Paranormal romance

  • Changing seasons, changing reads …

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    I talked about this over at Magical Musings last week, but I thought I would share it here on my blog too.

    It Happened One WeddingSpring officially begins on Thursday, March 20, and I know a lot of folks are ready to put the winter weather behind them. Far, far behind them.

    The cold temperatures have kept a lot of folks indoors over the past few months, including yours truly, and have certainly made curling up with a good book more appealing than ever before. But I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’ve been reading over the past few months and how my tastes and temperament often change with the seasons.

    In the fall and winter months, I find myself turning to fantasy reads, whether it’s epic fantasy, young adult fantasy, or paranormal romance. Some of my reads this winter have included The Girl of Fire and Thorns by Rae Carson and the Healer series by Maria V. Snyder, to name a few. Books with worlds and magic and characters and adventures that offer an escape from the unrelenting cold temperatures. And we’ve all had our fair share of those this winter. Thank you, polar vortex.

    But as spring (and then summer) rolls around, I find that I’m in the mood for lighter, more contemporary reads, especially contemporary romances. One of my many anticipated reads for the spring is It Happened One Wedding by Julie James. Books where the heroine and hero meet cute and have their ups and downs before realizing that they’re crazy about each other. Stories that are as charming and hopeful as the unfurling of the spring leaves (but without all the woes of allergy season).

    So I’m looking forward to the changing seasons and the changes in my TBR pile too.

    What about you guys? Do you find that your reading preferences change with the seasons? Why or why not? What are some of the books that you are looking forward to this spring?

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    Guest blog: Tia Nevitt on fairy tales and more …

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    Tia NevittToday, I’m pleased to welcome paranormal romance author Tia Nevitt to my blog. Tia is one of my author friends. She’s the author of the novella, The Magic Mirror and the Seventh Dwarf. Take it away, Tia:

    Question: Hi, Tia. Thanks for taking the time to guest blog. Please tell us about your latest release, The Magic Mirror and the Seventh Dwarf.

    Tia: Hi, Jennifer! Thanks for having me.

    The Magic Mirror and the Seventh Dwarf is a retelling of Snow White. With this story, I wanted a heroine who was as unique as Talia was in The Sevenfold Spell (also a novella). Therefore, I wrote it from the point of view of one of the dwarfs, who I made female. Gretchen hears about a sort of a dwarf refuge, a farm owned by dwarfs and run by dwarfs. She travels there in search of love.

    And of course, she wanders right into a fairy tale. I tried to do the same thing that I did with The Sevenfold Spell — fill in plot holes, and approach the story from new angles. But the Snow White story is much more straightforward than Sleeping Beauty.

    The biggest unanswered mystery is the identity of that face in the magic mirror. So I decided to make him the prince! I then tied the whole story in knots and let the characters find their own way out.

    The Magic Mirror and the Seventh DwarfQuestion: What inspired you to write The Magic Mirror and the Seventh Dwarf?

    Tia: After coming up with my idea for Sleeping Beauty, the confiscation of the spinning wheels resulted in the unemployment of thousands of spinsters, I brainstormed ideas for several other fairy tales. As I said in the question above, the man in the mirror was the biggest mystery. Who was he, and why did he find the evil queen so beautiful?

    Question: You’ve also written another fairy tale-themed story, The Sevenfold Spell. What interests you about fairy tales?

    Tia: The same sort of thing that draws me into the fantasy genre as a whole. I love stories that can fill me with a sense of wonder, or stories where ordinary people — with no powers — have the guts to take on the supernatural.

    Fairy tales started out as tales for an adult audience, but I learned to love them as a child, as most people do. I didn’t read fantasy when I was a teenager or a new adult. But once I discovered it, I never went back. I write all kinds of fantasy, not just fairy tales. But I had to start somewhere!

    Question: What’s your favorite fairy tale?

    Tia: Beauty and the Beast. I learned that story at an older age than Cinderella, Snow White, or Sleeping Beauty. Both characters intrigued me so. I like that story because Beauty is willing to sacrifice her future for her father, and because the Beast is so tormented and convinced that he could not be loved.

    Beauty is a much more mature heroine. She does not idly dream of balls, or handsome princes. She is the one who gets all the action. She saves her father, she saves the Beast, and she saves his entire household of servants.

    Question: Is The Magic Mirror and the Seventh Dwarf part of a series? If so, how many stories are planned?

    Tia: At least three. I am working on my Beauty and the Beast story now. In it, the time limit for the Curse has passed, and the Beast is doomed to remain a beast for all of his days. In the original version of the story, the servants were all made invisible; they were not turned into inanimate objects. Well, when the time ran out for the Beast, it also ran out for them, and they are doomed to remain invisible forever as well.

    The Beast decides to look for a nonmagical way to break — or to cure — the curse.

    I also have a mostly complete draft of Cinderella, but I had a hard time with the premise. Once I finish my Beauty and the Beast story — which I am quite excited about — I’ll try to tackle Cinderella again.

    So three for certain, but maybe four!

    Question: What are some of your favorite books and authors?

    Tia: I read a wide variety of genres. An enduring favorite series of mine is Elizabeth Moon’s The Deed of Paksenarrion. The same goes for Dragonlance and its authors. More recently, I have enjoyed your novels :D, David Anthony Durham’s Acacia series, KS Augustin’s space operas, John Scalzi’s science fiction, and a recent discovery of mine is Nicole Luiken’s epic fantasy, Gate to Kandrith. I already pre-ordered the sequel!

    Question: What’s next for you?

    Tia: I have been working on a time travel historical that spans a range of time from modern day back to the 20s, and the Civil War. It is quite an ambitious project with a lot of research required, and I expect to work on it for another year. I also have been self-publishing a dystopian series of short stories, but I won’t do a book launch for those until later this spring, when I have the third story ready. It’s been fun, but I’m not taking them very seriously. They are highly experimental!

    Beyond that, who knows? I always have way more ideas than I have time to write!

    GIVEAWAY TIME

    The Sevenfold SpellTia has generously offered up digital copies of The Magic Mirror and the Seventh Dwarf and The Sevenfold Spell to one winner — Epub, Kindle, or PDF — winner’s choice. The giveaway is open worldwide, and the winner will be randomly chosen.

    To enter, just leave a comment on this post talking about what your favorite fairy tale is.

    The giveaway will be open through midnight, EST, Wednesday, March 6. The winner will be announced here on the blog on Friday, March 8.

    MORE ABOUT TIA

    Not even a stint in the military as an aircraft mechanic could erase Tia Nevitt’s love of fairy tales. To this day, she loves to read (and write) books that take her to another place, or another time, or both. She also dabbles in calligraphy, violin, piano and songwriting. Tia has worked on an assembly line, as a computer programmer, a technical writer and a business analyst. She lives in the southeast with her husband and daughter.

    Tia’s novella, The Sevenfold Spell, won the 2012 EPIC ebook award for Fantasy.

    You can find Tia online at her website, blog, Twitter, Facebook, and Goodreads.

    Thanks so much for being here today, Tia.

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    Nightingale, Bigtime book #4, e-published …

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    NightingaleI’m happy to announce that I have e-published Nightingale, the fourth book in my Bigtime superhero paranormal romance series. Huzzah!

    Here’s the book description:

    Anxious brides. Drunken businessmen. Panicked partygoers. As Bigtime, New York’s premiere event planner, Abby Appleby is capable of handling almost any crisis, but even she’s not prepared when she finds herself in the middle of a fight between superhero Talon and his ubervillain nemesis Bandit. Abby manages to save Talon, but the superhero is temporarily blinded, so she takes him back to her loft, where the two wait out a snowstorm. During a blizzard that shuts down the city, Abby and Talon grow close, and he starts calling her Nightingale because of her love of music and singing.

    But Abby is afraid of what Talon will think when he can see the real her, so she conceals her identity from the sexy superhero, and they go their separate ways. However, Abby discovers that Talon is looking for Nightingale, looking for her — and so is Bandit. The mercenary ubervillain thinks that Abby has information that belongs to his boss, the mysterious Tycoon. Abby knows that she’s in serious trouble and that not even Talon — or the Fearless Five — may be able to save her …

    So this book is a little different than the others in the Bigtime series in that Abby and Talon are front and center, instead of the members of the Fearless Five, as in the previous books. In this story, the Fearless Five are more minor characters, although they, along with Lulu Lo, do appear.

    For those of you who remember, Abby was an event planner who helped Bella Bulluci with the museum benefit in Jinx. I thought writing about Abby and a new hero would let me expand the Bigtime world a little bit and bring in some new characters and places in the city for folks to read about.

    Nightingale is available for $3.99 at the following sites:

    Amazon

    Barnes & Noble

    iTunes (you will have to open iTunes on your computer)

    Kobo

    All Romance Ebooks

    Sony

    Smashwords

    I figure posting the e-book on these sites would let me hit most of the e-readers and e-book formats out there.

    Nightingale is around 94,000 words. You can read the first chapter here.

    I don’t have any plans to do a print version of Nightingale at this point. I just don’t have the time in my writing schedule to do that right now. However, if there is enough interest in the book, I may write some more e-books or e-stories in the Bigtime series. Again, we’ll see what happens.

    Anyway, I hope folks enjoy this return trip to Bigtime. Happy reading!