Tuesday, September 29, 2015

THE ASSASSIN: YA'S Version of Outlander (And $20 Gift Card Giveaway)


Title: The Assassin by Pamela DuMond 

Series: (Mortal Beloved, #2) 
Publication date: July 5th 2015
Genre: Time-Travel, Young Adult

Don't miss out on the giveaway at the end of this post! Enter to win a $20 Gift Card for Amazon.com. Plus, 2 copies of each of Pamela's books are up for grabs!


Synopsis:

“All the excitement of Outlander if it was a YA series.”
THE ASSASSIN IS the anticipated sequel to the YA Time Travel romantic thriller — THE MESSENGER.
The Messenger has been optioned for Film/TV.
The Assassin will be featured in Glamour UK Magazine September 2015 edition.


BOOK DESCRIPTION:

Time Traveler. Messenger. Beloved. Spy.
“I was a Messenger: I kept the memory of all our encounters, our lives, like a locket that brushes the skin and bones covering my heart. But Samuel was a Healer: he didn’t time travel. His kind lived, died, re-incarnated, and he didn’t retain memories from his past lives. Every year I landed in required starting our relationship over: from ashes, from scrap… Every place I journeyed had beauty as well as darkness; all my time-travels were bittersweet.” ~ Madeline.
Madeline’s a Messenger: time traveling across lifetimes and delivering messages that could change one life or many. When she discovers that her true love, Samuel, is alive in present day, but doesn’t remember her from their past, she journeys to a deadly royal conflict in medieval Portugal hoping to rekindle his memory. Mortal assassins as well as dark-souled time travelers seek to kill her. Will Madeline and Samuel be together again in life—or only in death?
THE SEEKER (Mortal Beloved, Book Three) publishes Winter 2015/2016.


Purchase book 1 - The Messenger:



About the Author 
Pamela DuMond is the author who discovered Erin Brockovich’s life story, thought it would make a great movie and pitched it to ‘Hollywood’.

She writes romantic comedic mysteries, romantic YA time travel and New Adult romance.

Her book The Story of You and Me was a Quarterfinalist in the Amazon Breakout Novel Award (ABNA) 2014 in Romance.

Cupcakes, Pies, and Hot Guys was a Quarterfinalist in ABNA 2013 in Mystery .

She’s addicted to TV shows — The Voice and Reign. The movies Love Actually and The Bourne trilogy (with Matt Damon — not that other actor guy,) make her cry ever time she watches them. (Like — a thousand.)

When she’s not writing Pamela’s also a chiropractor and cat wrangler. She loves reading, the beach, working out, movies, TV, animals, her family and friends. She lives in Venice, California with her fur-babies.

She likes her coffee strong, her cabernet hearty, her chocolate dark, her foods non-GMO and she lives for a good giggle.

Author Links



Giveaway: 



a Rafflecopter giveaway





Monday, September 28, 2015

SODA POP SOLDIER: And A Bunch of Other Books You Should Read NOW

It's a funny thing: working as a full-time novelist makes finding time to read a little tricky. I write, edit and release 4-5 books per year, which means I'm always staring at the computer and leafing through loose manuscripts with a frighteningly red pen. At the end of the day, my eyes hurt too much to read, or I fall asleep as I'm halfway through the prologue. 

For me, I can read only on days where I have a short work day or if it's a Sunday afternoon. I LOVE reading - it's a magnificent escape from reality. I found some great books this year, too. Here's a compilation of some entertaining Kindle picks I scarfed down this year - or that I'm PLANNING to scarf down next! 

Soda Pop Soldier by Nick Cole 
Call of Duty meets Ready Player One in this fast-paced, action-packed novel from the author of The Wasteland Saga.  Gamer PerfectQuestion fights for ColaCorp in WarWorld, an online Modern Warfare combat sport arena where mega-corporations field entire armies in the battle for real world global advertising-space dominance. 

Within the immense virtual battlefield, players and bots are high-tech grunts, using drop-ships and state-of-the-art weaponry to wipe each other out.  But times are tough and the rent is due, and when players need extra dough, there's always the Black, an illegal open source tournament where the sick and twisted desires of the future are given free rein in the Wastehavens, a gothic dungeon  fantasy world.  

All too soon, the real and virtual worlds collide when PerfectQuestion refuses to become the tool of a mad man intent on hacking the global economy for himself.

Kindle  

Phantasma, An Anthology of Sci-Fi Tales
An eclectic collection of speculative short stories by Anne Charnock (2013 Philip K. Dick Award finalist), Jodi McIsaac (“A Cure for Madness,” the Thin Veil series), Kate Maruyama (“Harrowgate”), Roberta Trahan (The Dream Stewards epic fantasy series), J.D. Horn ("Shivaree," the Witching Savannah series), and award-winning poet Jason Kirk. 

Stories include: 

“Undercurrents” – A young woman discovers her migraines are a symptom of something more sinister than what a good lie-down in a dark room can cure. 

“Pro Patria Mori” – An Irish soldier encounters fairies who offer magical aid, but will that magic help save those he holds dearest? 

“Akiko” – A curse laid in Japan finds its mark in the City of Angels. 

“The Adoption” – In a new age of sexual equality and reproductive freedom, bio-engineered foetuses are gestated in artificial wombs. But what becomes of tomorrow’s orphans? 

“Pitch” – A goat-faced boy sets out with a rifle to kill his father, the Devil, in 1950s rural Georgia. 

“The Guardian from the Sea” – A wheelchair-bound mermaid finds love in an adult-video store, and barely escapes to regret it. 


Kindle

Gray, Part 1, by Lou Cadle 
A dense black cloud boiled up in the southeastern sky. It rose high and fast, like a time-lapse movie of the birth of a thunderhead. But it was no rain cloud. Wholly black, it reached up and loomed over her, blocking out the sun. Somehow she knew it was Death coming at her. 

Pre-med student Coral is on a vacation in Idaho when something terrible happens. The black cloud is followed by a wildfire and searing heat that lasts for days. She survives deep in a cave but emerges days later to find the world transformed, a world of blackened trees, an ash-filled sky, and no living creatures except her. 

So begins her desperate journey: to find water, and food, and other survivors...and the answer to the mystery of what happened.


Kindle


Snow and Ash by Theresa Shaver
Bomb after bomb dropped across the globe sending the world tumbling into a seemingly never ending nuclear winter. 
Skylar Ross is ten that day when she’s ripped from dance classes and sleepovers to being an orphan in a prepper’s paradise of a mountain bunker. Her determination to protect her baby brother keeps her locked away with nothing but responsibility and loneliness. Her father’s words are a continuous echo, “Trust no one. Help no one.” 

Rex Larson is eleven that day. He’s left stranded on the side of the road in a strange place far from home when his mother dies the first day. With his own small brother to look after he is lost and alone. Rex has no choice but to trust complete strangers with his and his brother’s future. 

Two different survivors in two different circumstances spend the next seven years trying to survive until an explosive meeting changes both their courses and lives forever. Trust is almost impossible when your whole life is spent in the Snow & Ash. 


Kindle 

Plague Town, by Dana Fredsti 
Ashley was just trying to get through a tough day when the world turned upside down. 

A terrifying virus appears, quickly becoming a pandemic that leaves its victims, not dead, but far worse. Attacked by zombies, Ashley discovers that she is a 'Wild-Card' -- immune to the virus -- and she is recruited to fight back and try to control the outbreak. 

It's Buffy meets the Walking Dead in a rapid-fire zombie adventure!


Kindle 






Have any reading recommendations that you'd like to see from me? Shoot me an email at: writingbelle18@gmail.com! Thanks so much, and have an awesome week! 









Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Phantasma: Stories - Science Fiction Takes Over


Title: Phantasma: Stories 
Authors: Anne Charnock, Jason Kirk, Kate Maruyama, Jodi McIsaac, Roberta Trahan, and J.D. Horn
Release: September 22nd, 2015 
Where: Kindle 

An eclectic collection of speculative short stories by Anne Charnock (2013 Philip K. Dick Award finalist), Jodi McIsaac (“A Cure for Madness,” the Thin Veil series), Kate Maruyama (“Harrowgate”), Roberta Trahan (The Dream Stewards epic fantasy series), J.D. Horn ("Shivaree," the Witching Savannah series), and award-winning poet Jason Kirk. 

Stories include: 

“Undercurrents” – A young woman discovers her migraines are a symptom of something more sinister than what a good lie-down in a dark room can cure. 

“Pro Patria Mori” – An Irish soldier encounters fairies who offer magical aid, but will that magic help save those he holds dearest? 

“Akiko” – A curse laid in Japan finds its mark in the City of Angels. 

“The Adoption” – In a new age of sexual equality and reproductive freedom, bio-engineered foetuses are gestated in artificial wombs. But what becomes of tomorrow’s orphans? 

“Pitch” – A goat-faced boy sets out with a rifle to kill his father, the Devil, in 1950s rural Georgia. 

“The Guardian from the Sea” – A wheelchair-bound mermaid finds love in an adult-video store, and barely escapes to regret it. 





My Review of Phantasma 

** I received a free copy of this anthology in exchange for a fair and honest review** 

Let's get honest here. I'm not a huge science-fiction reader. I read a lot of dystopia or post-apocalyptic fiction. There are a lot of science-fiction elements in those, but when I was in high school, I was a voracious consumer of anything with the Star Wars title on it. As I got older, my tastes evolved a little, and I found myself drawn to vampire lore, and then time travel, and then anything based on Grimm's Fairytales or Alice and Wonderland (The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor were AMAZING!). 

And now here I am, starting over again. The great thing about reading is that you can bounce from one thing to the next. With Phantasma, I found myself intrigued by the short stories. Some of them were creepy as all heck - especially Pitch. A goat-faced boy hunting the Devil? This is where I, in true Valley Girl fashion, utters the words, "I CAN'T EVEN." 

I enjoyed the collection, and it was very kind for Roberta Trahan to offer me a free copy of the novel in exchange for a review. Her story is the first in the novel, and I swear I was holding my forehead because the main character's pain felt like my own. Good job! I definitely recommend checking it out. It's available for just a couple of bucks on Kindle! 






Monday, September 21, 2015

Breathe and Release: Katherine Hayton Talks Kidnapping and Amnesia

It's a custom of mine to spend a few hours every week digging through book lists and contacting authors who might want to be featured on Writing Belle. I love meeting new people and talking to them about the art of storytelling. I was delighted to come across Katherine Hayton, the author of a mysterious thrill ride called Breathe and Release. Katherine is from New Zealand, and her writing is as bright as her personality. 

She took the time to kindly sit down for an interview with Writing Belle. Check it out. I think it's worth your time - and pick up her book on Kindle, too! 

Interview with Katherine 

Welcome to Writing Belle, Katherine! Where are you from, and how did you get started writing? 
I’m from Christchurch, New Zealand, and I started writing when I was about eight. Stories about rabbits mostly, because I was obsessed with Watership Down. I’ve moved on since then and been through a romance phase (all unpublished thank goodness – they were terrible) and have now ended up writing mysteries, which is much more fun as I get to kill off anyone I don’t like.

Tell me about Breathe and Release. 
Breathe and Release tells the story of two women.

The first woman, Elisabet, was involved in a car accident and has retrograde amnesia. When her husband Graeme’s attention to her starts to spiral down, first into apathy and then into violence, she becomes more interested in recovering her memory and working out who she was, and how she ended up in the relationship. Another member of the household is her adoptive daughter, Kristen. She is Graeme’s daughter from a previous marriage, and her relationship with Elisabet is extremely strained.

The second woman, Lillian, wakes to find she’s a captive in an underground cell. She can’t find a way to escape, and is fighting her hardest to stay alive long enough to be found and rescued, or to figure out a way to free herself.

What about your other books - Found Near Water and Skeletal? Are those part of the Breathe and Release story or are they separate? 
The three novels are all standalone, although there are some minor crossover characters.

Found, Near Water is a novel about the loss of a child. When Rena Sutherland discovers her daughter is missing, she forms a close bond with her assigned victim support officer, Christine Emmett, while they try to work out what’s happened and bring her daughter back home. The story also intersects with the woman in Christine’s support group who each have a story of loss relating to a child.

Skeletal follows a coroner’s court case, trying to determine the cause of death for a teenage girl, Daina Harrow, whose remains are unearthed ten years after she died. As each witness gives evidence, Daina’s spirit provides a running commentary on them and then details the situations that actually occurred leading to her death.

How long does it take you to write a novel? 
I’ve been writing part-time so I finish about one novel every six or seven months. I’m on a sabbatical from work at the moment for six months, which should give me a chance to speed that up a little bit, and to play around with a few different formats.

Why do you think you write?
I’ve always been fascinated by books, and how written words on the page can completely mesmerise the reader until you have entire make-believe worlds existing in their heads. Performing the same trick has always been an obsession of mine, and I think I now have enough practice at it that I can release it on the unsuspecting public. 


Let's say you've got writer's block. How do you overcome this? 
I have writer’s block quite frequently. It either comes in the form of I’m too lazy to write today so I’m going to pretend that I can’t, or it appears as I can’t work out where this story is going and everything I’ve written so far is terrible and I want to stop now before I make any more of a fool of myself.

Either way I’ve found the trick is just to force myself to keep writing. The laziness is something I’m used to combatting in any form of work, so I have tricks up my sleeve to fool myself into accidentally doing some work by pretending I’m not allowed to eat, or not allowed to play, or not allowed to do this, that or the other, until I’ve done a teeny, tiny, little bit of work. Which then makes it easier to do just a little bit more, and just a little bit more, until it’s all done.

If I’m stuck in a book I’m writing and don’t know where to go I just write out one more sentence and one more sentence until something sparks and I can work out where it’s going again.

Any plans to write more books? 
I’m working on another couple at the moment. One of them is involving time-travel, and the effects this has on a great-aunt and niece over generations, and the other is about a woman who has been in the control of a poltergeist or similar for decades, and has only just come free and is able to make her own decisions for the first time.

What types of books do you enjoy reading yourself? 
I really enjoy reading mysteries and thrillers so they’re the main genre of book that I read. I like delving into odd sections of non-fiction as well, especially where people have unusual jobs or know morbid and interesting things, so I usually have one or two of those on the go as well. Other than that, whatever takes my fancy usually ends up on my Kindle in a never-ending TBR pile.

Where can readers connect with you online? 
I have a website www.kathay1973.com/  where I put up whatever’s happening with my books, some reviews, a few oddities, and a link to sign-up for my newsletter. There’s also a sample of my blog posts, and a link through to my main blog page which is http://kathay1973.blogspot.co.nz/


There may be a few random other places, but I’m sure that will be enough for everybody to get sick of me!



Thank you for talking with us today! Happy writing! 






Would you like to be featured on Writing Belle?  I am always looking for fresh, new authors and their amazing stories! Contact me at: 
writingbelle18@gmail.com 

I look forward to hearing from you! 






Friday, September 18, 2015

New WORST CASE SCENARIO: Militia, Book 5


Title: Militia
Series: Worst Case Scenario #5
Author: G. Allen Mercer 
Release: Available Now!


Worst Case Scenario - Book 5: 

Militia brings the reality of personal loss and calamity to the lives of the Tillers and Burrows.  The enemy takes a personal interest in the existence, and ultimate destruction of Ian Burrows and his family.  Militia is action packed, from start to finish, and it ties up some of the storylines from previous books. Set along some of Alabama’s most iconic landmarks, Militia will leave you wanting to know more about this new band of heroes, and how can they possibly make a difference in the war.





G. Allen Mercer’s the Worst Case Scenario series follows the Burrows family struggle to survive after an EMP attack by the Chinese government.  The family is separated when disaster strikes; and the first three books in the series, Worst Case Scenario, Bug-Out and Invasion, chronicle the disappointments and victories associated with reunification.  

Although the Burrows live a typical suburban life in the outskirts of Birmingham, Alabama, they are anything but typical.  Ian Burrows is former military, and both he and his wife, Leah, live with the shadow of a clandestine past.  Even Grace, their 18-year-old high school graduate learns that while her parents have been preparing for disaster, they have also been training her for something greater than college.

Book 4, The State, (the previous installment to Militia) highlights some of the mindset and evil associated with a foreign enemy occupying the southern part of the United States.  The story also dives deeper into the role of the Tillers, a family nestled on a farm beyond the outskirts of Birmingham.  By book 4, the Tillers have become synonymous with providing emotional and physical support to the mission that Ian Burrows has adopted, the survival of the two families, and the creation of a militia.



 Book Links:
Worst Case Scenario: Book 1
Worst Case Scenario: Book 2 Bug Out
Worst Case Scenario: Book 3 Invasion
Worst Case Scenario: Book 4 The State
Worst Case Scenario: Book 5 Militia


Connect with G. Allen Mercer:





Sign up to learn about new books and blogs:



Extra:

Worst Case Scenario – Book 6: War Dawgs, is expected this winter.

Collapsing World Series: (Based on the Worst Case Scenario world)
Teen brother and sister, Jack and Lucy, are trapped under the Atlanta airport after a nuclear bomb has been detonated in downtown Atlanta.  Join them as they fight to survive what comes next.
Collapsing World: Book 1 (October 2015)