Teasers aplenty!

I'm trying to up my social media game, and that means posting teasers. I've been making them pretty consistently for a little while, but I thought I'd share them here.

Teasers for the Trilogy of Tinna (my favourites!)

The Red Slipper Series

Book 1, The Wizard King: 

Book 2, A Problem of Ghosts

 Book 3; The Beast With Silver Eyes (TBR in September)

There you have it so far. These are really fun to make!

And lastly, here is a little peek at what the costume for the cover of The Beast With Silver Eyes (a very subtle peek). Sumptuous velvet trimmed in silver (which looks a little gold in the yellow light).

Post-Comic-Con Recovery

Yes, it's taken me this long to recover from Wizard World Portland Comic Con. It's a pretty epic con and I sold SO MANY BOOKS, and met SO MANY AWESOME PEOPLE! I love the conventions so much, I can't stop doing them. I'm really looking forward to the Rose City Comic Con coming up in September.  I hope you'll drop by and visit!

Problem of Ghosts is off to a lovely start. I'm really having a great deal of fun with the Red Slipper series (Regency, With a Twist!)--and I think I'l be doing more of these books. Regency with wizards; Regency with Ghosts, and coming up soon (I hope) Regency with Werewolves and Regency with Giants! There are so many fun places to go with this one.

I also have some other genres on the cooker, and am slowly pecking my way through them. I've tried to refine my production process and stick to one project at a time. Being a Fly-By-The-Seat-Of-My-Pants kind of writer, with a healthy dose of attention deficit disorder, I tend to go Squirrel too often. But my mentor Shéa MacLeod is teaching me that focus is what works, and Problem of Ghosts is evidence of that. So apart from stopping to write down the new ideas that come along while on a project, I have been working exclusively on the book tentatively called Magpie.

Will I go back to epic fantasy, and possibly Tinna's world? I don't know yet. Tinna's trilogy has sort of burned itself through me and left me breathless. So now I am focusing on lighter fiction.  The time may come when I go back to check in on Tinna, her two husbands, Avria and the baby Istvan.

In the meantime; I sold MANY of the trilogy at Comic Con this year.  I even snagged a Lady Sif who was so reminiscent of Tinna in book 2, I had to have a photo op.

My table assistant cosplayed at Tinna from book one, but would you believe I didn't get a decent image of her? I'll bug her and see if she got one.  She spent the convention like a little embassador, roaming wildly and spreading the word of Tinna and her world.

I'm plugging along! I'll have a fabulous giveaway to offer soon, so stay tuned!

What's new and wonderful?

First and foremost, Tinna's Reign; Book Three of the Trilogy of Tinna is available for download in eBook format.  The hard-copy will follow soon.  Along with the release of this book is a full redesign of the covers for the trilogy and I think all three are mighty bold and fun.  Do you not agree?

Book 1, Tinna's Promise
Available at Barnes & Noble for DL.

  

Book 2; Tinna's Might
Available at Barnes & Noble for DL

Book 3: Tinna's Reign
Available for DL at Barnes & Noble.

Or just click here to view the series.

So that's one project that's finally done. ::Oy:: It hasn't been easy to get my stuff together, I won't lie, but I've gotten a bit of a boot in the pants from this year's Wizard World Convention. I had such a great time, and met a couple of fans, and there's nothing better than that for validation, is there?

So I have other projects underway. Something post-apocalyptic, some of the ones I mentioned prior, and another alternate timeline, which will take time, because it requires some research.  But I am working on stuff, this I promise you. :)

So download book three and enjoy the conclusion to this trilogy. Will there be another set of books in Oromoii? Who is to know? ::smile::

A giveaway that you should not miss!

Click here to enter.

Greetings all!

I've thrown in with a group of independent authors whose works feature strong, female characters.  I have always admired strong women in fiction, and have always striven to stray away from the archetype wilting violet, waiting for the world to rescue her.  Some of my girls may start off seemingly helpless or frail, but in almost all my books, all you have to do is watch as each of my ladies finds her source of power and uses it to steer her own fate.  There are no Bella Swans in my books, and there are no cookie-cutter, hot-tempered silly putty romance novel milquetoasts in any of the books being offered in this giveaway (at least we hope!)

There are (count 'em) 23 authors participating in this giveaway, offering a total of 29 books to the winner(s).  Tinna's Promise and Tinna's Might are in there with the prize package, which also includes gift cards and other lovely things.  The winner gets two hard copies (signed) of the books, and the runner-up gets two digital copies (or coupons to Smashwords.com for free download).

So click on through, and enter to win.  Almost 30 books of ass-kickin' power-chicks is no prize to thumb your nose at. :)  Good luck!

Comicon 2014 and More

Greetings all.

I've been in stealth-mode. Being a new mom ain't easy, but hell if it isn't amazing. It is filled with all sorts of experiences that will end up bleeding into the stuff I write, this is without a doubt.  Aaaanyway... What's new? Not too much, but there are some things here and there.

I've added Blackroot and am working on adding the Belletrist in as Print-On-Demand in addition to eBook format. I will post links as they come.  The Belletrist will be as inexpensive as I can swing it, since the eBook is free, but I will be adding illustrations for each short story to make it special.

Also, I have secured a spot in at the WizardWorld Comic-Con at the Oregon Convnention Center in Portland on January 24, 25, and 26 of 2014. I'm very excited. It is my first comic convention. I will have a stock of all of my books with me, I will be signing, and selling, and also carrying some art material and information and such from my book-cover illustrator, Abigail Larson.  It's a ways off, but if pregnancy taught me anything.. Time flies, so plan on coming and stop by my table to say hi. :)

I'm working on a new manuscript and will be going back to Tinna's Reign soon.  I have been working on writing again, which is good. So that's it for immediate news. Follow me on Facebook, and you are free to friend me if you can handle my Atheist-themed posts. ::hehheh::

Toodle-oo.

I am writing, writing, writing.

I am quickly discovering that with ebooks, the more titles, the better. At least that’s what I’m being told by a variety of authors who publish ebooks, and this has been somewhat proven to me by the rather brisk sale of the Blackroot novel I put on Smashwords sometime back. At 99¢, it is the best-selling ebook I have, outselling both Tinna’s Promise and even the free short-story collection, The Belletrist. It’s sort of shocking because Blackroot is such a departure from what I usually write, it’s gory and graphic, and a little weird. But the readers seem to like it. iBooks users especially, and lots of Sony Reader users. The desire to offer more titles has given me a creative kick in the pants, but on the flip side, it has also presented me with way too much distraction.

I am currently about 60% on Tinna’s Reign, editing for Tinna’s Might has slowed to a crawl, but it is still moving. I’d say we’ve moved up to about 84% completed, and I have two other books I’ve been pecking at, one called the Wizard King and another The Blue Journal. The Blue Journal is sort of out of my comfort zone, being written in journal form in first-person, which is challenging to someone who almost always writes as a narrator. The Wizard King is a strange hybrid of a Regency romance novel and a fantasy. I started it about four years ago, but it fell into my ‘false start’ pile, and then I was browsing my old starts and rediscovered it, and found some fresh ideas popping into my head as I started reading it.

So this means I’m working on four books concurrently. Probably not a good plan—most people will tell you to pick a project and stick to it until you’re finished, but it’s a bit hard to do when you are having a hard time finding inspiration on one, and have come to a complete halt while another has found a little pocket of inspiration to feed it. I guess, as I always do, I will go where my instincts point me, and let the organic, creative process work itself out.

The point of it all is to offer a broad range of titles for readers. I have the bones for a few good, meaty novels, and I’m working on finishing up the Tinna Trilogy. I may revisit Oromoii later on, but for now, I’m going to concentrate on these other titles and keep out of my false start folder for a few months—just in case something else catches my creative eye.

Argh.

A NookBook at last.

It took me a while to figure out that Tinna's Promise was not available in any e-book format on Barnes & Noble. Then it took me another eon to figure out how to go about having it put on the NookBook list. I had to go through their PubIt! program... which took three long days for it to appear (not to mention a LOT of formatting I had to perform beforehand). I forgot where I put the final version of the manuscript after I sent it to the publisher... so I had to buy the publisher's ebook version, cut and paste it into an .rtf file, and start cleaning it up and reformatting it. I did the best I could considering how tedious it was re-constituting lines where there were breaks inserted, re-spacing chapters, etc, on to mention deleting page numbers and crap like that. There are still some annoying issues here and there that need fixing.

But it's there! Finally; and like the Kindle version, I've offered it up for a mere $4.00 (which isn't a lot). It's still $6.00 on the publisher's page... so it's a deal. There might be a formatting muss-up here and there, but please have patience... I've been refining it as I go along, and I will be adding in the first chapter of Tinna's Might on the end of it this weekend. Please help my book climb the ranks at the NookBook site (if you're nook owners). It's in ePub format... I think a few readers can open those.

Editing on Tinna's Might continues on through the arduous process... I'll keep everyone apprised. Editors are busy people.

First copy, fresh off the press....

It's done. The new cover for Tinna's Promise is in place at last. There are a few details that need mopping up around the interwebs, of which a few I can take care of myself. A few of the digital e-book sites still have the old cover on them; I'm not sure how to go about changing that information on each site, but at least the big guys are switched over; Amazon, Barns & Noble, etc. My Search-Inside option on Amazon is in the process of change as well... I'm hoping in the next few months, this lovely cover will be the one presented on all available sales sites.

Miss Abigail Larson, artiste extraordinaire, did a lovely job. She put up with quibbling from TWO people about this and about that... change this detail here, change this detail there.... Poor thing! She bore it with grace and produced a beautiful cover that we are all proud of.

Abigail's style is has a soft, subtle edge of the dreary and dark in it. Her other artwork is beautifully gloomy; but in creating the less gloomy subject matter on my covers, she does not lose her sense of stark beauty and whimsy. It takes skill to create something for someone's vision, and to still have it be uniquely yours. She accomplished that incredibly well. She really managed to maintain her unique style, but also respect what we were asking for. She's has off-the-charts talent, and I foresee great things for this artist. Here are her two primary websites:

Abigail Larson's DeviantArt page.
Abigail Larson's Main Website

She has completed the cover for Tinna's Might (which is STUNNING) and she is currently working on the cover for yes... Book THREE. I am on the edge of my seat to see what she does with the concept we put together, we asked her to just run with it this time, there are no constraints of existing story to keep her reined in--so this cover will be beautiful, I know. I haven't written a jot of book three yet, but I'll be starting fairly soon, after the editing process is finished for book two.

Editors, like everyone else in this economy are hurting; and one ad brought me over 80 responses from editors. Yipes. Anyway... I'll keep you apprised of the progress of book two, but in the meantime, click through to Amazon or B&N and grab yourself a copy of Tinna's Promise with this beautiful artwork on the cover!

Thank you Abigail!

Organics.

I’ve hear a lot of questions about starting a book off with character who isn’t immediately likeable. I guess I don’t always follow convention… I just write organically… and for some reason it seemed natural for me to start Tinna’s Promise with Taneth and his smug rants that get him booted from Hildercross Academy. It just felt right I guess.

I hear the following things about Taneth as most readers start the book: He’s a geek… he’s too smug; he’s annoying… I tell them to read on. Then they do, and they stop grumbling at me. Making Taneth kind of a superior, pompous jerk at the beginning of Tinna’s Promise was the whole point. I wanted to exhibit a person’s capacity for change and growth. I broadened his views, opened his mind and humbled him. I think both Taneth and Tinna show great evidence of change. Each experience that occurs during the book opens their eyes; brings out the parts of them that are noble and likeable. In the end, I can’t help but root for my characters, and find understanding for them, despite their flaws.

In a way, Tinna’s Might starts with a less-than-loveable character. However, the question is, will he ever become someone better? It’s hard to know. Heck, I’m not even sure yet.

For those of you who have read Tinna’s Promise, Tinna’s Might is going to be a pretty astonishing jump. We’re about twenty years from Tinna’s Promise; and the world is so very different. There are new characters you will meet, familiar ones you already know, and a world in turmoil. I’m having fun finishing up this book—and am already thinking about where to go from here. But, I have focus on getting this book polished up and ready for publication. Padding, scanning, pre-editing, and then off to a real editor to start the arduous process of putting my ‘organic’ work in order, and chasing down all my little grammatical issues. ::eep::

I’m working on it. 

A Fresh Start

Tinna's Promise has been available and published for three years this March. Part of my effort to focus more on my creative side, I've decided Tinna needs a revamp; and that includes my long-neglected website and everything else that fell by the roadside when life got in the way. Hey, it happens to all of us. :)

Part of this revamp means a new look for the original book in what is becoming the Tinna series. This includes a new cover design by artist Abigail Larson (extremely talented young lady) who has also provided me with a design for book two in the Tinna series; Tinna's Might. Yes, I have been working on this book as well--and I am striving to get it finished, pre-edited, then fully edited before the end of this year (ambitious considering how things have been going creatively for me... but I am trying!). The new covers have injected new fire in my veins and reinvigorated my little lost writing muse.

So I created this blog to make myself accountable for my promises. And promises are pivotal in my world, and in Tinna's world.

So it begins. :::sigh:::

MM