deciding that it still needs another re-write, having to revise, edit, copy-edit, and proofread again. And on it goes, with not one of those steps being as easy as they sound to those who don’t know what each of those skills entail.
Of course, we get all the help we can. Sometimes it’s free…other times, it only requires we sign over our life.

And it doesn’t stop there.

Writing isn’t a job. Some can say they will sit at their desk from 9:00 to 5:00 and write—or work on any of the above mentioned writing activities. But writing is a lifestyle. You are working on your writing while you read. You’re working on it while you shower. While you sleep, change a baby’s diaper, do the dishes…you’re writing. When you walk through a forest trail and you notice a large oak tree that looks completely out of place among a forest full of redwoods or when you notice the receptionist at your optometrist’s office is squinting to read her paperwork … you’re writing.

Writing is just one of those things that, in my experience, consumes you. It becomes part of who you are. You live your life, same as before, but everything means more now. Everything is valuable. Writing becomes an outlet for life.

This is where you can find Rebecca:
Website
Facebook
Twitter
Goodreads

Don't forget to leave your name in the comments box below if you'd like to win a copy of The Forever Girl and that gorgeous scented candle!
The contest closes at midnight on March 9th

Wednesday 2 November 2011

OUT NOW! Fairy Thief by Johanna Frappier

So, you all probably know that Fairy Circle is one of my favourite books and so I'm thrilled and delighted that author friend, Johanna Frappier, has agreed to tell us a little about the recently released sequel, Fairy Thief.

Hi Shalini! Thank you so much for letting me stop by. I wanted everyone to know that the next installment in The Fairy Circle Series, FAIRY THIEF, is now available as an eBook on Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes and Noble, and all the other lovely E retailers. The paperback is available on Amazon.


Here's what FAIRY THIEF is about:
It has been a year since Saffron Keller traveled to the Fairyrealm. She had no intention of ever mixing with fairy-kind again. When the fairy, Ny, steals the soul of her human love, Markis, she finds herself entangled once more in all that is beautiful and magical and torturous. To find Markis, she must travel through different realms - alternate planes of existence and spaces of time – all before her life in the Earthrealm passes too far into the future.

Not wanting the help of the possessive fairy, Li, whom Saffron has shared turbulent past lives with – she is instead paired up with two immature boy fairies, Tai and Wo, who try her patience to the very limits of tolerance. As the three pass through realms they meet others who hinder and help them on their way: Orji - the handsome man with the bad bed-side manner, Deva - the cow who has the twins besotted, a monster of a prince, and the most vile dragon lady in one hundred realms.


Woohoo! Now I'm so excited to read it! Sounds like it's going to be another great story with an exotic cast of weird and wonderful characters. Oh, and I'm pretty sure I know that vile dragon lady personally. Thanks so much for stopping by, Johanna, and good luck with Fairy Thief!

Thursday 4 August 2011

Raven by Suzy Turner

Lilly's life is strange. She has odd parents and only one friend. But when Lilly’s parents disappear, things get even stranger. Everything she knows is taken away from her and she begins to realise that she isn’t who she thought she was. The story had me flipping the pages to discover Lilly’s family secrets and I wasn’t disappointed.

Suzy Turner’s writing flows and the story pulls you in with its intrigue and mystery. The characters are compelling and the plot unfolds into an exciting and dangerous adventure.

I can’t wait for book 2 and I’m really glad it’s going to be about Lilly’s friend, December Moon. She’s a character I wished we’d seen more of in Raven, so it’s brilliant we’ll get to find out who she is. All in all this was a fantastic read!

Raven is a refreshingly different novel suitable for children, teens and adults alike. You can find it in the following places:

Amazon for Kindle
Barnes & Noble for the Nook
Smashwords

Suzy's website: http://www.suzyturner.com/

Monday 4 July 2011

Paranormal Romance Author: Tessa Stokes

Hi Tessa! Welcome to Someone Wot Writes. Can you tell us a little about your writing.
I have just completed book four in The Seven Spell Saga, it is titled, The Sealed Door. My books, Spellbinding, The Spell Breaker, and The Seven Spell all in The Seven Spell Saga are romantic, lyrical, sprinkled with the motifs of magic, love, friendship, time travel, and immortality.

I wanted my characters to strike real chords with readers, they had become so real to me that it seemed very important to me that readers could also picture and empathize with the characters. One of my characters actually has their own twitter account, although not too many followers just yet. LOL I will leave readers to guess which character. Anyone who has read any of The Seven Spell Saga books will be able to guess who.







What will readers like about The Seven Spell Saga?
That the main character draws them into her life and tells them about her feelings and thoughts as well as her experiences. Chloe McGarry also turns to the reader now and again for opinions. I think that readers will like the two guys in the book, Oliver Tarrant is centred, loving and lovely. Tristan Dearing is mysterious and intense, his love is consuming. I think readers will like the love triangle in the books. As Chloe settles down to her new life in a different country, falls in love and makes new friends the style of the book reflects her growth.

What inspired you to write them?
I wrote The Seven Spell Saga after having the ideas in my head for a few years, I had made notes on various computers and suddenly found that they all gelled. I love ancient places and history, plus I have come across some strange coincidences in life and that is a major motif in the books.

Do you have any new works in the pipeline?
Yes book five of The Seven Spell Saga is started, I love my characters so much I could not leave them where book four finishes for long and so started the fifth book straightaway.

I have two chapters of a science fiction young adult novel written and I am about the third of the way through a vampire paranormal romance, another plot I have had in my head for a long time. It's a vampire story with a difference, I hope.

Who are your favourite authors?

I have read so much and find it hard to have favourite authors but at the risk of seeming high brow which it's not, I love Shakespeare, also Thomas Hardy. I read lots of detective novels because they are far away from my own genre so that I am not influenced by anything. So I read, Sue Grafton, Ruth Rendell. I also read Alexander McCall-Smith.

Tell us something about yourself that not many people know.
I have a degree in Computer Education. If that is too crusty, I once lived in Tangiers, Morocco, quite exotic.


Thanks so much, Tessa. And good luck with your Seven Spell Saga!

You can discover more about Tessa in the following places:
Tessa's Blog
Tessa's Website

The Seven Spell Saga is available to buy from Smashwords and Amazon

Sunday 10 April 2011

Hidden #SampleSunday

He felt the drumming of the earth, the heartbeat of all humankind in his bones and blood, in his skin and soul. It sang a song that he had known forever and in that instant everything became clear. He knew the reason for it all; the key to life and it was so obvious. How could he not have known this simple truth before now?
And then as suddenly as it had come, it left. His beating heart slowed, the song faded and the knowledge slipped away like an elusive memory refusing to come to mind. He felt a devastating loss, worse than if his dearest love had died.
A heavy melancholy descended, so profound he felt as though he should like to sleep for a thousand years. In the cold darkness, tears rolled down his face and stung his cheeks like acid. He closed his eyes and tried not to think. It hurt to think.
It hurt.
God, it hurt.
Like the skin being stripped from his body. He could not breathe and his eyes burned white hot with a searing pain.
He tried to speak but his throat constricted, closed shut. Was he in hell? Was this the fate he deserved? Please, God, no! Help me! he silently screamed. Save me! I promise … I promise anything. I will do anything. Just please … make … it … STOP.

HIDDEN on Amazon