For a ticket to a fast and hawt ride on the rollercoaster of angst and love, the line starts here:
B10 Mediaworx (print and digital)
Amazon (print and Kindle)
OmniLit (digital)
Barnes & Noble (print and nook)
Smashwords (digital)
And its first review!
Magdalene, the third book in the Dunham series, will be released on Sunday, April 24, 2011. This is the last book in the series with contemporary characters; book four, Dunham, is an historical and book five, tentatively titled Delilah, is post-apocalypse.
For this, I thought it would be fun to have a contest. The grand prize winner will receive an Easter basket full of goodies pertaining mostly to Magdalene, and five runners up will win a trilogy ebook. Here’s the grand prize:
(Click to make big; a couple of the items are not shown.)
1. Print copies of The Proviso, Stay, and Magdalene, all signed,
2. Two canisters of Jacques Torres hot chocolate (one milk and one spicy),
3. Magdalene mug and mousepad,
4. One new CD of Carmina Burana,
5. A thumb drive with all three books plus their playlists,
and
6. A super secret and sexy prize hinting at what Mitch and Cassie might have done in a scene I never wrote…
…all in a nice Easter basket that will arrive at the grand prize winner’s doorstep at least a week before the release date. (Even if you live out of the country. I can do that. Because I’m in charge.)
2011-04-04 UPDATE: I failed to remember that many of the songs on the playlists are full albums, so instead of burning them to the stick, and in addition to Carmina Burana (orchestral version), these will be included as full (new) CDs: The Piano (Michael Nyman), Messiah (Handel), Nutcracker (Tchaikovsky), and the Rach 3 (Rachmaninoff). (Unfortunately, the chamber version of Carmina Burana that I have is an import and very hard to get.)
The five runners up will receive their ebooks at the close of the contest.
But every contest has rules, right?
1. Post about Magdalene and link to this blog post anywhere on the web.
2. Come back here and comment on where you posted it.
3. The more places you link from, the more chances you have to win. (One link per comment.)
4. The contest runs through midnight, April 10, 2011, US Central Daylight Saving Time (Chicago).
5. If you’re related to me or you worked on the book, you’re not eligible. I will know who you are. *ahemDudeahem*
That’s it.
I’ll use random.org to pick the grand prize winner and five runners up.
Like, by somebody else. (Inorite?)
So Freya’s Bower (one of the veteran epublishers in the landscape) has this annual anthology called Dreams and Desires, where the proceeds from it go to a charity. This year’s charity is A Window Between Worlds, a non-profit organization that provides art supplies and training for art as a healing tool free of charge to battered women’s shelters across the United States.
Marci Baun, Freya’s Bower’s Perpetrator In Chief, asked me to contribute a story to the anthology, and because it’s a) for a good cause and b) for the #1 cause on my personal list of good causes, I said SURE! The result? Short story “Twenty-Dollar Rag.”
For fans of the Dunham series, the hero in this one is the weird kid from Stay (who wears kilts and sleeps in trees), Vachel Whittaker, all grown up and possibly more normal than the rest of the Dunham men. Lo, there is no religion or politics in it.
Here’s the blurb for Dreams and Desires:
True love, freedom, self-worth, security… Dreams and desires of the ordinary woman, or man. From a thirty-something, single woman who wants a baby to a jeweler who finds love with the least expected man to a widow who wants to finish her degree and find love to a young, futuristic woman who’s still searching for herself to an 18th century saloon girl whose lost hope but still dreams of love to a man who has escaped his abusive lover but has lost himself. This collection of nine stories celebrates the attainment of all one can dream or desire. Which one do you secretly yearn for?
And here’s the blurb for “Twenty-Dollar Rag”:
One night. One man. One dress.
Regina Westlake sees nothing wrong with her clubbing lifestyle until the gorgeous guy cleaning her pool refuses to play her games. When he’s hired to be her arm candy for a formal event, he makes his disdain for her clear by re-dressing her in something far more appropriate than what she had worn to the party.
Shattered, she takes his contempt, his dress, the memory of his kiss—and rebuilds her life from the ground up. She never expects to see him again, but when she does…
Buy the collection, have a few hours of entertainment and help somebody out at the same time. Win-win!
Dreams and Desires ($5.99)
“Twenty-Dollar Rag” (12,000 words) ($2.99)
I want to thank everyone so much for helping me in my experiment, retweeting, Facebook posting, emailing, message board posting, and downloading. Nothing makes an author happier than when people are sharing in her vision. The links to the free download are broken now, replaced with links to the purchase point. The samples on the sidebar are back, so you can still try before you buy.
Final download tally in 26-1/2 hours: The Proviso, 420 and Stay 364.
* * * * *
I’m going to try something here. Y’all know I’m a writer and I have books for sale. More than 1500 copies of the sample for The Proviso have been downloaded, and 450 for Stay. That’s awesome! Thank you!
The thing is, I’m excited about the world I created and I want you to be as excited as I am. But I’m a new-to-almost-everybody writer and I write long, angsty, family saga books that can be polarizing, so one might be hesitant to try it. I get that.
So just for the next little while (a couple of days or so 24 hours), I’m going to offer the ebook versions of The Proviso (book 1) and Stay (book 2) for free. In their entirety. (The files are huge.)
Enjoy!
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UPDATE: I’m going to disable the sample links on the sidebar while the books are available free. I don’t want somebody to pick up the sample, thinking it’s the whole thing and then be upset.
UPDATE 2: This is good until Friday, February 26, 2010, at 3:08 p.m. CST. When I said “today only,” I meant for 24 hours. What, you can’t read my mind???
UPDATE 3: So, exactly 24 hours after I posted the links, what did I get? Numbers. I don’t really know what they mean, but I’ll share them. In 24 hours:
The Proviso: 385
Stay: 333
I’m not sure why there is such a discrepancy between the two, but I’m going to guess it had something to do with file size and download time. I’m breaking these links by midnight, so hurry! The samples are back up on the sidebar, plus they are littered elsewhere throughout the web.
Anyway, thank you all for participating in my experiment and I hope that you enjoy my imaginary friends as much as I do. And if you do, could you tell somebody else who might?
. Thank you!
I’m in the middle of writing Magdalene, book 3 in my series.
If you’re passingly familiar with Christian myth, it should be quite clear where I’m going with this.
But let me tell you a little about my main characters.
Mitch Hollander, PhD, metallurgical engineering; founder and CEO of Hollander Steelworks, headquartered in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He is also a widowed Mormon bishop who served half an 18-month mission in Paris, France. He likes fast cars and ZZ Top.
Cassie St. James, MBA; Vice President-Restructuring Division, Blackwood Securities. In a previous life, she was a high-dollar hooker. She is divorced, lives in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, has four adult children (all of whom live with her), engages in strategic revenge, and possesses a latent penchant for silliness.
So I was on the search for a special little gift that Mitch could give Cassie that meant something but was not expensive. After all, what do you give a woman who can buy anything she wants?
Naturally, I turned to books because I have a vested interest in people buying books (product placement!). I decided that Mitch might have a special book that he may have acquired on his mission and is probably in French. Naturally, I googled, and then headed over to Wikipedia where I stumbled upon a list of French novels. I doggedly worked my way through them one by one, read the synopses, then picked one based on a vague similarity of the plot to Cassie’s past.
I wrote it into my book as if I’d read the thing (but hadn’t), then decided I probably should read it. And it freaked me out. Big time.
The book? Angélique, the Marquise of Angels by Anne & Serge Golon, first published in 1958.
Unbeknownst to me, this was a huge hit in Europe and apparently a big hit here. I’d never heard of it, never stumbled across it in the intellectual drunkenness of my youth (that actually amazes me).
The book is heroine-centric, so it’s all about Angélique. The parallel I found between Angélique and Cassie was that they both had arranged marriages. The similarity stopped there.
Angélique didn’t know her contracted husband, feared him at first, then grew to love him.
Cassie knew the man she was to marry, adored him from afar and was eager to marry him, and then quickly realized that her marriage was a sham.
Cassie is familiar with the story via film, so she has no problem making this parallel and had, in fact, written a paper on it during her undergrad years.
What doesn’t show up in the plot summary is a description of the hero’s “unusual way of life.” Joffray (the hero) is described as “scientist, musician, philosopher.” I didn’t think much of it. Mitch is a scientist with his own lab, true, but he’s also a CEO and I’ve always thought of him in those terms. He’s not a musician. He’s not a philosopher. At heart, he’s a blue-collar steel worker who loves steel enough to reinvent himself and the industry; steel is his life’s work.
Turns out that Joffray’s science is metallurgy. That was freaky.
Turns out that Joffray is hung out to dry, religiously speaking, for reasons that have nothing to do with religion and everything to do with power, politics, and money. That was even freakier.
As I got deeper and deeper into the book, I felt like I’d entered the Twilight Zone.
Then I got to the end. Angélique plunges out into the cold night, penniless and powerless, to exact revenge. That is so Cassie. I nearly expired from the freakiness the universe had perpetrated upon my person.
I couldn’t have picked a better novel if I’d written it myself.
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PS: Yes, I know Mary Magdalene wasn’t a prostitute.
PPS: In the mid-1980s, missions were, in fact, only 18 months long for men.
Yup, it’s here, November 27, 2009, Black Friday, the official release date for Stay, Book 2 in the Dunham Series.
*
At 12, Vanessa Whittaker defied her family to save 17-year-old bad boy Eric Cipriani from wrongful imprisonment and, possibly, death. She’d hoped for a “thank you” from him, a kiss on the cheek, but before she could grow up and grow curves, he left town.
Fourteen years later, Vanessa is a celebrity chef at the five-star Ozarks resort she built. Eric is the new Chouteau County prosecutor on his way to the White House.
Four hours apart and each tied to their own careers, their worlds have no reason to intersect until a funeral brings Vanessa back to Chouteau County, back to face the man for whom she’d risked so much, the only man she ever wanted—
—the only man she can’t have.
*
For those of you who read The Proviso, you know it ended on January 1, 2009. Stay picks up with the adult Eric Cipriani (Knox’s executive assistant prosecutor) and Vanessa Whittaker (Knox’s ward and business partner) on January 5, 2009, five days after Eric replaces Knox as the Chouteau County prosecutor. “The Pack” are secondary characters, with enough face time to give you a good idea what’s going on in their lives.
You can special order it in print from your local bookstore or library (it’s in the Ingram’s catalog—don’t let them tell you different) with ISBN 9780981769639. You can order it in print online at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, Powell’s, and Book Depository (Borders is, apparently, out of the loop). You can get it in digital at Scribd, Amazon for Kindle, and Smashwords.
What we hope you do, though, is buy directly from the publisher, B10 Mediaworx, in either print or digital, as it’s cheaper for everybody.
Finally, Stay has a website, just like The Proviso does. What’s there is not all I have to put there, but regular updates will happen to make it fresh.
Magdalene, Book 3 in the Dunham series, has a tentative release date of April 24, 2011.
This is the final installment on the covers series (parts 1, 2, and 3). I never got this finished for Publishing Renaissance, so this is fresh and new.
Thank you for your continuing indulgence on the travails of designing a cover if you’re not a designer of covers. As I’ve said in the past, it took me almost a year and hundreds of hours of Photoshopping to come to the cover I did, which I affectionately call The Bewbies™. Originally, The Proviso was one book and it was enormous. Then I figured I’d probably do better to split it out into 3 parts, 1 part per romance. Then I realized there was no way to write this in three parts without making everybody crazy.
We are now at the final cycle of decisionmaking, when The Bewbies™ perked up.
Read the rest of this entry »
Originally published at Publishing Renaissance on February 12, 2009.
Thank you for your continuing indulgence on the travails of designing a cover if you’re not a designer of covers. As I said last week, it took me almost a year and hundreds of hours of Photoshopping to come to the cover I did, which I affectionately call The Bewbies™. Originally, The Proviso was one book and it was enormous. I originally titled it Barefoot Through Fire. Then I figured I’d probably do better to split it out into 3 parts, 1 part per romance. This is the story of book 3.
Read the rest of this entry »
Originally published at Publishing Renaissance January 30, 2009.
Thank you for your continuing indulgence on the travails of designing a cover if you’re not a designer of covers. As I said last week, it took me almost a year and hundreds of hours of Photoshopping to come to the cover I did, which I affectionately call The Bewbies™. Originally, The Proviso was one book and it was enormous. I originally titled it Barefoot Through Fire. Then I figured I’d probably do better to split it out into 3 parts, 1 part per romance. This is the story of book 2.
Read the rest of this entry »
I’m a visual person, so when I write, I have to have some fairly specific object or person in mind in order to describe it. I write because I can’t paint, so if I have never seen what I see in my head, I’ll try to find something relatively close and make sure I can look at it often.
A lot of authors use real people as the basis of the looks of their characters. Some authors even reference those people in the text (I did it with Giselle and Bryce). Some readers like it, some don’t. Some readers like faces on their covers, some don’t. Some readers (*ahem* Th. *ahem*) don’t like any description at all. It gets to be a balancing act for an author not to intrude on a reader who likes to imagine the character, yet provide enough for the reader who wants to know which famous person the character most looks like.
Anyway, I’ve been debating writing this post for about a year now, but I’m going to go ahead and bite the bullet. Wanna know who I had in mind while writing The Proviso and Stay and Magdalene (albeit Magdalene‘s only about half written)? Here you go, in order of actual appearance across the books:
Originally published at Publishing Renaissance January 6, 2009.
If you’ll all indulge me, I though it’d be fun to do a little series on the evolution of a cover by a non-cover artist/designer. It took me almost a year and hundreds of hours of Photoshopping to come to the cover I did, which I affectionately call The Bewbies™. Originally, The Proviso was one book and it was enormous. I originally titled it Barefoot Through Fire. Then I figured I’d probably do better to split it out into 3 parts, 1 part per romance. This is where the cover journey begins.
Read the rest of this entry »
June 21, 2009
I’m doing this without my editor’s approval, but hey! I’m feeling rebellious this evening.
Stay is the second book in the Dunham series. It is not entirely necessary for you to read The Proviso before you read Stay, but I do recommend it. Now, neither main character is an actual Dunham by blood or marriage, nor are they Mormons (shocker, I know, but there’s still plenty religion, money, politics, and sex), but there is a method to my madness in the series order. If you have read The Proviso, you might have (or not) picked up on a hint or two that these (very) minor characters might have rather . . . interesting . . . histories that were not explained.
Here’s the official back-of-book blurb:
At 12, Vanessa defied her family to save 17-year-old bad boy Eric from wrongful imprisonment and, possibly, death. She’d hoped for a “thank you” from him, a kiss on the cheek, but before she could grow up and grow curves, he left town.
Fourteen years later, Vanessa is a celebrity chef at the five-star Ozarks resort she built. Eric is the new Chouteau County prosecutor on his way to the White House.
Four hours apart and each tied to their own careers, their worlds have no reason to intersect until a funeral brings Vanessa back to Chouteau County, back to face the man for whom she’d risked so much, the only man she ever wanted—
—the only man she can’t have.
* * * * *
DECEMBER 14, 1994
“People versus Eric Niccolò Cipriani. Charges of statutory rape, sexual assault in the first degree, and forcible rape in the first degree.”
“Ms. Leventen, how does the defendant plead?”
“Not guilty.”
“Hilliard?”
“Remand, your honor. The victim is thirteen.”
“So ordered.”
* * * * *
So today I’m listening to Babs and this line keeps jumping out at me: “Art isn’t easy, even when you’re hot. Advancing art is easy; financing it is not…Every time I start to feel defensive, I remember vinyl is expensive.”
In case no one missed me, I’ll tell you what I’m doing:
1. Damned Day Job. You know, I’m awfully glad to have one right now, so I’ll refrain from bitching. See aforementioned financing art to understand why I feel obliged to tell you that.
2. Had a very short deadline drop in my lap for a project I feel privileged to be part of, so there is much e-mailing and such going on around my office in order to get this yumminess out into the marketplace.
3. Stay is finished sorta. A secondary character (a throwaway, but how come all my redshirts end up demanding their own stories?) garnered some attention from alpha readers who said, “Hey, what happened to him?” The original story with Vanessa and Eric is finished and in the hands of beta readers. Yet again I’ve decided to do something bizarre, which is to say, put two mirror-image stories back-to-back in the same spine.
4. Magdalene is 3/4 finished. I believe Cassie St. James is the woman I’ve most enjoyed writing. Ever.
This balancing the art with the marketing is getting on my nerves, quite frankly. I’m a writer and I love my imaginary friends; I settle in with them and I’m mentally…gone…for days.
Plus, I’m still convinced that an author’s brand is the writing, the stories themselves. How can you have a brand that’s the writing if you only have 1 product?
I like blogging, don’t get me wrong—when I have something to say. I also didn’t like feeling like a slave to my stats, who’s visiting, where they’re coming from, what they’re reading…
Some days, I just don’t have anything to say and you know, I think more people should just not say anything when they have nothing to say. Not every second of every day must be filled with words just because we fear silence.
