Archive for the ‘Books’ Category
New Book!
I’m sitting here in front of a roaring fire on a yucky December day, a dozing dachshund snuggled at my side. If she was in her preferred spot, my lap, you wouldn’t be reading this right now because there’s no room for dog and laptop, and the dog usually wins.
I’m trying to mellow out, but it’s difficult because OMG I HAVE A BOOK COMING OUT THIS WEEK!!!
Yes, that’s exactly what it feels like. I don’t know if someone like Nora Roberts or Stephen King gets the same kind of rush every time they know one of their babies is going out into the big, bad world, but for me as a romance author there’s no feeling quite like it.
On December 6 the ebook edition of The Bride and the Buccaneer will be available at Amber Quill Press. There’s a link at my website. In addition, there will soon be a paper edition, a Kindle edition, and sales of the ebook at Fictionwise, BN.com and other sites. The Bride and the Buccaneer was a fun novel for me to research and write, and I’m thrilled it’s ready for publication.
What’s it about, you ask? Here’s a blurb:
“Lucky Jack” Burrell’s quest for revenge against Sophia Deford will have to wait until he discharges a debt. He has to help her find the fabled pirate treasure Garvey’s Gold. Then he can wring her dainty neck.
Sophia has no intention of sharing anything with anyone. She will have all of Garvey’s Gold, no matter how much Jack’s lean-muscled body makes her want to get to know him just a little bit better before she gets rid of him.
As the two adversaries squabble their way across Territorial Florida following the clues on their treasure map, they know that before they’re through they’re either going to kiss each other, kill each other, or both…
People ask me why I write when so many days I’d be just as effective banging my head on the keyboard until blood flows. The answer is because of the rush, the emotional lift that comes from hearing from people who bought my book and liked it.
Next month I’ll have something more concrete on the writing process, but for December’s HEA you’ll have to forgive me if all I want to do is sit here and bask in the firelight, and think about my book going out into the big wide world.
White Collar Christmas
Happy Holidays! Santa and I talked it over, and I have a few gifts under the tree for my readers.
This December, I’m participating in a Find the Icon Scavenger Hunt with about 30 fellow authors. Prizes include a Sony Pocket Reader and a $50 prepaid Visa card. The contest runs live from today, December 1st, through Christmas Eve. For details, visit http://www.ravenhappyhour.com/Rockin_Raven_Xmas_Tree_Contest and start hunting!
On December 15th, I’ll be on www.maryeason.blogspot.com from 10 to 11 am for a Christmas extravaganza full of good books and great giveaways. Along with me, Mary Eason, Cindy Green, Inez Kelley, Renee Wildes, Jane Toombs, Tina Donohue and Mary Wine will also have an hour apiece on the blog to showcase their books and give away prizes.
My free short story, White Collar Christmas, releases December 16th if all goes as planned from www.samhellion.net . Take one rookie FBI agent and put her undercover with a sexy art forgerer and see who gets on Santa’s list of Naughty Girls and Boys.
The TICKLE MY FANTASY anthology is now available, WITCHES ANONYMOUS included, just in time for gift giving. For anyone who enjoys werewolves, ghosts, witches and love, this anthology is perfect! It’s available from www.samhainpublishing.com , Amazon, Barnes and Noble and your local independent bookstore.
May health and joy be yours this season. Please feel free to stop by my website, www.readmistyevans.com , drop me a note at misty@readmistyevans.com or find me on Twitter, www.twitter.com/readmistyevans .
Happy reading!
Life in the 21st Century
- Image by Steve75 via Flickr
I’ve been published in ebook form since 2001. I can’t read my original works because they were sold on a format that’s no longer supported by my computer, floppy disks. I did, of course, keep paper backups of my work but that’s a different article–the need for back-up.
Today I want to talk about moving into the 21st century of ereading. I finally broke down and bought a dedicated ereader, the Sony PRS 300, their new “Pocket Reader”. Three things led me to this point: 1. the price came down to a place that was more affordable for an ereader, $199. 2. Some of my favorite authors were releasing novellas and back list works only as ebooks. 3. I’ve been doing more ebook reading at my notebook and not finding it especially comfortable.
The feedback I’ve been getting from my own readers shows a rising curve of ebook sales, and I’m now an ebook consumer as well. My little Pocket is the same size as a mass market paperback, though thinner. It can hold 350 books. I automatically slip it into my purse each day, and don’t worry that I’m leaving the house without something to read. Most importantly, the next time I go on a trip I’ll have more room in my carry-on because it won’t be full of books.
I’m still buying books in paper, but now I’m restricting it to hardcovers and paper copies of books I know I’m likely to want to keep. Much of what I’ve been buying gets recycled to the library book sale as soon as I’m done with it, and while the library will lose a bit with this purchase, it’s certainly better for the trees and the environment.
If you’ve been thinking of getting an ebook reader, this may be the right time. More models are scheduled for release later in 2010, and there’s still talk of an Apple Tablet that may make Mac users happy. My wish now is that publishers would figure out a good pricing scheme for ebooks. Some of them are releasing ebooks for twice the cost of mass market paperbacks, which makes no sense to me at all and I refuse to buy them that way. Eventually, however, I believe the market will drive them to a standard, reasonable pricing scheme.
In the meantime, I’m still getting used to my little device, but I think I’m going to like it. Maybe I’ll report back in six months on how this new love affair is progressing.
Happy Birthday, USCG!
“Fifteen hundred dollars worth of coffee coming in duty free meant a tidy profit, whether it was Delerue-Sanders behind the smuggling or someone else. A simple plan, but one that worked all too well given the poor state of the Revenue Marine. The revenue cutters couldn’t begin to cover all of the coast, not when the ships were spread thin with surveying, rescue operations, and winter cruising between Charleston and Key West. Underfunded, understaffed, looked down on by the regular navy, despised by the merchants who paid the tariffs, the Revenue Marine was no one’s darling.
Well, except maybe Alexander Hamilton, he’d loved his revenue cutters that brought money into the Treasury, but look what happened to him, Washburn thought. Irritate the wrong people and there you are, worm food.”
Smuggler’s Bride, Darlene Marshall
Today is the birthday of the U.S. Coast Guard, a branch of the service with a fascinating history. When I was researching Smuggler’s Bride I thought at first I’d be able to use all the early 19th c. USN research I’d done for my other novels. Wrong. The more I studied, the more I realized that what I really needed to know about was the Revenue Marine, aka the Coast Guard.
From its earliest days, when the USN sneered at it as “The Treasury’s pet navy”, the USCG has had PR issues. Before the national income tax, tariffs were a key source of income for the nation and the Revenue Marine (later called the Coast Guard) was charged with patrolling the waters and making sure goods weren’t smuggled in without payment. As one historian said, “Unlike the Navy, they never had a Marryat.” There wasn’t a historian crafting exciting tales of life in the Revenue Marine so few people knew what this brave service did, the branch of the armed forces that fights battles in peacetime.
Nonetheless, for over 200 years the USCG has been, as their motto so aptly puts it, “Semper Paratus”–Always Ready, whether it was keeping slavers from smuggling in illicit human cargo in the 19th C., stopping drug dealers in the 21st C., saving boaters and rescuing the shipwrecked, teaching water safety and more. Today they’re part of Homeland Security and continue their work guarding our borders and waterways.
So it’s time to say, “Thank you, Coasties, and Happy 219th Birthday!” They may not have gotten the PR they deserve over the last two centuries, but we’re glad they’re there.
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Crossing the Aisles – A Cross Post
My choices as a child were limited by 1) what my mother brought home 2) what was in the local Five-&-Dime (and for those of you scratching your heads, ask—I am giving away my age here…) 3) what I had to read in school and 4) what was available from the Scholastic Book Club that month (also part of school). I had Golden Books (remember those? They’re still around). I read stories about talking rabbits and talking cats and talking butterflies. Was I reading fantasy? Damned if I know. I was reading a colorful book with hard cardboard covers and a gold foil spine. I was having fun. I was being pulled out of my me-ness and my world and into Someplace Else in my imagination.
I also had several large books of fairy tales, which I assume my parents or some relative bought. There was the usual Mother Goose stuff but there were also Aesop’s stories, and then one book that I remember treasuring that had to be someone’s original ideas. Thinking back, they had an almost Narnia quality to them but they weren’t the Narnia books. There was one tale of a clothes cabinet in an attic, and the little girl in the story could use it for all sorts of adventures (I’m thinking a mirror was involved). I remember one of the stories involved a pair of red shoes (Mary Jane style from the illustration that I can still—vaguely—see to this day). The other involved a dress she wore in a print of multi-colored pom-poms. I craved that dress. There was something about that particular dress and its colors, but what and how and why are all long since gone from my mind.
So perhaps I read adventure? Thriller? With a fantasy sub-plot?
In school Dick and Jane were always doing something. Was that general literary fiction? A precursor of Oprah meets Dr. Phil? Then when I was nine or ten my mother subscribed to Reader’s Digest Condensed Classics For Children, and every few months a nice big fat volume came in the mail. For me. Oh, joy. Oh, rapture. I fell in love with The Scarlet Pimpernel. I solved crimes with Sherlock Holmes.
I wouldn’t know a genre if it bit me in the behind.
At the end of every school year, the local library had a book sale, with the children’s books all on long tables. I was in heaven. I had my dollar which meant I could buy ten books, and I grabbed them based on cover images, title. Genre? No clue. “Does this look like fun?” was my only parameter.
I read The Hobbit in eighth grade. Not because I was browsing the fantasy section but because everyone else was reading The Hobbit. I never asked myself if I like fantasy or whether I’d find stories about not-quite-human creatures believable. “Suspension of disbelief” had no meaning to 
me. After all, I’d cut my reading teeth on fairy tales. Reading about ogres and witches and fairies and talking mice and flying cats had opened my mind long ago.
I read for the sheer joy of the experience. Opening the first page of a book signaled to my mind an immediate shut off of here and now, of reality as I knew it. Even when I was a pre-teen and read You Have To Draw The Line Somewhere—a YA novel before such were labeled so—about a high school girl deciding between a regular college and an art school. No unreality in that but it was still not MY life or MY school or MY decision. So it required a shut off of here and now, which I gladly did. (If you think it’s amazing that I remember the title of a book I read when I was twelve, then you don’t understand the depth of my love affair with the printed word.)
I didn’t give one thought to whether or not I liked the genre.
Rather, the one common denominator in all that I read—once I could make my own choices—was “does this problem or situation sound interesting?” In essence, conflict. In essence, to quote Blake Snyder, I was interested in “it’s all about a guy who…” Whether the guy was a prince, a doctor, a magician or a high school student mattered not one bit.
In my twenties and later, I did a lot of book buying at the grocery store where, for the most part, there’s no genre separation. Oh, there’s a little, with romance books on the left of the long display and some science fiction and fantasy in a row at the bottom. Or vice versa. But as people read the back cover blurbs and replace them, the books just get put back…somewhere. So I chose much as I had a decade before at the school library sale—what looks like fun?
I first read Melissa Scott because I found her Five Twelfths of Heaven in a bin in K-Mart.
I found Sherrilyn Kenyon’s A Pirate of Her Own (writing as Kinley MacGregor) in a bin in TJ Maxx (or it might have been Beall’s Outlet…).
I found Austin Tappan Wright’s Islandia…I don’t know where. I only remember reading it in college so possibly it was on a rack in the IU bookstore.
I didn’t read back then with one eye tracking whether or not the author fulfilled the conventions of the genre. I read because it was all about a gal or guy who… and it wasn’t where or who I was. 
It never occurred to me to read—or not read—a certain genre because it wasn’t cool or it wasn’t something a female would read or it wasn’t highly regarded by this-or-that person.
I read because for a couple hundred pages, I wasn’t me.
So why do you read? What did you read as a child and has that impacted what you read now?
And do you quiver with excitement over a bin full of mixed books in a bargain store…or do you need your genres properly cordoned off on shelves?
Inquiring minds want to know. ~Linnea
// Interstellar Adventure Infused with Romance//
Available Now from Bantam: Hope’s Folly
http://www.linneasinclair.com/