Blog Tour Winners

My Dark Matters Blog Tour is now over and it's been such fun. Thank you to everyone who came along to visit and supported me, leaving wonderful comments and making this such a lovely experience.

I've now chosen the two winners for the $50 Amazon gift card. All comments across all the blog stops were gathered and the two winners chosen using a random generator.

I've notified the winners by email, so if you haven't checked your email today, do so now :)

I haven't posted up the names of the winners here with respect for their privacy, but they're welcome to leave a comment if they don't mind sharing their identify.

Dark Matters On Tour

Dark Matters,  Book 1, is on tour this month and I hope you'll join in.

This is more of a blitz tour, so I'm not doing guest posts or interviews, etc, but I am giving away two $50 Amazon gift vouchers and one can never have too many books, right? So please pop by a couple of the stops to leave a comment.

Mon 6th - Out of the LockBox
Tues 7th - Readaholic's Reviews
Wed 8th - The Life and Lies...
Wed 8th - Long and Short Reviews
Thurs 9th - United By Books
Fri 10th - It's Raining Books

Mon 13th - Books and Other Spells
Tues 14th - Ramblings From This Chick
Wed 15th - Flirting with Romance
Thurs 16th - The Love NV
Fri 17th - All in One Place

Mon 20th - My Reading Obsession
Tues 21st - Dawn's Reading Nook
Wed 22nd - Bea's Book Nook
Thurs 23rd - Welcome to My World of Dreams
Fri 24th - Book Girl Knitting

Looking forward to seeing you there :)

New Dark Matters Release

I'm very pleased to announce that A Matter of Propriety and Parasites (Dark Matters: Book 2) releases today

Available at most online retailers including:
Amazon
Kobo

Victorian Steampunk / Paranormal Romance

Lily has embraced her destiny and shredded her reputation. She's done with straddling two worlds and losing in both. With so much at stake, her standing in society is the least of her problems. Or so she thought.

Demons walk among us...

Demons are infiltrating the London Court and cozying up to the Queen. Too late, Lily learns the price of throwing propriety to the wind. She must return to the influential circles of London and the stiff cuff of society. But with the pious Queen Victoria on the throne, that won't be possible until she salvages her reputation and the only way to do that is to marry.

Will she choose the dashing Scottish rogue, Greyston Adair, or the arrogant and powerful Kelan McAllister? Will the choice even be hers to make?

A marriage of convenience.
A practical arrangement.
A temporary rearrangement of her personal situation.

Does her choice even matter?

Saturday Snippet

Writing, writing, writing my next book from Corkscrew Bay, Falling for Alexander. Here's a teensy snippet

    Kate punched in the code to redirect the call to her phone and answered. “Corkscrew Weekly, good morning.”

    “Morning.” The gravel baritone rumbled over those two syllables and down her spine to curl into her toes. “I’d like to speak to the senior editor, please.”
   
     Kate blew out a long, shallow breath.

    There was a sexy voice, and then there was sin. That voice belonged on a face with chiselled cheekbones and a hollowed jaw. On a tanned body rippled in lean muscle. Designer suits and Armani sunglasses. Dark brown hair mussed with a careless hand and sliding into the turn of a collar.

    “Hello?” came the voice again, traced with accents of Italian.

    “Um, speaking,” she said, fanning hot cheeks with her free hand. If Megan were here, she’d put this guy on speakerphone. “This is the senior editor.”

    “Excellent. Then you’re responsible for approving that piece on the front page of the paper today.”

    Her mind snapped to attention and her toes uncurled. For writing it. Approving it. Proofing it. “Whom I speaking to?”

   “Alexander Gerardo, as your reporter so kindly announced to the whole damn world,” he said. “I don’t expect you to recall the paper or retract that article, but I’d like to make myself clear, Ms…?”

    “Kate Hadley,” she drew out in a cautious tone.

   A static pause took up the next couple of seconds.Was he writing down her name? What for?

    This wasn’t The Godfather, she reminded herself, even if the mysterious Alexander Gerardo had a thick Italian accent to match the name. God, and she’d thought his voice sinfully hot.

    To be honest, she still did, but now she was far less interested in fantasizing about the kind of face and body that went with that voice.

    “Ms. Hadley, let me make myself clear,” he continued. “I don’t interfere with anyone else’s life and I’d appreciate the favour returned.”

    She arched a brow at the wall opposite. “You should have thought of that before you bought our national heritage and shut it down.”

We haz a new family member purrrrr

Where have all the carefully crafted words gone?

As I sit here this morning, finishing the edits on a final draft, I got to thinking... you know, easily distracted at all...how much story telling has changed.

I'll improvise on what a well known author once said. I don't recall exactly whom, and these aren't his exact words, and he was getting a broader point across rather than stating a pedantic fact, but it went something like: "Today I wrote two words. Tomorrow I'll get the order right."

Today, authors are not putting out 4 to 6 books a year by fretting over the turn of every single sentence, by striving for the perfect word with each and every stroke on the keyboard. They're opening their minds, stretching their imagination, bursting open their hearts and letting the wonderful mishmash explosion of their story pour out.

And we're loving it!! Yes, I enjoy the wonderfully crafted story, where my eyes fall in love with the prose on the page.

But it's just as wonderful (maybe even better) to dive in with eyes wide open and forget to draw breath until I finally surface from an author's world. And now, ahem, back to those edits...

Happy Easter weekend to those who celebrate and happy long weekend to the rest :)

A Matter of Propriety and Parasites

Lady Lily has embraced her destiny and shredded her reputation. She's done with straddling two worlds and losing in both. With so much at stake, her standing in society is the least of her problems. Or so she thought.

Demons walk among us...

Demons are infiltrating the London Court and cozying up to the Queen. Too late, Lily learns the price of throwing propriety to the wind when she must return to the influential circles of London and the stiff cuff of society.

But with the pious Queen Victoria on the throne, that won't be possible until she salvages her reputation with a marriage of convenience. Or, as Lily prefers to think of it, a temporary rearrangement of her personal situation.

Available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble
and in Print

Chapter One

It might be high summer in the rest of Scotland and England, but one would never know it, Lily thought as she stared out the carriage window. A drizzly breeze swept in from the west of Glasgow and converged with the putrid smoke billowing from foundries and forges, creating a saturated, smoggy grey blanket that hung over the entire city. To her left, the River Clyde was a murky, unpleasant green that didn’t encourage close inspection.

Lily snapped her gaze from the dismal surroundings. Her small, involuntary shudder would have gone unnoticed by most, but nothing escaped Kelan McAllister. Earl of Perth and Chieftain of the powerful McAllister clan, Kelan seemed to possess a handful of extra senses and he’d been trained since the age of four to act upon them with lightning speed.

Sitting across from her on the padded velvet bunk, he glanced up from the leather-bound journal he’d been studying.

With that dark, dark blue gaze set on her, Lily felt the inclination to shudder for an altogether different reason.

Kelan McAllister was a man who filled a room with his mere presence, and that effect increased a hundred-fold in the cramped interior of the carriage. His charcoal suit was exquisitely tailored to fit his broad shoulders, impressive height and lean torso. His hair, black as a moonless night, scraped over the sharp angles of his jaw to nestle at the collar of his shirt.

In another lifetime, he might have been quite handsome. But this lifetime had carved a feral harshness into his features and hardened the hollows of his jaw with fierce shadows. He was a compelling force of nature with the attitude and bearing of an avenging angel.

“Did you see something more?” he asked.

By ‘see’, he meant inside her head. With the blood of a demon called Raimlas flowing through her veins, Lily was effectively the McAllister demon sniffer. Although not quite effective as she’d yet to exercise any measure of control over her ability.

She shook her head at him. “I’m completely useless.”

“We wouldn’t be here if not for your vision yesterday,” he reminded her in that refined drawl. Born and raised in Florence, there wasn’t a shred of Scottish burr in the Scotsman.

Which inversely turned her thoughts to Greyston, every inch a Scotsman down to his warm honey-rumbling-over-oats burr and unruly hair. She hadn’t heard from Greyston since he’d blazed a trail through the Aether six weeks ago. He was running from both the inner demons of his past and the demon blood mingled with his own. The same demon blood pumping through her heart with a visceral identity that set her hairs on end if she thought about it for too long.

Which she tried not to.

Desperately.

“It’s been six weeks,” she said, her voice tight with frustration. “And in all that time, I’ve had only this one vision.”

The demon had taken on the guise of such a nondescript man…middle-aged, of average height, blond hair and a plain, square face—not a single distinguishing feature or mannerism she could describe to Kelan for a positive identity. Which was why she’d had to leave the anonymity of Cragloden Castle to venture to Glasgow with him.

“I recognised the building you described.” Kelan leaned forward, planting his elbows on his knees. “That’s important information.”

“It is?” she chided. “I wouldn’t know, of course, because you never actually tell me a thing.”

His brow creased. “You’ve had a lot to deal with, Lily, and it wouldn’t do to overwhelm you.”

She rolled her eyes. “I want to be overwhelmed! Can you not understand? I want to learn and know everything at once.”

Perhaps it had been naïve of her to think she’d be back in London before the end of The Season, but at this rate, she’d die an old maid stuck away at Cragloden Castle. “I’ve had another letter from Evelyn and it would appear my aunt’s suspicions are roused. She’s demanding the address of the convent I’m not cloistered in, Kelan. I don’t know how much longer Evelyn can put her off and we’re no closer to learning how to focus my visions. ”

“Training you in defence techniques is my first concern.” He leaned back in his seat again. “Impatience, you know, rarely yields a good result.”

“You have no sense of urgency! Greyston warned me. The McAllisters strategise in terms of generations, not a single life-span.” She flung her arms across her chest and took a moment to regain her composure. “I have only this one life, and I don’t intend to give the whole of it to your demon cause.”

His gaze, already so intense, hardened. “I don’t recall casting you in chains.”

“Oh, for goodness sake!” She flicked aside the black gauze scratching her forehead. A little too vigorously, perhaps, because the entire veil ripped loose from her widow weeds disguise.

Thanks to her dear friend, Evelyn, London Society believed she’d been cloistered in a highland convent these last six weeks. Having been spotted on the 10:30 Perth-Glasgow Mainline would rather ruin that tale.

“I made my choice and I don’t intend to change my mind,” she said quietly. “I will not give up until the last demon has been banished and the Cairngorm Tear between our dimensions sealed.” She opened her eyes, peering at him from lowered lashes. “Is it so very selfish of me to want that sooner rather than later?”

He looked at her, a contemplative, brooding look that divulged naught of his thoughts on the matter, and then the carriage drew to a lurching halt alongside the curb and his attention turned outside.

Lily sighed. Conversations with Kelan McAllister were like tramping through a marsh bog. One could wade for hours with absolutely no progress.