The Merlin's Stronghold Blog Tour Starts Today!

The next book in the Faerie Crossed series,  Merlin's Stronghold, comes out October 23rd!

 To celebrate, YA Bound Book Tours helped me set up a blog tour and giveaways, and here's the schedule:

And some of the tour stops are sharing my artwork from A Compendium of the Faer Folke, and if you're not familiar with it, it's a book Avery uses in Crow's Rest to learn about the Fae and how to protect herself against them. The pages being shared have an odd history and origin story:

"Specimen #1132 was a wholly unremarkable geode, one of a dozen donated geological samples that made their way from a private collection in Cornwall to a university in the United States. About the size and shape of a sleeping cat, the stone’s secrets abided until a research student detected the shifting of an object inside.

With the aid of the latest imaging devices, she was able to peer past the tabby-colored crust and into the interior of the geode. A nebulous form, one with edges too regular to be anything but manmade, intrigued her enough to flout protocol and cut open the specimen. The hollowed interior contained a remarkable array of sphalarite and ferruginous quartz crystals—along with the remnants of a peculiar tome.

The spine still attached to the hand-painted, leather cover suggested a much thicker volume, but only a fraction of loose pages were extant. Inked on various types of unknown skins, the pages contained drawings and descriptions of fantastical creatures: mythological beings and faeries  treated as genuine subjects for field study. The title, A Compendium of the Faer Folke, could not be found in any database of historical or contemporary books, however.

Suspecting a prank, the student used radiometric dating methods on the geode, and radiocarbon dating for the book. Test results showed an age of approximately nine million years ago for the geode’s creation, and two hundred years for the book’s materials. It was obvious that the specimen exhibited no signs of tampering, other than the cut she herself made.

Before she could publish her findings, the student herself, plus all her notes and samples, disappeared from her locked basement office. Fortunately, before their loss, she invited a local photographer to document the find, and they were able to post images of the now-lost remnants of A Compendium of the Faer Folke to relevant websites.

Requests to confirm the existence of an entire volume in the private library of one Thomas Flynn of Crow’s Rest, California, have been met with silence. It is unknown if any other manuscripts—full or partial—of this fascinating guide to the “Faer Folke” exist. One can only hope that they will eventually come to light."

DATE WITH A ROCKSTAR Blog Tour!

One of my fellow Spencer Hill Press authors, published through imprint Spencer Hill Contemporary, has a book coming out today!

To help celebrate, Sarah Gagnon has joined me for a Top Ten list, and a giveaway. But first I have to say her book, Date With a Rockstar, has a truly unique premise:

Only one girl will win the cash prize...and a chance at love with Jeremy Bane.

Monet isn’t just another lust-struck teenager trying to win the heart of Rock God Jeremy Bane--she needs the prize money from his new reality show to cure her illness.

Monet has Fluxem, a contagious disease that's spread through saliva. It's completely curable if you have enough money, which she and her single mother don't. Now that she's on the show, Monet has to work harder to keep her Fluxem hidden. She only has to keep the secret long enough to woo Jeremy Bane so he picks her as the winner. She doesn't even care about the love part; the prize alone will change her life.

But the real Jeremy Bane is nothing like she imagined. Monet finds herself fighting against feelings that make her want to give in to her attraction and Jeremy's attempts for a kiss. The further she goes in the competition, the more impossible it becomes to resist him--and when the producers turn the tables and start digging up dirt on the contestants, Monet fears her secret will be revealed before she's ready and ruin everything.

The only way to win Jeremy's heart is to tell him the truth, but confessing her disease could cost her the competition, the prize money, and him.

Doesn't that sound like a great romantic twist? And I think Sarah knows from romance, because she shared a list of Top Ten Kisses:

Sarah says: "I have definitely not read enough to qualify my opinions on top ten. So this is just going to be a list of ten really awesome kisses."

1. The first time Anita Blake and Jean-Claude kissed. That series is one I will never get tired of. If only I could control the dead and have powers that increased through kissing.

2. When Claire and Jamie first kissed in Outlander. Gabaldon had me the first time Claire climbed on the horse behind him, and now the show. He’s just so perfectly cast, I love watching and reading all my favorite scenes back to back.

3. These Broken Stars by Amie Kaufman. Sigh, this book. So hard not to go total fan girl here. Tarver for me was a perfect hero, and Lilac’s strength was so endearing that when they finally got over hating each other, the romance felt so epic.

4. Alienated by Melissa Landers. I love when characters are closed off emotionally or physically and then all of a sudden a passionate kiss begins to change everything. An emotionally cold alien is the perfect set-up and the dialogue and chemistry leading up to the kiss, wow.

5. Unteachable by Leah Raedar. That whole book is a vortex of sexy from the first kiss to the last. Forbidden kisses are sometimes the best.

6. Archer’s Voice by Mia Sheridan because when the character development is so complete, every kiss reads right into my heart.

7. Pride and Prejudice, because Mr. Darcy must be added to all lists.

8. The Mind Readers by Lori Brighton. I can only imagine the craziness of being able to read someone’s thoughts while kissing them.

9. Cinder by Marissa Meyer. I was rooting for Cinder so hard, that my brain almost popped when Prince Kai finally kissed her.

10. Losing It by Cora Carmack. I love it when a heroine sets out to do something sexual. That alone is so empowering to me, add in Garrick’s British accent and Bliss’s internal dialogue— I was hooked. 

I have to agree with a lot of those--they are pretty awesome kisses! I'm going to wrap up the post with more about Sarah, and links to where you can find her book

Sarah Gagnon grew up in the frigid woods of Maine amidst snow and animal skins and has now moved back home. As a small child she wrote ship-wrecked romances all while being stared down by a taxidermied duck.

She has a BFA in photography and a minor in writing from the University of Southern Maine. She's the mother of two tiny, feral children and two ill-behaved dogs. For fun she’s taken up construction and interior design. Her first project: moving into a dilapidated farmhouse with her computer-genius husband. 

Website 

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And here's where you can find your own copy of Date With a Rockstar

Goodreads

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

IndieBound

The Book Depository

Kobo

And...I did mention something about a giveaway, didn't I? If you live in the U.S., you could win a DATE WITH A ROCKSTAR t-shirt, and a paperback copy of the book! Enter through the Rafflecopter below

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Crow's Rest Book Trailer Reveal!

Today, the book trailer for Crow's Rest goes live!





Also today, on Operation Awesome, I give a closer look at the images that make up the trailer, so please go check it out! You can find pre-order and Goodreads info on Crow's Rest here.

For this blog post, I thought it would be interesting to share an earlier version of an attempt at making a video trailer. I had some great raw footage of the Castle and its interior, and even some models for the characters--but felt like I was missing a few other scenes. Without buying some stock video footage (which gets expensive!), I felt like this was too disjointed and abandoned it in favor of using still images and PowerPoint. You can see that the script changed a little, too (this one has no sound)




Thanks for stopping by!