Oct 23 2019

Author T.L. Christianson #interview

Please give a warm welcome to

Tell us a bit about yourself

I’m a Colorado native, an alumna of CU Boulder, mother of 2 terrible but wonderful teenagers and wife of almost 20 years. Ever since I can remember, I’ve lived in my own imagination visiting reality occasionally. Writing for me has always been my comfort, my escape, and my most profound companion since I can remember.

Have you always wanted to become an author?

I don’t remember ever not writing. Reading and writing are like breathing to me. However, I give my sister, and author, Ann Martinez (Annabelle Anders), the credit for pushing me off the publishing ledge. After reading through some of my stories, she said, “You have to get published. This is really good.” I took her advice and finished Crimson during the spring of 2018, and the rest is history.

What was your inspiration for your current book/series?

Like all authors, our writing is a combination of people, ideas, and beliefs that we have, and I’m no different. However, I tend to focus on women in my novels. I grew up with powerful women, and every main character is based on someone I love and care about. My favorite to write was Sarah from Scarlet. Sarah is actually based on my sister, Leslie. She’s one of the most inspiring women in my life; she’s fearless and brave, and those are qualities that I wish I had more of. When she wants something, there’s nothing in this world that will keep her from it. It’s the tenacity and courage that I was aiming for when writing Sarah.

What are you working on now?

I am currently writing Bloodthirsty Bastard. It’s a spinoff of the original Cocky Bastard by Vi Keeland and Penelope Ward. In it, we meet Aubrey Bloom’s roommate from college, Caroline. She’s a teacher from New England who’s in need of a job. Along with her evil cat (that Chance nicknames Lucifer), she moves into the newlywed’s spare bedroom. However, between her ability to thwart her hosts’ amorous activities, and the devil kitty, Caroline needs to find a new place to live…Enter Ethan, vampire, and owner of Dumont securities, and he’s in need of a personal assistant. Ethan is sexy, ruthless, logical, and bloodthirsty… So, of course, Aubrey offers Caroline for the job!

Do you have any quirks while writing?

Silence. No distractions, no music, no phone.

What are your hopes for the future?

I love writing, and it alone gives me a lot of joy, but I would like to see some validation from my work and be able to make a living from it. Right now, I’m a brand new author, so I’m hoping my efforts will pay off in the future.

Do you have any advice for new authors about the publishing world?

Keep writing, and keep pushing. You get nowhere if you give up.

Do you have anything to say to your readers?

I have amazing readers! I love you guys! Thank you for all your support – YOU are a huge reason why I write 😉

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🌎www.TLChristianson.com

Jun 7 2019

Authors Karpov Kinrade #interview @KarpovKinrade

Please give a warm welcome to authors Karpov Kinrade

Tell us a bit about yourself

We are Lux and Dmytry Karpov Kinrade. A married couple co-writing under our shared last name. We met on twitter while Dmytry lived on the east coast of Canada and Lux lived on the west coast of the United States. We were writing partners who fell in love and we are now living our HEA in California with our three kids, seven cats and a lot of love. We have written over 38 books, a few screenplays and several songs, with plans for many more!

Have you always wanted to become an author?

Yes. We both started writing stories when we were children.

What was your inspiration for your current book/series?

The Night Firm is our most current series and was inspired by our love for new vampire lore, romance, and fantasy. The main character’s backstory was also largely inspired by Lux’s life and the loss of her brother to suicide.

What are you working on now?

We are working on book 2 of The Night Firm, as well as a standalone vampire romance, Forever Bound, launching at the end of May.

Do you have any quirks while writing?

We listen to the same song on repeat until our children hate all music and want to smash our computers. LOL

What are your hopes for the future?

To write more books, and to ultimately write and direct movies and awesome tv.

Do you have any advice for new authors about the publishing world?

Learn your genre, study the market, hone your craft, practice-practice-practice, and don’t give up!

Do you have anything to say to your readers?

We love you. You’re the reason we get to make up stories for a living. Thanks for reading them. ❤

Buy links

Author links

Of Dreams And Dragons

Apr 12 2019

Author R.A. Steffan #interview

Please give a warm welcome to author R.A. Steffan

Tell us a bit about yourself

I’m a forty-something ex-rancher living in flyover country in the US Midwest. For the last few years, I’ve been city bound—living in a midsized college town where I’m illegally keeping ducks in the backyard, so I don’t go completely insane from lack of critters.

Have you always wanted to become an author?

Not at all. I started writing fanfiction in 2005 for personal enjoyment, and branched out to ghostwriting and non-fiction content creation a few years later to supplement my income. I published my first series professionally in 2015. (It was a commercial disaster, and remains deeply buried in red ink to this day.)

With my ranch gone, and deeply disillusioned by a series of back-breaking, low-paying shift jobs, I told my husband in early 2016 that I would be writing as a full-time living within eighteen months. He scoffed at the assertion.

In his defense, it took me twenty months of working 100+ hours per week, not eighteen. But, ever since March of 2018, here I am, a full-time writer.

What was your inspiration for your current book/series?

That’s a trick question—I currently have three active series going. (Side note to aspiring writers: never, ever do this. NOT EVER. Trust me on this one.)

Anyway, the inspiration for the Love and War sci-fi romance series is the current slow march toward extremism in the western world. It’s a cautionary tale about the manipulation of a populace into an “us” versus “them” mentality, and how easy it is for that kind of xenophobia to morph into acts of unspeakable brutality and evil… as we see every day in the news from around the world.

The inspiration for my second active series, The Eburosi Chronicles, is the beauty of inclusivity and understanding when it comes to love. Love has the power to heal, and I firmly believe that consuming media in which love is portrayed as beautiful and desirable in all its forms can help people bring some of that beauty and tolerance into their own lives.

The Eburosi Chronicles is the umbrella series for The Horse Mistress, The Lion Mistress, and The Dragon Mistress story arcs, which follow various members of an adoptive family in a fictional Bronze Age culture across a span of decades. The current arc in progress, The Dragon Mistress, deals with a misfit group of renegades coming together to save the last five dragons in existence from powerful forces that would see them wiped out forever.

Finally, the inspiration for The Last Vampire (co-written with Jaelynn Woolf) was my love for big, sprawling, intricate book series that span the divide between Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance. (We market ours as “urban fantasy romance.”)

What are you working on now?

Right now I’m diving into Anthelion: Love and War, Book 4, which is the second-to-last installment of the sci-fi romance series. I expect this book will garner mixed reviews, to put it mildly, since the protagonists are gay and the couples in the other books were all heterosexual.

Mind you, it’s not like I didn’t make it pretty obvious from the beginning that this was coming, but I’ll still be interested to see the response. There seems to be only a vanishingly small amount of M/M sci-fi romance available, and what’s there mostly follows the male pregnancy trope (which mine doesn’t). I’m not at all sure why that is.

Do you have any quirks while writing?

Eh, probably. I’m afraid I couldn’t say what they are, though, beyond the fact that I need quiet to write. Since we live in a tiny house, and my writing time usually overlaps time when my husband is home from work—playing video games or watching TV—I seem to spend an awful lot of hours with earbuds blasting white noise in my ears.

I have absolutely no clue how writers who go to coffee shops or cafes to write can manage to get anything done.

What are your hopes for the future?

I dream of a day when being a full-time writer/publisher isn’t a constant source of panic, stress, and worry. Will the next book flop? (Answer: if it’s not about vampires, then yes, it will flop. I can only sell vampires. The other two series are merely self-indulgence on my part—a very expensive hobby.)

Will Amazon or Facebook or some other platform I rely on suddenly change their algorithms, causing my sales to plummet to nothing overnight? (Answer: it’s happened to writers before, so… maybe.)

Do people like my work? Am I good enough? Is the last book-related decision I made hopelessly wrong? Will it destroy my business? And so on and so forth.

Fun with anxiety and clinical depression, basically. Both very common conditions among artistic types, or so I hear.

Do you have any advice for new authors about the publishing world?

If you’re writing genre fiction, indie publishing is the way to go. Traditional publishing may still be a viable option for literary fiction and poetry.

Before you do anything else, ask yourself what your goals are. If the goal is artistic expression, write what you want and enjoy yourself to the fullest, but be aware that publishing probably won’t be a gateway to untold riches. If the goal is to make a comfortable living, put aside your ego and write what readers want to read. Produce it quickly and with good quality, market it professionally, and treat the venture like the business it is.

If what you want to write and what readers want to read happen to overlap, then understand how lucky you are and embrace that opportunity with your entire being.

Do you have anything to say to your readers?

Thank you—especially those of you who read the books I write because I’m passionate about them, rather than because they pay the bills. I wouldn’t be here without you.

Buy links

The Eburosi Chronicles

The Last Vampire

Anthelion: Love and War

Love In The Dessert

The Queen’s Musketeers

Author links

Apr 5 2019

Author Savannah Skye #interview

Please give a warm welcome to author Savannah Skye

Tell us a bit about yourself

Let’s see, I’m a full time self-published author by day and by night I’m mostly on the hunt for a great craft beer and some delicious tapas. I’m single (don’t jump all at once, boys!) and I like it that way most of the time because I get the whole bed to myself.

Guilty Pleasures: If there is a Real Housewife, I’m all about it! I know it’s bad, but it’s also so so good and it gives my brain a much needed break. I’m also obsessed with Nutella. I’d bathe in it if I could.

Favorite book: Hunger Games, the series. Love those books!

Favorite musical artist: Florence and the Machine.

Have you always wanted to become an author?

No! My dream job was to be Willy Wonka (I’m still gunning for that one some day. A girl’s gotta dream!) But in my teens, I started writing and it was sort of something I couldn’t NOT do. I kept at it, and soon enough I realized that I needed to start letting other people see my work.

What was your inspiration for your current book/series?

I knew I wanted to do vampires, and I knew I wanted them to live underground. Once the undercity came to mind, it all sort of unfolded from there.

What are you working on now?

The next set of books in the Undercity Chronicles! I love this world so much and can’t wait for readers to meet all the amazing characters I have in store for them. I’m especially excited for Jack’s story. I’ve been itching to get to that one since I first introduced him to the series.

Do you have any quirks while writing?

Hmm, that’s a good question. Not a quirk so much, but I try to ensure that the music I have going in my headphones creates the same emotion I’m trying to convey in the scene. So if I’m imagining a huge vampire battle scene, I’m listening to something intense and loud and chaotic. If I’m coming up to a big, emotional break up or death scene, I’m probably listening to Evanessence or something lol!

What are your hopes for the future?

I hope that the Undercity Chronicles becomes as big as Twilight 🙂 But seriously, I really just hope readers love the books and connect with the world and characters so I can do this job forever.

Do you have any advice for new authors about the publishing world?

Read. Read read read lol! Whenever I’m struggling and the words just won’t come, I try to put it aside and clear my mind. A lot of times, just taking that break to dive into another world for awhile get’s me back into creative mode.

Do you have anything to say to your readers?

Thanks so much for choosing my books! I know there are SO many out there, and I’m honored every time you guys pick mine.

Buy links

Author links

Jan 23 2019

Poppy Woods #interview

Please welcome debut author Poppy Woods *

Tell us a bit about yourself

Ahhh, I’m terrible at this. I’m Poppy… I’m short, southern, and swear like a well educated sailor? I’m a mom. I have two evil day jobs in addition to arguing with fictional characters (quite frequently *while* I’m at my evil day job, much to my boss’s dismay)

* Have you always wanted to become an author?

I have always wanted to write. I don’t know that I always wanted to publish anything. I used to write a ton of poetry… probably from the time I was like 7-20. I have those in a binder somewhere, they got me through hard times.
A Call To Pride is the first story I’ve actually finished. I’ve started writing it and a hundred other stories a million times and just never had the willpower to finish. I’d try to edit it while I was still writing and get discouraged and scrap everything.*

What was your inspiration for your current book/series?

Liza’s story is a little bit of everything to me. She has parts of me in her and parts that are completely organic, a product of my weird and twisted imagination.
The series as a whole (Unsung Veil) will focus on other characters throughout the series. My inspiration for the series is honestly a combination of reading works like The Damon’s Mountains series by TS Joyce and the Wings of Artemis series by Rebecca Royce and wanting to create a book world like that. A book world where there is a single universe that all these characters share, and maybe some of them know each other, but everything comes back to a single plot thread. Eventually. I guess we will have to see if I pull that off.

What are you working on now?

Right now I’m writing Unsung Veil Book 2 – A Call To War. It’s the conclusion to Liza’s personal part of the story. She will still pop up as a side character in at least a few books, but her personal plot will be done.

Do you have any quirks while writing?

I don’t know… lol. I get frustrated and close my laptop a lot. I smoke cigarettes religiously during sprint breaks, or when I get to a point in the story where I need some space to think about my next move.

Do you have any advice for new authors about the publishing world?

I haven’t done traditional publishing and probably never will. I like the indie world. I like being in control of my career and setting my own deadlines. If I had any advice it would be just to write the damn thing. Don’t try to stop to self-edit it. Just get that first draft out onto paper/screen so that you have somewhere to start. If you stop writing it to do anything else, you probably won’t finish it. At least, that’s been true for me a million times.

What are your hopes for the future?

I have several things in the works. Once I finish writing ACTW (Liza’s second book) I’ll be doing a totally new, secret project with another author, in a completely different universe. Once I finish that secret project, I’ll come back to the Unsung Veil and play with the characters there.
My overall goal is to eventually be a full-time author so that I can focus on my little terrorist at home instead of splitting my time four ways: Momming, Evil day job one, Evil day job two, Author.

Do you have anything to say to your fans?

Thank you! I realize there may not be that many of you yet, at least not compared to some of the big names in this business, but each and every one of you are important to me. You make it possible for me to chase this dream of mine and I couldn’t possibly be more grateful! Every book, every page read, matters more than you know.

Book link

Amazon

Author links

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Facebook author page

Poppy Wood’s Reader Group

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Blog post updated April 16th

Jul 17 2015

Midnight Moonrising Cover Reveal! @Kshaigwood @AnneConley10 #MidnightMoonrising

***COVER REVEAL***

Win one of 3 paperbacks of Midnight Moonrising signed by K. S. Haigwood, Anne Conley and Ryan Cottrell (model) by simply sharing this post or making your own post. If you make your own, be sure to include the hashtag #MidnightMoonrising and the cover art to be eligible to win.

Release date is July 31,2015! Be ready! #UrbanFantasy #vampires #witches #shifters