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KING OF SWORDS is here!

After all my talking about it, I’ve finally gotten KING OF SWORDS onto Smashwords and Amazon. I know my website listed the release date as “November” and I’ve made it just under the wire. Last day of November! Of course, it’s not quite everywhere yet. I’m still working on Barnes & Noble & ARe, and Smashwords will be sending it around to a number of other ebook retailers.

I’ll post more links as they become available and I become aware of them. Meanwhile, I hope some of you can access the books from either Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006GBXDQU) or Smashwords (http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/108781).

Here’s a little more about the book:

David is a newly retired special ops soldier, looking to find his way in an unfamiliar civilian world. His first step is to visit an old friend, the owner of a bar called The Rabbit Hole on a distant space station. While there, he meets an intriguing woman who holds the keys to his future.

Adele has a special ability, handed down through her family. Adele can sometimes see the future. She doesn’t know exactly why she’s been drawn to the space station where her aunt deals cards in a bar that caters to station workers and ex-military. She only knows that she needs to be there. When she meets David, sparks of desire fly between them and she begins to suspect that he is part of the reason she traveled halfway across the galaxy.

Pirates gas the inhabitants of the station while Adele and David are safe inside a transport tube and it’s up to them to repel the invaders. Passion flares while they wait for the right moment to overcome the alien threat and retake the station. But what good can one retired soldier and a civilian do against a ship full of alien pirates?

Note: This novella was previously available in an anthology titled Fortune’s Fool, which is now out of print.

Happy Thanksgiving

Great News!

I finally got a copy of RT Book Reviews Magazine and discovered, much to my surprise and delight, that HIDDEN TALENT was chosen as the one & only Top Pick in the Erotic Romance category for January 2012. How cool is that? I’ve never had a Top Pick before and it really tickles me pink!

The reviewer, Sabrina Cooper, called the book “…riveting and fascinating.” Love it! She also said, “She paints a colorful world where psychics are the norm and sexual pleasure is explored and cherished.” And that, “…lovers of both the paranormal and erotic genres will be enchanted.”

I’m so happy, I could tap dance.

The book also continues to do really well on Amazon, consistently ranking in the Top 100 for Fantasy & Futuristic Romance since it’s release in October. That is so awesome and I can’t thank my readers enough for giving me this kind of positive reinforcement. Maybe I’m fickle, but when I see things like this, it just makes me want to write more! I guess everyone likes a little bit of positive proof now and again that they’re not existing in a vacuum.

To celebrate my first ever Top Pick, I think I’m going to spend what’s left of my day writing. Yay!

A Funny Sort of Day

Today was a strange one. I raked some leaves and started to put the garden to bed for the winter a bit, though I’ve been very lax on doing yard work for a while now. It was something my mother loved and she would come in covered in mud, happy as can be. She loved getting dirty in the garden and making things grow. Plants, flowers… people.

My Mom was a nurturer and an encourager. She gave advice freely and well. If you weren’t in school, she usually counselled you to go back and get your degree. If you had a bachelors, she encouraged you to get a masters. If you had a masters, it was time for a Ph.D…. you get the idea. She was an educator through and through and she loved seeing people succeed and helping them get there.

She’s been on my mind a lot these past weeks. This was the time of year when she was ill, facing her mortality with a great deal of fear and uncertainty. I’d have spared her that if I could have.

Anyway… today, I finally repotted a plant that Stella Price and the Tease Publishing girls sent for my Mom’s funeral. It was a plant – not cut flowers. Stella knew my Mom well enough to know that was her preference. It was a dish garden – and since we didn’t have a wake – something my mother did NOT want - it was the only arrangement to be with her in the funeral home when we were allowed to see her for a few minutes before the service.

Morbid, isn’t it? Sorry. I don’t mean to bring you down, but this collection of tropical house plants has been going strong since then. For almost two years, it’s been sitting in this room with me, day in, day out. It’s gotten bigger and bigger, outgrowing the pretty green dish it’s been in. It actually cracked the ceramic in a few places! It’s been doing so well – and all I have to do is water it a bit.

But it’s so huge, I finally decided for the good of the plants, it should be split up. I broke it up into four separate pots, leaving only one of the original plants in the original dish. Hopefully they’ll all survive my manhandling.

A lot has been going on here behind the scenes that has my emotions on a roller coaster. Bad time of year for me and all that. But I am writing. Slowly. But I am writing. Work is progressing well on a new dragon book that I suppose will be out sometime next summer.

In addition to all the home stuff, two of my friends – small press authors at that (YAY! Go us!) - just found out that they made both the NY Times and USA Today Best Seller Lists. I’m so darn happy for them! So major congrats to Jayne Rylon and Mari Carr on the success of their book Eastern Ambitions. I’ve read it and it’s darn good! Actually, it made my cry in places. It’s a great book and if you haven’t read it, or any of the others in the Compass Brothers series, I’d highly recommend them!!!

So here’s hoping tomorrow is a better day. I wish the same for all of you, if you’ve bothered to read this far, you deserve it! LOL!

Bizzy, Bizzy, Bizzzzzzzy!!!

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while. I came back from RAW and dove right into renovations. Nine days out of the last ten have been spent running back and forth to home improvement stores so the guys we hired to do a “small” job of fixing a leak in the ceiling could focus on ripping out half the ceilings in the entire house, putting on an entirely new roof and re-doing the bathroom. I’m not even going into the repair work that still has to be done outside. Yikes!

Suffice to say, I am TIRED! But, I’m feeling very virtuous today because I got up around 6:30am (probably because of the early days I’ve been putting in to oversee the construction) and started writing. I got a nice word count in before I took Dad out for breakfast and then went food shopping. I haven’t had a chance to do some decent grocery shopping since we got back and the cupboards were getting a bit bare. That’s fixed now, thank goodness and I plan to spend another hour or two writing now.

What am I working on, you ask? (I can just hear you asking! LOL) It’s a new dragon book. I’ve been ordered by my editor to “Drop everything!” and write a new dragon book ASAP. So that’s what I’m doing. I’ve got the hero and heroine together and established some of their internal conflicts. Now I’m going to throw a monkey wrench into the works by introducing a nice, big, juicy, external conflict. Whee!

See, I’ve been using the drive time and construction time to plot out this book in my head and this is really the first chance I’ve had to write it down. I think it’s going to be an exciting, hot, sexy story with a good bit of adventure. It may also add a nice twist to the dragonverse. We’ll have to see how it goes. I’m about 13,000 words into it right now and hope to up that word count considerably over the next two, blessedly, construction-free days! Wish me luck!!!

Lora Leigh’s RAW, et al…

So much has been going on the past week or so! First, I had a new book release on Tuesday, Oct. 25th from Samhain. It’s called HIDDEN TALENT and it’s doing really well, having hit #2 already on the Samhain Best Seller list and rising to somewhere in the 30′s for all of Amazon Fantasy & Futuristic Romance. How cool is that?

I also spent the last 4-5 days traveling to and from Lora Leigh’s Reader Appreciation Weekend (RAW) in the beautiful mountains of Maryland. The hotel was stellar! Situated on the edge of a small lake, with a golf course on one side and woodlands all around. There was a spa, and I even found a few minutes to get a facial that did wonders for my state of mind.

Great friends were also there to make the weekend memorable. I got to see so many great people… it would be hard to list them all because I just know I’d forget someone somehow. Highlights were meeting Kim Rocha, a super fan of romance who lives very near me. I also had a great time talking to Cheryl, who knew the details of my dragon world better than I do! I was so honored to learn someone cares so deeply for the world I created. Truly.

I had the opportunity to gossip and catch up with Jacki Frank and her assistant, Natalie, who are both a lot of fun. And speaking of fun, Mari Carr and Jayne Rylon really made the weekend for me. They are more fun than a barrel of monkeys. I mean that from the bottom of my heart. In fact, Mari and I got to gossip and laugh through the whole booksigning, since we were sharing a table. Sylvia Day was next to us and it was great to see her again too. The very first time I went to RAW, Sylvia and I ended up sharing one of the rooms in that crazy lodge at Carter Caves State Park. Two city girls (from opposite coasts) stuck in the middle of the woods. It was comical.

There was a poignant moment when I saw Veronica Chadwick for the first time in about 2 years. She asked how my Mom was doing – apparently they’d had a long talk at some convention or other a few years back that made an impression on her. I had to tell her my Mom was gone and I was touched by the fact that she teared up at the news. So few of my romance writer friends have ever met my Mom. Mom wasn’t a fan of any kind of fiction. She didn’t read a lot for pleasure. She was always on the move and didn’t sit still long enough to bury her nose in a book the way I always have. We were opposite in that way, but it didn’t matter. We were still best friends. It was hard to have to tell Ronnie that Mom was gone, but gratifying to know that she remembered her with fondness.

Lora Leigh was a gracious hostess and there were lots of goodies to bring home, including a really cool book that had two pages for each author. Let’s see… I met so many great people, it’s hard to recall all the awesome highlights… lunch with Mari, Jayne and Ivelisse (I hope I spelled that right!)… chatting with Lori Foster, Angela Knight and Cheyenne McCray (three of my fave authors!)… the pajama party where nobody realized I had “dressed up” because I was wearing Pajama Jeans (you know – the ones from the infomercial? They really look just like jeans!)… the masquerade dinner and party that had some amazing costumes… the breakfasts, the lunches in the hotel, the veggie burgers, the spa… Just so much to remember! It was all great.

And today we started work on a property my Dad owns about an hour away from home. We’d arranged to have some water damage repaired and found out today that the roof was bad and had to be replaced. A $3000 job just doubled. More than doubled, actually. Grrr. And I’m going to be spending most of my time out there, watching construction happen when I’d so much rather be warm in my house, writing or just recovering from the awesome trip. Oh, well. *sigh*

Hopefully in a week or two, it’ll all be fixed and I can veg out at home again for a bit. Meanwhile, I need to pack my cooler for tomorrow and hope I remember to bring everything I’ll need! Ack!

Thanks to everyone who made the weekend so awesome!!!