Tuesday, November 27, 2012

SHADOWS of the PAST by CARMEN STEFANESCU

 

 

Author Carmen Stefanescu is an English teacher; she lives in Romania, better known as Dracula's country. Romania is one of the former communist countries in East Europe.

 

DECEMBER 4th 2012



Has destiny other plans for Anne?






Why, then, do the two lovers lose their way and have to spend the night in an odd forest? Whose is the human skeleton they find and why does the bejeweled cross laying under the bones trigger a strong feeling of apprehension in Anne? Is there a connection between the strange women who haunt Anne’s dreams and the ruins of a large building the two lovers come upon, deep in the forest? What is it that these ghostly apparitions want from her
 
TO VISIT SHADOWS PAST MYSTERY click here
 
 

ON DECEMBER 4th BUY HERE

 
 
BOOK TRAILER from YouTube
 
 

Thursday, November 22, 2012

Forever Young The Beginning

Unlike any vampire story you have ever read………..

Gerald Simpkin's   Forever Young The Beginning


 




Short author bio: Now retired, I had a lifelong career in telecommunications.  I have a love of the written word and have always admired those who can skillfully express feelings and events in writing.  My novel 'Forever Young The Beginning' is my first attempt at fiction.  It is set in Europe in the mid-18th century.  I also wrote a book about Bible Codes in 1998 which is titled 'Secrets of the Bible'.



I live in the Southeastern United States in the countryside with my wife Kathy.  For some ten years, I had a deep love affair with flying.  Hopelessly hooked after my very first flight on a hang glider, I began a journey of flying gliders and ultralights, even becoming a dealer for three different brands and an observer for the southeastern region of the then U S H G Assn.  To this day, I have to say that I loved that more than any past time, hobby, or sport in which I ever participated.  Next to being a husband and father, it was the high point of my life, no pun intended.
I love to write and I thoroughly enjoy creating characters and developing them to where my readers can get a feel for not only how they look, but how they tick.  Developing a plot and filling it with shocks, surprises, humorous events, and tenderness is what I strive for; and I love to fill my stories with the full range of human emotions from true love to extreme hatred, from warm companionship to extreme rage, and from laughter to tears.  Surprises should be liberally sprinkled throughout the length of a story as well in my view.  My goal is to transport the reader to a place where he cannot otherwise go, simply by the power of my words.  I hope to refine the skills that I have long admired before I ever turned my hand toward becoming an author.


YOU CAN FIND GERALD and Forever Young The Beginning at .....

 
Purchase link: http://www.amazon.com/Forever-Young-The-Beginning-ebook/dp/B008PKQH3Q/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1344894396&sr=1-1&keywords=forever+young+the+beginning...
Website / Blog: http://www.amazon.com/Gerald-Simpkins/e/B008RBHLJC
Facebook: gerry.simpkins.9@facebook.com
Twitter: geraldsimpkins@GeraldSimpkins
 
Book Synopsis: A 23 year old Scottish seaman/apprentice trader (Ian McCloud) is on a ship in the Mediterranean and they are attacked by Moroccan pirates in two ships.  After a pitched battle at sea, they prevail and are surprised to learn that they have inadvertently rescued two captive Spanish girls being taken to Morocco.  After several days of sailing towards Spain, Ian and the 17 year old Alandra are both falling in love.  The prize ship Ian is piloting is separated from his uncle’s ship by a terrific storm, and Ian ends up in Marseille, France with eight of his shipmates.
     There he has a ferocious life or death fight in an infamous tavern and inn, the result of which is that he is targeted to be killed.  Instead, he is infected by a vampire and is saved by another one who witnessed the attack.  After learning that he is no longer human, he has some serious soul-searching to do and realizes that his former life is lost to him. 
     I am sure that this next part is new to vampire fans and is unique to my book only.  He learns that for his own good, he has to undergo a rigorous imprinting phase as his body changes into the creature he will become.  The tolerances he imprints will be with him for eternity.  Successful completion of imprinting requires a great deal of pain, but the result is that the convert becomes an Adept vampire; one who can freely mingle with human society day or night, eat their food, work with them side by side and be undetected.  The most painful part of the imprinting process is the blood fast during which no blood may be consumed in order to forever develop a tolerance for doing without it for periods of time.  Male vampires must make love while imprinting or lose their libido forever, which makes for an interesting dilemma for Ian.  His mentors do not consume human blood and really, Adepts mostly do not.  After all, blood is hemoglobin, saline protein, and other things no matter what kind of blood it is.  Non-mentored rogue vampires do prey on humans in the cities of Europe and elsewhere in my story.
     The remainder of the book is a mix of his warm new friendships, including some with children; tender romantic interludes, a love triangle involving a human woman, some horrific and sorrowful events, eye-popping fighting against rogue vampires, and being pursued by various enemies he has made during his sometimes turbulent journey.  He is called to testify before the Supreme Council, a group of nine powerful vampires who monitor vampire related events throughout Europe with an eye toward keeping the existence of vampires a secret from humanity in general.
     Ian is schooled by a wise mentor in how to approach and recruit young to middle aged officials in order to have their services for the balance of their careers in government.  One such recruit is tracked throughout the story in order to show the intricacy and far reaching magnitude of Ian’s mentor’s program.
     His wealth is grown over the years by means of inside information from his mentor and from members of the Supreme Council.  He is taught how to make a generational change of identity and how to conceal his true wealth in anonymous interlocking trusts in various countries as a necessary part of being an immortal and remaining undetected, yet increasing his holdings in order to live the life of an Adept Prince among vampires; but his heart sometimes longs for the simpler life he knew when he first fell in love with Alandra.  Tortured by his fear of her reaction to what he has become, he resolutely goes about the business of his mentor and his adopted family, and lives the life that fate has dealt him.  Fate is a fickle mistress however as Ian learns.
     Being that I had only a little exposure to vampire literature and movies, I have written what I believe is a completely original take on the subject.  The love scenes are tenderly done with no sexually explicit content, and if ‘Forever Young The Beginning’ was a miniseries on TV, it could be rated PG13 excepting for the violent and brutally gruesome fighting scenes.  No vulgar language is used and the tiny amount of profanity that occurs is only as an exclamation of extreme anger now and then.  Laughter and surprises are liberally sprinkled throughout my story, and I guarantee that you will love the ending.
 
 
 
 
1.       How did you come up with the title?  Vampires live forever and if they are converted when young, then they will be ‘Forever Young’.  Since this is the foundational story for a series, it is titled ‘Forever Young The Beginning’.  I plan to have it available on Barnes & Noble/Nook soon.
 
2.       What inspired you to write this book?  I think it was that what little I had seen in movies regarding the subject seemed to fall short of what such a genre could really be.  I did read Ann Rice’s book about the vampire Lestat, and I thought that it seemed depressing.  It seemed to me that such a subject should be exciting, adventurous and romantic as well as dreadful.  Since my vampires are extreme creatures with extreme abilities, I thought it reasonable that extremes of happiness and sorrow, of love and hate, of warm friendships and rage were all to be included in a well-crafted vampire story.  I wanted to avoid some of the stereotypes that I have seen, while preserving others that seem more worthy and not too corny. 
     In my story, there is a scene where Ian is learning of a theory which his mentors have concerning the origin of vampires.  They tie their origin to the 6th chapter of Genesis in the Bible and there is a discussion of that in relation to vampires that takes place one evening in the chateau of his mentors while human guests are present.  I doubt that has ever been used in any vampire story, but my exposure to such stories is limited. 
 
3.       How are your story ideas born?  For the most part, they literally come to me as I am writing, although I sometimes think of something when not writing.  The story is always lurking in my mind no matter what else I am doing on any given day when I am in the process of writing.  I recently learned of a spy ring that George Washington is credited with starting during the revolutionary war and I have resolved to incorporate that into my next book.
 
4.       What is your writing process?  Few notes, but long hours at the keyboard.  I sometimes do 12 hour stretches with only a few breaks.  When I am at an impasse, I quit and take a note pad and literally make a map or diagram of where the story might go next.  That will happen in the basement den as I watch a show or two that I have recorded.  I will make a stick drawing and I will follow maybe three or four branches and note several events on each path as they occur to me.  After looking at all of them for a while, I will begin to get ideas so fast that I can barely write them down.  I am usually ready to get back to it the following day.  At least that is how it was when I wrote ‘Forever Young The Beginning’.  I do make up a word document and add each character to it so as to never confuse one with another while writing.  I will refer to it now and then.  Even so, I had to correct a few places in my book where I had inadvertently put one character’s name in place of another.  Their names were similar, so that contributed to the problem.  That is a good thing for anyone to avoid in their writing process.  I always keep my manuscript’s latest version on three separate flash drives as well as under duplicate files in ‘My Documents’.  Ditto for cover art and cast of characters.
 
 
5.       What’s your favorite part of the writing process?  I absolutely love it when I suddenly get an idea for something and then I have to search for a way to integrate it into the story.  I am consumed until I find the perfect place to spring it on the reader.  My thoughts race as I weigh this new event and whether or not it is plausible given the content of the story up to that time.  If it is in the future somewhere, I cannot wait to get the text there so I can fit it in!  Sometimes then I will backtrack and adjust the text if needed to support this new idea.  Then the best part of it all is to find the proper words to convey the emotions felt by the characters in that instant.  I often search for some way to highlight that instant, and to freeze that frame briefly in the reader’s mind.  It might be the sound of the wind in the treetops or the sound of surf crashing in the distance or something of that sort that in the real world, any of us would remember later in recalling such an event from our memory of it.  Sometimes I end a chapter right when it happens or is revealed, and the next chapter opens with other characters in the story somewhere else doing whatever they are doing at that time.  I am hoping that the reader is in a state of shocked surprise at that instant.  Yet other times the conclusion of such an event is uproarious laughter by all characters present.
 
6.       How long did it take to write your latest release?  ‘Forever Young The Beginning’ took me around three months to write and then it took me three more months to edit and publish it, including doing my own cover art.
 
7.       Did you hire an editor to review your manuscript before publishing?  No.  I did go through the entire book eleven times cutting some 20,000 words from it, catching typos, punctuation errors, etc.  I did add in some extra villains with scores to settle.  That was for the next book.
 
8.       What are the future plans for you and this book?  This is to be the foundation for an open-ended series that will span the time from before the American Revolutionary War to modern times.  The sequel will center on the Revolutionary War itself and the behind the scenes role Adept vampires play on both sides in the fight for American independence.
 
9.       Have you published anything else?  Yes.  I wrote ‘Secrets of the Bible’ in 1998.  It is about bible codes at equally spaced intervals in the Hebrew canon of scripture and how they amplify the events in the very verses in which they are found.  For instance, in the verse where the bible says Pharaoh pursued Israel into the Red Sea, it spells ‘stupid’ at equally spaced intervals.  Thus the encoded word supports the events detailed in the text itself, being that the Egyptian army perished there.  There are hundreds of such things encoded at equally spaced intervals in the Hebrew Canon of Scripture.

10.   Do you have anything specific that you want to say to your readers?  Oh my, yes!  Thank you for taking a chance on me.  Thank you so very much for investing your time and money on nothing more than the product of my imagination.  I am both humbled and grateful.  And I am very open and approachable regarding feedback too, wanting only the very most enjoyable experience for my readers.
 

Remember that Forever Young The Beginning is

Unlike any vampire story you have ever read………..

 

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

CROSSING LINES new release by KEITH HOUGHTON

Wednesday 21st November, for my new novel “Crossing Lines” - the Gabe Quinn Thriller #2 – which follows on from the events described in “Killing Hope”. It’s been a challenge writing the new book from scratch over the last six months in and around work and family life, while maintaining the level of quality and intrigue, plus the plot twists and meaty length seen in the first book. Hopefully, you’ll like what I’ve done!

As always, if you do enjoy it, please consider putting a review on Amazon for me. I know not everyone feels comfortable writing a review, but it doesn’t have to be a lengthy passage – just a couple of lines will do (Amazon request a minimum of 20 different words). So if you can do, thank you! If not, no problem; I understand. You can also leave your review on both amazon.com and amazon.co.uk by logging into each site with your usual details, finding the book’s page and clicking on ‘Write A Customer Review’ down the page. Basically, the more positive reviews I get for my books, the more it enables me to devote more time to writing, which means the sooner I can get more books out to you! Phew!
"Crossing Lines” will go live on all the Amazon sites in the early hours GMT Wednesday – so it should be ready and available Stateside from midnight PST (or not long after) on Tuesday (today) onwards and on Wednesday afternoon for my Australian readers. You’ll be able to download it to your Kindle or your Kindle Apps. Just search for Crossing Lines and enjoy.
Oh, and don’t forget to spread the word!
Thanks for your support, and happy reading!
Best wishes,
Keith
View album
This album has 2 photos and will be available on SkyDrive until 18/02/2013.
Author Page Amazon UK - http://www.amazon.co.uk/l/B005UMEUJA?
 

Saturday, November 17, 2012

VICKI M. TAYLOR

Vicki M. Taylor



Award winning author, Vicki M. Taylor writes dramatic fiction with strong, unforgettable, real women characters involved in real life situations.

Vicki M. Taylor attacks the hard issues and brings them to the forefront with a deftness that outshines most other authors. Her ability to sink her teeth into these headline issues and pull the reader into the story makes her one of the best authors of this new century.
No issue is too controversial for Vicki. Murder, teenage suicide, domestic violence and more, you'll find Vicki M. Taylor's stories not only give you the harsh realities of the character's life but she wraps you up in their private emotional lives as well - daring you to not care, not feel, not read.
She lives in Florida with her husband, their American Eskimo dog, and Sun Conure parrot.


FACEBOOK AUTHOR PAGE:

FACEBOOK PERSONAL PAGE:


AUTHOR BLOG:


YOUR WRITING COACH:

 



Good Intentions is the tragic story of one woman’s efforts to help a teenage mother. Megan, fourteen and pregnant, needed a mom. Tracy, thirty-nine and already raising a large family, gave her a home. Neither was ready for what happened next.
Tracy Reynolds’ life is not her own. She works the night shift at the hospital and has three boys, two girls and a husband who works the opposite shift along with a menagerie of rescued pets. Somehow, she and her husband, Tim, have made it work with love, faith, and impeccable ethics.

Adding fourteen-year-old Megan and her newborn son to the mix was supposed to be uncomplicated. The adoption agency made it sound so easy. They painted Megan has a good child who had a rough life. She needed love and understanding and the stability of a respectable home and family. Tracy and Tim fit the bill and were fast tracked through the system and before they knew it trouble landed on their doorstep. Megan.

Megan rejected their family values and resisted from every direction when it came to learning how to live within their family dynamics and taking care of her son. She missed her friends and the people she knew when she worked as a prostitute. Despite court orders and her probation officer’s warnings, Megan secretly reconnected with her old friends and lover.

The Reynolds’ family spun out of control. Not one would be untouched by Hurricane Megan’s path of destruction.

Deceptions. Infidelity. Drugs. Child abuse. Cancer. Sexual abuse. Home invasion. The Reynolds’ went through it all. Would their family ever be the same?

GOOD INTENTIONS LINKS:


 


Rookie Detective Karen Sykes is out to prove she is good at her job, finding justice for a darkness in her past through law enforcement. She gets her first chance to shine with a case that hits a little too close to home. Like her younger sister, a four-year-old boy, has been brutally murdered. The case pairs her with Mike Connelly, an attractive crime scene technician, and sparks fly between the two of them. Mike resists the attraction and only adds more emotional conflict to the case.
When her partner becomes the latest victim and ends up in the hospital near death, Karen sets out to find the murderer before he hurts anyone else. Only the case gets trickier when the murder suspect ends up dead, leaving new clues to the real killer. Finding comfort in Mike's support, their relationship heats up, but so does the investigation. The killer has a plan. One that involves a Cat and Mouse game of hide and seek inside the hospital, where her partner struggles for his life. Karen discovers it takes more than catching a killer to make the pain of her past go away. It also takes opening her heart and learning to trust in others.

OUT FOR JUSTICE

Releases Nov 20, 2012



If you require additional information, please don't hesitate to ask.

Cheers,
Vicki

--
Vicki M. Taylor
Life is all about balance, check out My Balanced Life
Real Women. Real Life. Vicki M. Taylor, Author

Sunday, November 11, 2012

 

Sarah Buchynski

 
 
 
 

FROM MUNGAI AND THE GOA CONSTRICTOR Guest Post: To Catch a Reader by Sarah Buchynski Author of

 

Today, I am supposed to write about something I am passionate about in life. However, what really is passion? I would like to think of it as something in one’s life that brings them great joy. So, what brings me great joy in life? There are many things, but I am going to focus on writing. More specifically, creating a piece of work that others will be entertained when exposed to it. While I am writing, I am thinking of many things at once. How can I write down the ideas that are swimming in my head to convey them to the reader without boring them to death? What would sound better: It was morning and it came fast. The sky was filled with many colours; or: It was now dawn and it had come swiftly. With it came swirls of pink and red clouds. The colours painted a beautiful canvas in the sky. Just for the sake of illustrating a point, the first quote is relatively dull. It does get the information across, but is it entertaining? Will the reader be entranced by the scenario, and does it allow them to “enter” the story? I personally think it would not. The second example has a bit more detail - this detail can help a reader see the story inside their minds as they are reading. For fiction works, I think that it is important to paint a picture inside the reader’s mind. Since I am passionate about entertaining people through my literature, this concept is a priority for me to incorporate into my work. To read more….  CLICK HERE
 
 

Sunday, November 4, 2012

THE MAGIC WARBLE and author Victoria Simcox



 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

THE MAGIC WARBLE is a little about the book; it is 267 pgs long with 1-2 pictures per chap. It's listed a middle-grade read, ages 9-13.

 
 
Victoria was born in Scarborough, Ontario, Canada, to an Austrian immigrant mother, and a Dutch immigrant father. She now lives in Western Washington with her husband, Russ and their three children, Toby, Kristina, and William. Her other family members are a Chihuahua, named Pipsy and two cats, named Frodo and Fritz. Besides being an author, Victoria is a home-schooling mother of twelve years and an elementary school art teacher of eleven years. In her spare time, Victoria enjoys managing her two older children's Celtic band. She also loves writing, reading, painting watercolors, hiking, good movies, and just simply hanging out with her family and friends.

For the giveaway 3 ebooks US/international. Giveaway begins here at 4covert2overt on Sunday November 4th and continues until November 11th. Same giveaway will also be posted on The Bridge of deaths at Tumblr. Total giveaway is 3 e-books.


Join to enter :
 
 
 
Victoria Simcox on Twitter.

http://twitter.com/VictoriaSimcox