Continue reading »]]> My server host decided the best way to solve the brute force hacker attacks I was receiving was to kick me off their server…permanently. They cited me as an abuser of their system and someone they had to suspend four times to protect their other users. I’ll take ownership for one of those times, the first time (note to readers–do not install a wiki unless you know what you’re doing because it’s a spam magnet), but the other three shutdowns were caused by brute force hacker attacks that my host emailed and told me were NOT MY FAULT. More on brute force hacker attacks in a future post. I’ve learned a LOT since April 2013.

Bottom line:

Web Hosting Hub will never get any of my business nor my recommendation. Ever.

They shut me down and kept me down with no ETA or updates (as promised in their emails) for 1 – 2 days at a time, were horrible with email-based customer service, had long online wait times for help calls that were never answered before I gave up and hung up.

Rather than import the data dump file they generously gave me 72 hours to claim (and which doesn’t even seem complete), I decided to restore my blog almost from scratch. Just in case I had some malware. I had a blog backup but it was from the end of April. Better than nothing. The media images did not want to import so I’m working through those slowly, re-importing in bulk then reattaching to the posts. Ditto with the widgets and pages.

Since I have 3 of these blogs to rebuild, it’s going to take me a little time.

My apologies in advance to any of you who had blog subscriptions via email as I’ve no idea if those will transfer over.

My apologies to those of you who had cover reveals, giveaways in process, guest columns, etc….I’ll rebuild as best I can but if they were posted in May or June, it may be more problematic.

My apologies to visitors seeking information about my books. Believe me, I want you to get this information as quickly and easily as possible and will try to get all the links back up before this weekend ends.

My apologies to The Romance Reviews and those participating in their Sizzling Summer Bash. Sadly, the legitimate traffic from that party is probably what drove the final nail in my coffin.

My sincere and humble thanks to you for sticking with me and for your patience.

Yours truly,

Claire

(who got the termination notice email at 2 AM, tossed and turned with anxiety until 6:30 AM and has been working on setting up my new host site and restoring blogs for about 7 hours now.)

Continue reading »]]> Wow…this month’s ezine is GORGEOUS!! It’s been given a bit of a facelift and WOW! Can’t say that enough times.

Check out my column, Second Chance Cinema (page 87) and a review of my latest release, Purely Relative, (page 22) in this issue. My sista from another mista, Sandra Bunino as has a regular column, “Chic Trends in Romance”.

Continue reading »]]> You hopefully already know Jocelyn from her Lila Gray series that began with The Glass Man. If you don’t, you should! She’s one talented lady and a fellow Pen sister I’ve had the pleasure of sharing the publishing path with for several years now. Jocelyn has a brand spanking new urban fantasy series called “Ironhill Jinn” and I have all the deets, including an excerpt to share:

Title:  Stone Chameleon

Series:  Ironhill Jinn, book #1

Genre:  Urban Fantasy

Publisher:  MuseItUp Publishing

Release Date:  May 24, 2013

Blurb:

When a series of unusual murders point to Lou Hudson, Ironhill’s equal rights advocate, as the primary suspect, she has but one choice: find the real perpetrator before her trial begins or face execution.

Lou, the last of the jinn, survives by hiding her abilities after the rest of the elementals fell victim to genocide. As a preternatural pest exterminator and self-proclaimed guardian of the innocent, she’s accustomed to trudging through the dregs of society. Hunting down a pesky murderer should be easy, especially with help from the dashing and mischievous local media darling.

For Lou, though, nothing is ever simple. When she discovers the killer’s identity, to reveal it would unearth her secret and go against her strict moral code, resulting in a deadly catch twenty-two.

Excerpt:

A flare shot over the rooftops to our left. I dove at Blake and slammed him to the pavement as another column of fire streaked toward us. The flames seared my back. The dragon bat was not a happy camper. Someone landed on my backside, crushing a grunt out of me and pounding my shoulder blade while Blake gasped beneath me.

“Bloody hell, Amun,” I said, before I realized he did it to put out the flames eating up my shirt. “Oh, I see. Thanks.”

He pulled me up, and the three of us ducked behind a car in the parking lot beside the Whip and Tickle, a vampire fetish-wear shop. The owl-sized bat swooped over us again, blasting an inferno that exploded the front window of the shop, sending studded leather and melted mannequins onto the sidewalk.

Three of the other creatures we’d hunted lay dead on other streets, the scorpion included, all by my sword when I’d been left with two options: kill or die. Twelve more were contained in three trucks. The bat remained the only unwelcome visitor in Fangtown. Other than us, of course.

“This is madness, Lou.” Amun panted beside me, his arms rising to shield his head as the bat exhaled on a Mini Cooper two cars over, the crackling and popping suggesting we should find a new hiding place.

“I agree with Mr. Bassili,” Blake said, his drawl worsening with his fright. “What the hell in a hand grenade do we do now?”

Rudy poked his almost translucent head out from behind the newspaper boxes he dove behind during the first fiery blast. The poor guy shook so badly I’d have been surprised if he could see anything. I gestured to him to stay put. “We’ve scared it, not something you want to do to a dragon bat.” A deep exhalation centered me enough to think. “I seem to recall the pecking order in a colony of bats. If we want protection from the dominants, we must present an offering of food.”

“And that helps us how?” Amun, his face blackened with soot and smeared with dirt, tilted to rest against the tire of the car, appearing as frazzled as I’d ever seen him. The sight induced a belly laugh that wouldn’t be contained.

He took on a strange expression of one eyebrow cocked and a half-grin, as if he wasn’t sure whether to be amused or offended. “What?”

I waved him off. “Nothing, I think I’m just losing my marbles.” Rising up enough to see around the car to Rudy, I shouted, “Rudy, do you have any rodents in your truck? Rats or mice?”

“No,” he hollered back, “but I can call some for you.”

I nodded. “As fast as you can.”

Flapping came from our rears. Crackling. A blast tossed the front of a car up until it crashed down on its hood, crushing a Mazda behind it.

“Move!” I shoved at Amun and tugged Blake toward the back of the fetish shop, since it was much closer than the front where flames still poured out of the broken window. Amun kicked out with a startling force against the wooden door. It took three tries, but it finally gave. My, but he was strong. We rushed inside and crouched behind a cement wall beside a set of stairs leading down.

“What do you want the rats for?” Amun asked with obvious suspicion. “Tell me you don’t want one of us to go out there and dangle something for that thing to come and snatch, probably toasting us to a golden brown in the process? Because I think I’ve grown a healthy dose of sympathy for marshmallows right about now.”

“Don’t worry, Amun. I’m going, not you. We just need to listen for Rudy to come back, if he hasn’t chickened out and run for the hills. Hopefully rats like to hang out here and aren’t snapped up for evening snacks.” There was a reason the umikan stuck to small, normal pests, other than his ability to talk to them. Although he’d deal with the scarier stuff when the need called for it, he usually didn’t have enough courage to fill a thimble.

“What?” Amun palmed his forehead. “You can’t be serious.” He gestured toward the door. “Have you been oblivious to the destruction that thing caused just in the last ten minutes? It’s pissed, and I don’t think it’s going to care about some little morsel you offer it.” His frown tugged at his features. “Why are you smiling like that?”

I shrugged, hopped up on adrenaline and enjoying the sight of the great Amun Bassili squirming. “This is what I do for a living.”

“You’re enjoying this?” Both of his eyebrows jacked up.

“Yup,” Blake said, rolling his eyes and chuckling from deep in his belly. “Weirdest broad I ever knew. Takes a bit of starch outta the ole manhood, don’t it?”

I wiped the char from my hands onto my jeans. “To do a job one takes no pride in is a travesty, in my opinion.”

At Rudy’s shout from beyond the wall, I said, “Stay here. Don’t come out until I call or you could send the bat into fits again.”

***

Okay you KNOW you want to buy this one so to make it easier on you here are the…

Purchase Links:

Amazon.com  |  Barnes & Noble  |  MuseItUp Publishing

About the Author:

Jocelyn Adams grew up on a cattle farm in Lakefield and has remained a resident of Southern Ontario her entire life, most recently in Muskoka. She has worked as a computer geek, a stable hand, a secretary, and spent most of her childhood buried up to the waist in an old car or tractor engine with her mechanically inclined dad. But mostly, she’s a dreamer with a vivid imagination and a love for dark fantasy (and a closet romantic — shhh!). When she isn’t shooting her compound bow in competition or writing, she hangs out with her husband and young daughter at their little house in the woods.

Links:

Website  |  Blog |  Facebook  |  Twitter  |  Goodreads

Continue reading »]]> From one of my Sisterhood of the Traveling Pens writer buddies:

Title: Remember Me

Author: Amaleen Ison

Release Date: TBA

Publisher: Decadent Publishing

Editor: Lea Finley

Cover Artist: Scott Carpenter

Genre: Young Adult

Format: E-book

Blurb:  Sera isn’t living. She’s existing—barely. Bedbound by illness, she has no memory of life before the freezing barn she now calls home. A mournful song haunts her dreams and hints at a past not completely buried—one she’s desperate to uncover. Yet Father’s whirlwind visits to draw blood and administer medication don’t provide answers. He only confirms the one thing she already knows; she’s dying.

A lonely death without ever knowing her past seems inevitable until a sudden, mystifying return to health coincides with the arrival of a boy in the opposite out-building. The inextricable pull to the stranger, and the broken memories that storm her mind when he’s near, warn of a history quite different to any she could have imagined. If she’s to uncover the truth she craves, she’ll have to decide whether knowledge of the past is worth forfeiting her second chance at life.

Remember Me Goodreads Link:

 

About the Author: Amaleen Ison is a married mother of one. She lives with her family in Hertfordshire, England, along with her cats (Oscar and Winston), guinea pig ( LouLou), and gerbils (Blackberry and Pumpkinseed). She writes Young Adult fantasy stories that meander into a variety of sub-genres.

As a child, Amaleen lived most of her life in her head. She imagined herself in mystical lands populated by the weird and wonderful. She still spends way too much time daydreaming, but now she writes about her imaginings and weaves them into stories. The fantasy element is always important, but more so the hodgepodge of emotions that arise from her characters first time experiences.

Social Media Links: Facebook | Twitter | Website/Blog | Goodreads

Continue reading »]]>

I was nominated by Helen Jameson for the Liebster Award during the Blogging A to Z challenge this past April.  Now that the dust has settled and Purely Relative is out in the big bad world, I’ve time to catch up on a few blogging memes.

First things first:  Thank you, Helen! Check out her website at Helen Jameson–The Word Scribbler

The Liebster Award has been around since 2010, and over the years the requirements have changed. I’ve slightly altered the “rules” Helen had to follow for accepting the award because hers depended on the Blogging A to Z Challenge which is now over. I say “rules” because no one is required nor obligated to do any or all of the following to accept the award.

.

.

.

1. Post the award on her/his blog.
2. Thank the nominator and link back to his or her blog.
3. Write 11 random facts about yourself.
4. Answer 11 questions about yourself that the nominator has asked.
5. Nominate 11 fellow bloggers.
6. Make up 11 original questions for your nominees to answer.

HERE ARE 11 RANDOM FACTS ABOUT ME:

1. I provide the voice of and for my dog, much to my family’s amusement and eye-rolling (which also means they love it).
2. I’ve never broken a bone.
3. I’m not a good housekeeper, at all, but cannot stand a dirty toilet or a dirty oven.
4. I lived in Hawaii for three years and for most of those years was the only or in a tiny minority of haole’s in my class.
5. I have sickle feet, which means if seated on the ground, I can lay the soles of both feet flat by turning them inward. I had to sleep with my feet in shoes nailed to a board when I was a small child.
6. I cannot tolerate anyone’s feet on me. I think this goes back to when my sister and I had to share a bed as kids.
7. I make to-die-for chocolate chip cookies and homemade yeast rolls.
8. I am or was a pretty good seamstress. Sadly, I don’t sew anymore (*/BEGIN SHAMELESS PLUG: but you are more than welcome to read my book about a seamstress called Prometheus Unstitched by my other me, Lila Shaw END SHAMELESS PLUG/*).
9. I used to work for Arthur Andersen & Co back when it was THE premier CPA firm…sigh…so sad what happened to it because of a few bad eggs (not me!).
10. I am a Christian but I don’t think God minds my writing or reading salacious stories so long as I stay on the correct side of the line between fiction and reality.
11. My husband is funnier than I am, but one of the best sounds in the world is when I make him laugh.

THE 11 QUESTIONS HELEN ASKED ME:

1. What was your first car? A Ford Escort station wagon, 4 speed manual transmission.
2. If you were an animal, what would you be? Someone’s spoiled rotten kitty cat.
3. Have you had a bad dental experience? Yes–the Novocaine hit a vein and made my heart race.
4. Name five of your favorite foods. Cheez-its, chocolate, bread, strawberries and bananas.
5. What was your favorite cartoon as a child? The Flintstones
6. Name your least favorite literary character. Magister Ludi from The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse (bleh!)
7. What is the most exotic place that you have ever visited? Russia.
8. What board games do you play? Sorry, Monopoly, Clue
9. Who do you resemble in your family tree? My father now, my mother when I was younger.
10. If you won a million dollars, what would be the first thing that you would do with the dough? Pay off my debt and fully fund my sons’ college funds. I think that would use it all up and then some, alas.
11. Are you an owl or a lark? A lark, big time.

MY NOMINEES:

Just naming names here. They may or may not wish to participate either because they’ve already rec’d the Liebster award or they are too busy or they don’t care for blog memes. I won’t pressure or put them on the spot by linking to them:

1. Sheryl Winters
2. Anna Simpson
3. Julie Reece
4. Sandra Bunino
5. Ryan Derham
6. Diane Dooley
7. S.J. Maylee
8. Siobhan Muir
9. Kastil Eavenshade
10. Terri Rochenski
11. Stella Berkeley

MY QUESTIONS FOR THE NOMINEES:

1. Which family member influenced you the most?
2. If you could read only one genre for the rest of your life, which would it be?
3. Name your favorite alcoholic drink.
4. Would rather see America (or any country of your choice) by auto / RV or by biking / hiking / walking or by mass transit (airplane, train, bus)?
5. Name your favorite television show.
6. If you could change one aspect of yourself, what would it be?
7. What’s your zodiac sign?
8. What’s your shoe size?
9. What’s your “day” job?
10. What kind of car do you drive?
11. What, if any, sports did you play when in school?

That’s all, folks!

Continue reading »]]> Guess who’s visiting me today? Stephanie Lawton, author of Want and her newly released followup, Need. She’s going to talk a bit about Need and I think the post’s title kind of gives you a preview of what’s to come. So, turning over the keys now….heeeere’s Stephanie. Meet you again at the bottom.

***

Thanks so much to Claire for letting me spread my crazy around on her blog today, and helping get the word out about NEED. (Those are her kind words scrawled across the top of the cover.)

Here’s the thing: I don’t write normal, happy characters. Many of us don’t. Sure, all books need conflict and emotional turmoil of some degree to be interesting, but isn’t it more fun to take conflict and turmoil and trap them in an insane asylum, then dump them out on the front lawn and see what they do to each other in front of the neighbors?

Answer: Hell, yeah.

These kinds of characters make conflict easy, but they must also be handled with care or else they can become melodramatic, unrealistic, and worst of all, readers won’t be able to relate to them. Tortured souls, more than most, need careful arcs that show personal growth. It doesn’t have to (and arguably shouldn’t) be obvious, but when readers turn the last page, they must feel mostly satisfied and happy with the main characters’ newfound place in the World of Good Decisions.

Not so easy when the main character is unreliable at best and a depressed, agoraphobic asshat who can’t keep it in his pants at his worst. Enter Isaac Laroche in NEED. So many readers hated him at the end of WANT that they wondered why on earth I’d devote a follow-up to him.

(Pssst! Here’s a secret: Life is not black and white. Same goes for people—they’re rarely all villain or all hero.) In NEED, we get to see events though his eyes, we experience his shame, self-hate and compulsions, but we also get to see him slowly come out of his fog.

It’s this slow, careful ascent from the pits of hell that helps readers get behind a previously unlikeable character. The change can’t be immediate like the clichéd parting of the clouds, nor can it come from without the character. Sure, other characters help influence the narrator, but ultimately it’s up to him to change organically.

Will a character like Isaac wake up, change his wicked ways and become a well-balanced superhero with a wifey, two-point-five children and a house with a white picket fence? Not likely. Instead, he’ll have to settle for a Happy for Now with the possibility of finding his Happily Ever After … whatever that looks like.

***

Thanks, Stephanie. Me likey the crazy!

Now you know you want to read Need…but if you haven’t read Want yet, be sure to buy that one and read it too. They be some awesome bookends of crazy.

 More About Need:

Isaac Laroche is cursed. All he wants to do is hide out and feel sorry for himself. Never mind that he got caught sleeping with his seventeen-year-old piano student, or that he abandoned her when the truth was exposed.

Isaac’s feisty high school sweetheart has different plans. Heather Swann has returned to their hometown of Mobile, Alabama, to regroup after breaking up with her troll of a fiancé. She’s restless and looking for a diversion, but she bites off more than she can chew when she sets her sights on rehabilitating Isaac with her unorthodox sexual, mental, and physical plans.

The two quickly reconnect, but their happiness is threatened by family secrets, old vendettas and the death of a beloved father-figure.

Can Heather handle Isaac’s baggage, or will her own come back to haunt them both?

Here’s where you can pick up a copy of Need:

• Inkspell Publishing (paperback and digital)
• Barnes and Noble (paperback and Nook)
• Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
• All Romance eBooks (digital)
• The Book Depository (paperback)
• Kobo (digital)

For more information about Stephanie, including other books (**cough** May 22nd **cough**) she has planned, go to:

StephanieLawton.com

Continue reading »]]> One More Day

by Erika Beebe, Marissa Halvorson, Kimberly Kay, J. Keller Ford, L.S. Murphy, Danielle E. Shipley, Anna Simpson

Release Date: December 2, 2013

Target Reader: Young Adult

Keywords: Contemporary Romance, Fantasy, Fiction, Romantic, Science Fiction, Urban Fantasy

Back of the Book

What if today never ends?

What if everything about life—everything anyone hoped to be, to do, to experience—never happens?

Whether sitting in a chair, driving down the road, in surgery, jumping off a cliff or flying … that’s where you’d be … forever.

Unless …

In One More Day, Erika Beebe, Marissa Halvorson, Kimberly Kay, J. Keller Ford, Danielle E. Shipley and Anna Simpson join L.S. Murphy to give us their twists, surprising us with answers to two big questions, all from the perspective of characters under the age of eighteen.

How do we restart time?

How do we make everything go back to normal?

The answers, in whatever the world—human, alien, medieval, fantasy or fairytale—could, maybe, happen today.

Right now.

What would you do if this happened … to you?

URL: http://www.jtaylorpublishing.com/books/36

Continue reading »]]> Twenty-six letters, twenty-six posts. All done. Challenge met.

Ahhh…

That makes me a:

To recap, I told a story over all but about three of the twenty-six days. On my three off days, I talked about my foray into self-publishing and did a cover reveal for a fellow J Taylor Publishing author. The rest of the days were for Clockwork Nessie, a steampunk ditty set in pre-World War 1 Scotland. Each installment was around 200 words—quick easy reads.

The Good:

• Splitting up a story already written was easy-peasy.
• Prepping nearly all 26 posts over one long evening and next AM made for a stress free April. Nice because I was also busy getting ready for my self-publishing debut.
• Having the foresight to back up my blog after completing all those posts came in handy (see Not So Good section below)
• Awesome visitors—seriously! I had some terrific repeat visitors and lots of single visitors too. All terrific.
• Awesome blogs I visited—some I never expected I would enjoy…I totally did!!
• An author whose book I’d just read and loved was also participating so I was able to stalk and fangirl squee over her without being too obvious about it.
• I didn’t miss a single day, not even when my blog was down (thanks to backup plans).
• Advising participants to visit at least five blogs daily gave me a manageable goal to work with and kept the guilt away.

The Not So Good:

• My server host shut my blog down twice(!) due to brute force hacker attacks. My site wasn’t broken into but my server host opted to combat the excessive traffic by shutting me down, usually for 24-36 hours. Not cool, but both were over weekends, so only Saturday to worry about. At least I still had my free WordPress dot com blog and was able to import my pre-written blog post backup file and reroute my domain mapping or I’d have been a basket case.
• No massively amazing serendipity like last year when I was featured in not one but TWO magazine articles after the challenge ended. (Always tag your posts. You never know what fortuitous traffic they might bring you.)
• All that hacker stuff cut into my blog visiting time. I spent an exorbitant number of hours changing passwords, logging into my CPanel to install new html code, adding plugins, monitoring traffic and resource usage, etc, all because of the attacks, hours I would have preferred to have spent reading fellow A to Z blogger posts.
• Visitors trickled off toward the end. I can’t throw any sticks because I was guilty of losing my visitor momentum too.
• There were an overwhelming number of participants and I was never able to get a random “next stop” generator widget. Last year there was one on the A to Z blog but I was on the freebee WordPress dot com blog and couldn’t install it. This year I was on WordPress dot org on my own server, but no widget. sigh…

Overall though, I think the positives outweighed the negatives.

Will I do A to Z next year? You bet!

***

If you want to check out some others’ reflections, please go to the Linky list at the A to Z blog here .

Continue reading »]]> Zenith

Clockwork Nessie, Part 22

With his help, I clambered inside. We were all elbows and knees, but we managed to slam the door and seal it.

Out of breath and tangled with Robert, my face only inches from his in the tiny cockpit, I closed my eyes and whispered my heartfelt thanks. When I opened them again, Robert flashed a roguish grin.

“Oh my God! There really is a Loch Ness monster!” I shook my head as I shifted into a slightly more comfortable position, but no less scandalous.

“Where do you think your father got the design in the first place?” He shook with soft laughter and hugged me closer, easing me between his legs and pulling me back against his chest. His breath moved my hair as he spoke. “And now, Lizzie, how about we go find a little bauble for my newest joint venture partner before Nessie the First gets any amorous ideas.”

I turned in the arms that surrounded me. Robert Rankine really was a superb male specimen. “She’s amorous?”

“Oh, aye, Lizzie. Aye.”

“Darwin’s devils,” I sighed, nestling into the warmth of Robert’s body.

The End.

Continue reading »]]> Yummy

Clockwork Nessie, Part 21

“I say, Thomas, she seems to be stuck. I’ll need a bit more muscle than Miss Blake can provide in order to dislodge her so we can move out to deeper water and submerge.

What the Darwin’s devil was he up to?

Thomas motioned for me to come with him into the water. When he moved beyond the opening to the capsule, Robert raised a hand and mouthed, “Stay there.”

The disturbances in the water grew in intensity as if something large but invisible drew near. Twenty feet behind Thomas, a silver dorsal scale broke the surface, then another and another. Wide-eyed, I looked to Robert, who pressed a single finger to his lips.

The head of a dragon rose at least ten feet into the air before Thomas turned and laughed. “You must be Nessie the First.”

The beast opened its jaws and seized Thomas from head to the waist. It lifted him from the water and shook violently. Thomas discharged a single shot before his agonized cries came to a bone-crunching halt. The lower half of his body fell with a gush of blood into the water.

I watched and screamed before Robert jerked me away by my arm. “Miss Blake! Come now!”

(To Be Continued)