Can You Leave Us Breathless Contest Entry

Brenda Drake's blog is hosting another contest:  Can You Leave Us Breathless? with some amazing prizes.  It is open today, Oct 21st.  Feel free to enter something that will "take their breath away."

Meanwhile, here is my 303 word entry, an except from my manuscript, Kingdom of Obsession (title still pending):


We lived on a curvy street, and the sun was hitting the leaves just right to make the bend in the road framed beautifully.  I took off the lens and shoved it into my pocket and shot a few photos.  I heard a loud beep, turned around just in time to see the yellow school bus shatter my mailbox into a million pieces.  I saw the look of terror on the driver's face, trying to slam on the brakes again and again.  And then I died...

Or that's what I thought when I saw my dead mother standing over me.

“Oh, thank Heavens!”  She clutched her chest with older hands than I remembered. 

Catherine, my ex-best friend, was standing on the other side of my mother.  “It’s about time!”  She had put on a few pounds than when I had last seen her, eight years ago.

And the first words out of my mouth in the afterlife were, “Cat, you died?”  My mother and Cat looked at each other, quizzically.

“Still hanging in there, thank you very much.”  She scoffed.

“Wait… I’m not dead?” 

My mother was wide-eyed, hair grayed and falling across her face in wiry tufts.  “Honey, you’ve been in a coma for the past nine years.”

My spine tingled until it stopped feeling, everything was shifting sideways, and my vision went blurry.  I heard this rapid beeping somewhere off in the distance and my brain swelled.  “Where is Dennis?”  The two figures standing over me looked at each other.  “Where is he?!”  I grabbed my mother’s old leathery arm.  “Where is Asher?  Where’s my son?”  Nurses came running in.  I was being pushed down into my bed.  I couldn’t breathe with everyone on top of me.  I thrashed in a panic before I felt a sharp prick in my arm.

Gearing Up

Pardon me for not posting more frequently.  I've been neck deep in RUHE revisions (which are going along nicely, but not as fast as I originally hoped).  On top of that, I've been doing some brainstorming and character building for NaNo - and really, really inspecting their past.  I found that with RUHE the characters surrounding my main character were weak.  I knew little to nothing about her history or her decision to stop speaking - simply that she did stop speaking.

So I took to my new mirror of doom.  I scribbled furiously across it.  If you've never tried writing on walls before, I encourage you to do it (somewhere that you can eventually wipe off, of course).  There is something very satisfying about writing until the whole wall (mirror, in my case) is full and then your words are just staring you in the face.  I know, I know, I'm a little crazy, but aren't we all?  And isn't that why we write?  To hide behind the "It's okay, I'm not crazy!  I'm a writer!"

Regardless, I've been scrambling.  I want to polish my manuscript in order to submit it into a contest (November 1st).  I want to finish outlining my NaNo story so I can actually start with a solid basis on November 1st.  And that's that.  I haven't felt this kind of pressure since I left college.  And I suppose that's a good thing, because there's really this fire that's been lit under me.  I needed it, I needed the shove and push back in the right direction.  I mean, heck, I finished RUHE in a week (not polished, but finished the main story arc)!  If I can do that, dedicate a week of my life to being insane once every two months, then maybe I can finally get somewhere. (:  I'm a lot closer to wherever "somewhere" is than I was a month ago.

Review: Song to Wake to

Genre:  YA Urban Fantasy... with a bit of Romance

Song to Wake to is the first book in the Levels Series by J.D. Field.

I don't want to pin this as a YA Romance, because I feel like the story line is more coming-of-age.  Maddy Bride, our 16-year-old narrator, has just transferred into Levels (as Maddy refers to "it's kind of like Hogwarts").  And let me just say, as a Harry Potter fan, I really wished I went to a school like Levels (you know, one that actually could exist without magic and such).

Maddy meets the mysterious Eddy Moon.  She is drawn to him, for some inexplicable reason.  This is the part where the book sounds like a story you read before, but J.D. Field puts an amazing, fresh spin on it - but I won't give away what the spin is, you'll have to find that out for yourself.  Through her estranged relationship with Eddy, Maddy finds out a lot about who she is and how she sees the world.  There are fantasy elements to it, but not overwhelming to turn someone off that isn't into fantasy (and enough fantasy to make the rest of us that love fantasy happy). 

I really liked this book as the debut novel of the series, and I will pick up the next of the series.  For those of you that don't want another series book, Song to Wake to stands decently well on its own.  Though, by the end, I definitely wanted a little more.  Which brings me to the only downside of this novel - the ending itself feels a little rushed.  However, I think this was done as a ploy, because now I want to read the second novel.

So, I suppose the upside is there is more where this came from.  And it sounds like the next of the series, Rock Anthem, is set to be released on November this year!

You can purchase Song to Wake to for .99 cents through:  Amazon or Smashwords.

Giveaway Winner!

Hi everyone!

Thanks for all those who participated in the giveaway of Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver.  Random.org helped me pick out the fabulous winner.

Congratulations goes to:  Beesha

You will be receiving an e-mail shortly from me!  

Everyone who didn't win, I will have many more giveaways in the future.  My husband and I have been doing some spring cleaning in our house and I'm excited to be able to pass on a few gems to new homes.  

Upcoming blog posts:

• More spooky stories for Hallo-month
• Updates on NaNoWriMo in November
• Updates on RUHE (my finished, but not polished manuscripts)
• Some more original short stories and flash fiction

Also, I am going to be doing a once-a-month "book recommendation" post.  This will range from YA, to SciFi, to Fantasy, to Contemporary, and pretty much everything that I think is worth reading.  I won't bore you with the items I don't recommend - but instead just recommend the ones I like.  If there happens to be a month where I don't read anything mention-worthy, then I apologize in advance. 

I will have two more reviews coming out that will be promoting self-published authors (one book I have read and recommend to YA Urban Fantasy lovers and the other book is still on my shelf).  I will only do this for self-published authors, as there are already too many fabulous review sites out there for books that you can find on the shelves of your library.  With that being said, tomorrow I will be posting a review on Song to Wake to by J.D. Field.