Bring It Back(list) - HEALER OF THE HEART, a Sensuous Epic Fantasy Romance by Linda Mooney

HEALER OF THE HEART

Epic Fantasy Romance
by Linda Mooney

Word Count: 88.4K

$4.99 e / $15.99 p 

On an alternate world, a woman with extraordinary healing powers, and a man who would be the next ruler of his country, are thrown together to save their lands from warring nations and to solve the mystery of two brutal deaths within their fortress, despite the danger to their own lives.

Through it all, they find a love that defies all odds, and becomes the symbol of hope for the future of their world.

Warning!  Contains bloody swordplay, dungeon indoctrination, covert meeting in the kitchen, challenging authority, repeated attempted murder, total disregard for traditions, and the ultimate Seven Joys. 

Excerpt and Buy Links

Bring it Back(list) - Soul of Kandrith

 CONFESSION TIME: I have no idea how to market this book. No. Clue. Whatsoever.

First of all it's the second in a duology and the very blurb has spoilers for book one, Gate to Kandrith. So if you hate spoilers and haven't heard of book one, then go here.

Secondly, there's the cover which I both love and hate. It's a great cover, stunning and bold. I love the way it's framed and the red tones. It telegraphs that this is a fantasy novel quite well. But it looks as if the book is about a sword-swinging barbarian. In fact my hero is a healer. There is only one scene in which he picks up a sword--and after seeing the cover I tweaked the scene slightly so that I could tell myself the man was in fact Lance.

Third, there's the content. The book starts off with Sara having lost her soul and trying to regain it. the ending is happy, but it goes to some very dark places in which she is enslaved and, yes, raped. It feels unfair to encourage people to buy the book without including a Trigger Warning.

And yet I am proud of this book. I worked very hard on it: the pacing and action scenes, the world-building, the characters. It was hard to write compellingly through the viewpoint of  someone with no soul and therefore very little emotional connection to her surroundings, but I pulled it off.

VILLAIN STOMPING ON MY OUTLINE

Ironically, the rape scenes were not in my original outline. They are one of those (for me rare) cases where the characters came alive and the scene went sideways on me. I wrote the scene how it unfolded and told myself I'd fix it in the second draft, but when it came down to it I couldn't. Because I had something to say about slavery and sacrifice and rape. Too often in our world the victims of rape are shamed and told that they 'provoked' the attack or did something 'stupid' to find themselves in such a situation. But Sara, having no emotions, is not ashamed. She sees right through the villain when he tries blames her for the horrible things he does to her. And  that is why the dark scenes stay.

So if you're in the mood for some light entertainment, look elsewhere. But if you're willing to venture a step or two into the dark consider giving Soul of Kandrith a chance.

BUY LINK

Here Be News

New Releases

Veronica Scott released a new science fiction romance, STAR CRUISE: MAROONED. Here's the story:

Meg Antille works long hours on the charter cruise ship Far Horizon so she can send credits home to her family. Working hard to earn a promotion to a better post (and better pay), Meg has no time for romance.

Former Special Forces soldier Red Thomsill only took the berth on the Far Horizon in hopes of getting to know Meg better, but so far she’s kept him at a polite distance. A scheduled stopover on the idyllic beach of a nature preserve planet may be his last chance to impress the girl.

But when one of the passengers is attacked by a wild animal it becomes clear that conditions on the lushly forested Dantaralon aren’t as advertised – the ranger station is deserted, the defensive perimeter is down…and then the Far Horizon’s shuttle abruptly leaves without any of them.

Marooned on the dangerous outback world, romance is the least of their concerns, and yet Meg and Red cannot help being drawn to each other once they see how well they work together. But can they survive long enough to see their romance through? Or will the wild alien planet defeat them, ending their romance and their lives before anything can really begin?

Amazon     iBooks     Kobo     Barnes & Noble

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Out Tuesday: Idol of Blood, Book 2 in Jane Kindred's dark epic fantasy series, Looking Glass Gods

The price of revenge may be her sanity…and the lives of those she loves.

No longer haunted by memories of her life—and death—as the Meer of Rhyman, Ra looks forward to a quiet existence with her lover Jak in the Haethfalt highlands. Having made peace with Ahr, her consort from her former life, Ra can finally explore her new relationship, free of the ghosts of the past—until she unwittingly unearths Jak’s own.

Out of instinct, she uses her Meeric power to heal the pain of Jak’s childhood trauma. But all magic has a price, and Ra’s bill has come due.

Succumbing to the affliction inherent in her race, Ra flees to the mountain ruins where her mother’s temple once stood. As the madness takes hold, she resurrects the ancient city of AhlZel in a tremendous act of magic that seals her fate—and threatens to destroy those who would give up everything to save her from herself.

Product Warnings: Contains dark themes, violence, gender-bending sex, and recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse.

Idol of Blood is available in ebook and paperback from the following retailers:

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Book-A-Million | iBooks | Kobo | Samhain Publishing

Follow Jane's blog tour and giveaway June 23-30 for a chance to win signed paperback copies of Books 1 and 2 in the Looking Glass Gods and a Cult of Isis necklace.

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Now Available for Pre-Order!

The planet had secrets it never revealed, until it was too late. 

Centuries ago, mankind's only hope for survival were the seven vessels specially fitted to send the last survivors of Earth to a planet named New Earth. Seven space ships that became floating cities once they landed on the water-only world teeming with edible seafood, as well as dangerous creatures. 

Lt. Jace Novick, of the ship UnderPlatinum, is sent to sister ship UnderSilver to see if he can help find a possible solution to their growing problem. Food is beginning to run low, catches are growing scarcer, and the tension between ships is increasing as starvation becomes imminent. 

Lt. Commander Rhone Derth has created a security device called wrap shields to protect Silver from repeated attacks by the planet's hostile monsters. But it seems the shields are also keeping the fish away as well. Jace believes he has an answer, but it means he and Rhone must work together despite Rhone's antagonism toward him, and the short time he's been allotted before he must return to his own ship. 

Together, they try to discover a way to survive as the other vessels turn on each other in a desperate battle for the last of the dwindling food supply, not knowing that another, more malevolent being is watching them from the depths.

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The Making of Michael Bishop is now free on all platforms

Keep your distance. Don’t look him in the eye. Feed him and leave.

 Michael D’Augustino is a priest in the time of the Inquisition. Marked as weak for his refusal to torture those charged with sorcery, heresy, devil worship or worse, he’s given another task. Feed the prisoner in the cell in the darkest corner of the dungeon. With the edict comes a set of instructions.

Ever obedient, Michael does exactly as he is told. Until the night his charge doesn’t eat and Michael has to enter the cell to find out why. Instead of the beast he believes to be imprisoned there, he finds a man. A broken, tormented man who asks for help.

But all is not as it seems and, before the night is through, Michael will be changed forever.

Nook  Kindle 

Win-a-Book Wednesday with Nicole Luiken!

NICOLE LUIKEN

Nicole Luiken wrote her first book at age 13 and never stopped.

She is the author of nine published books for young adults, including Violet Eyes and its sequels Silver Eyes and Angel Eyes, Frost, Unlocking the Doors, The Catalyst, Escape to the Overworld, Dreamfire and the sequel Dreamline. She also has an adult thriller, Running on Instinct, under the name N.M. Luiken and an epic fantasy romance series, Gate to Kandrith and Soul of Kandrith.

Nicole lives with her family in Edmonton, Alberta. It is physically impossible for her to go more than three days in a row without writing.

Sarathena Remillus, daughter of the newly-elected Primus of the Republic of Temboria, has been given a mission: discover the secret of slave magic. Anxious to escape the corruption and treachery of the capital, Sara welcomes the chance to finally prove herself far away in Kandrith, the tiny nation of former slaves.

Accompanying her on her journey is Lance, a Kandrithan to whom Sara owes her life. Lance despises the nobility and is determined to resist his desire for Sara and keep the secret of his magic.

Soon their travels become fraught with peril, and Sara falls victim to the ultimate betrayal. To end a war between two nations, she will have to make the ultimate sacrifice...

RT Book Reviews: 4 1/2 Stars 

"Filled with plotlines that range from the political to the fantastical, the adventure is what keeps readers engrossed..."

I'm giving away an ebook of the first book in the Kandrith series, Gate to Kandrith. However, if you'd prefer a different ebook of mine, please let me know and I'll try to accomodate you.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Cookies!

This time of year, my mind doesn’t immediately turn to decorations or gift buying (or getting). I’m not thinking turkey or ham or holiday traffic. My thoughts turn toward cookies. I love to bake. Cake, pie, cookies, you name it. I find it therapeutic. Cookies are my go-to dessert because they’re fast easy and there are so many varieties... which leads me back to why thoughts go to cookies at this time of year.

Christmas cookies.

It’s like an excuse to bake as much as I want, as often as I can, and try as many varieties as possible. I can rarely leave a recipe alone. I like to experiment. What if I added coconut... chocolate, etc.  I have my favorites, and those varieties requested by friends and family, but I love to try out new varieties every year.  I bake them for friends, neighbors, family, and this year I’m even selling them.

I think it would be awesome to participate in a giant cookie exchange, but as that’s kind of problematic, how about an informal cookie recipe exchange?

I’ll give you my favorite sugar cookie recipe and if you have a favorite recipe, post them in the  comments.

 I’ve always loved sugar cookie dough, but this one... the cookies are good without frosting.

½ cup butter, room temperature

4 oz cream cheese, room temperature

1 cup white sugar

1 egg

½ tsp almond extract

2 cups all-purpose flour

½ tsp baking powder

Cream together cream cheese, butter and sugar. Blend until smooth. Add egg and vanilla extract. Mix. Add flour and baking powder and blend together.

Divide the dough in half and wrap in plastic wrap. Refrigerate for at least one hour. (I’ve refrigerated overnight with no problem)

Take half of the dough and roll it to a ¼ inch thick on a well-floured surface. Cut out the cookies and bake them at 350 for 6 to 10 minutes or until golden brown.  (Cooking time depends a lot on what shape you choose for your cookie) If you don’t like the taste of almond, substitute vanilla.

Cool and frost or decorate as you desire.

Let me know what you think of the cookies! I will check the comments and try your recipes too. I may just pick one I like the best and send you a batch of my famous—in my family anyway—lemon cookies. Because who doesn’t love getting cookies?

Not only is my mind full of cookie thoughts,  I’m celebrating my upcoming release, Journey of Wisdom, which is the third book in the Triune Stones series. I don’t think Ilythra ever made a cookie in her life, but she’d probably eat one or two.

Journey of Wisdom comes out December 30^th, just in time for New Year’s reading!

So please, leave your favorite recipe or a link to your favorite recipe in the comments below!

Summoning the Muse

I love talking to other writers. I learn so much from them while at the same time, get to impart a little of me to them as well. One of my favorite topics, as is many readers, is inspiration. Where do writers get their inspiration? Do they ever get to a point where their well runs dry and they are faced with the dreaded Writer's Block monster? *crazed lunatic pounds on an organ*

It seems as if muses come in as many shapes and sizes as there are writers. Some play guitar, go for a run, visit a museum, jump up and down on one leg while barking like a dog (a big dog), but me...I like my muse best.

She rocks. Literally.

 I knew exactly what the opening scene was going to be to my first novel DRYNN the first time I ever heard Forty Six & 2 by Tool.

Since I live in two states--NY and CT--I do some serious driving, back and forth, twice a week. Some people look at me with pity at all the driving I have to do, but I loooove it; I actually get to escape from the chaos of life and do a little decompressing. It's like going on vacation every week. The best part is that I get to listen to all the music I've been missing and within that music...novels are waiting to be born.

I actually conjured an entire book by a single song, it hit me like a Howitzer round--boom in the brain! Got it, and thank God for voice memo on the iPhone--I have hours and hours, which in of itself is a treasure because I get to actually hear epiphanies happening real time and get to keep them forever. Downloadable and all. ;)

I've written two books and have a third one on the way, and each one of them has a soundtrack, pieces of music that have moved me. Donald Maass calls the core of a scene the "uranium isotope", and it is such an apt description. I hear a song, I see a scene and I just start fleshing that sucker out. What's going on? Who're the main players? How'd they get there? What's the uranium isotope of the scene--rage, anguish, elation, vengeance? We as a civilization are so blessed with the plethora of gifted musicians out there and here's the cool part. As long as there's music...I get to write. :D

And that rocks.

What's your muse?

And thanks for the glance.

-Steve Vera

P.S. Oh yeah, maybe I should say a lil' something about my book. DRYNN, Book I of the LAST OF THE SHARDYN trilogy is an epic urban fantasy. The premise? The heroes of two worlds join forces to fight the Lord of the Underworld. Dun dun dun dunnnnnnnn. THROUGH THE BLACK VEIL (Book II) comes out Nov. 25th, 2013 and is also gonna be available on Audible.com as well as carinapress.com, Amazon, Google Play, and any other place in cyberspace that has ebooks.  I can't wait for the world to read it! DRYNN was just the appetizer. Okay, once again, thanks for the glance.

Steve out.

Fantasy Week - Epic fantasy: Does it have to be so long?

Do you need 1000 pages to tell an epic fantasy story?

I’ve heard this question a lot lately. Honestly more likely framed as why is epic fantasy so long?

I cut my reading teeth on authors like JRR Tolkien, George RR Martin, CS Lewis. 

(Notice how they all have initials. Honestly that’s why I should have gone SL Thomas.)

Game of Thrones - Clash of Kings at 1006 pages? I honestly won’t bat an eyelash. Bring it on.

But the question remains. Why are these books so long? In today’s fast-paced society, people don’t have patience for a thousand-page book. Novellas and shorts are popular for a reason. Get to the happily ever after in six hundred pages or less, please.

I get that.

So shouldn’t epic fantasy follow the same pattern?

I honestly think it would be a tragedy.

From Merriam Webster -  Epic: extending beyond the usual or ordinary especially in size or scope.

Epic fantasy gives you vistas. Vistas need words. It gives you the history of kings back a hundred generations. It gives you mythologies. It gives ruins of civilizations that lived before the one your heroine is currently fighting for. It tells you not only the color of the king’s hair, but what’s on his banner and why. It gives you not only the names of the characters, but their fathers and grandfathers. Why. What. When. Where.

Good epic fantasy doesn’t just take you to a world; it builds a world from the ground up: Currency, politics, food, geography, history. Nothing is left to chance. Once you enter Martin’s seven kingdoms or Tolkien’s Middle Earth, you will have felt you could navigate the culture, sit at dinner with the commoners or even royalty and not miss a beat or wonder where the spoons are.

So couldn’t you condense this a wee bit... you know to attract more readers. Because not many readers want to dive so deep into a world.

Yes. And no.

I admit, in today's world, not many readers want to pick up a tome. So can we hold on to the tenants of what makes epic fantasy epic without drowning in minutiae? 

It's a fine line. 

My Triune Stones series began as a single book. A single book that is now four books. Journey of Dominion, which will release on May 20^th, is the second in the series.  

And while the series is firmly epic fantasy, when rewriting it for publication, I recognized the need for action. I deleted many musings, many descriptions of beautiful scenery because they just didn’t move the plot forward.  

Even epic fantasy authors must adapt and change with the times. That said, by their very nature, our stories will still be too slow paced for some readers. But if you have patience, the story will weave around your imagination, drawing you into a land where magic happens, where villains desire power, heroes are ordinary people, just like you, who do extraordinary things that not only affect them, but the entire world. There may be dragons, fairies, airydh, magic rings, magic stones, elves, white walkers, secret glens and woven through it all, a sense that it has all been there for time beyond time.  Unless, of course, our hero fails. 

Journey of Dominion - a legend’s fall. 

May 20th, 2013

Don't forget to check out the other awesome posts for Fantasy week! 

Braving the Fantasy Debates - Not Only Epic, but Romantic

My world seems full of fantasy discussions and parsings lately. Like Jane Kindred, who posted yesterday, I was also at the RT Convention last week. Unlike her, I feel right at home among the romance authors - much more so than at World Fantasy Con last fall, which I also attended along with Jane.

(Is she stalking me or am I stalking HER? Hmmm...)

A popular tail-sniffing question at all of these conferences is "What do you write?" This is largely in lieu of the real question, which is more along the lines of "Are you a successful writer I should be interested in talking to and should I know who you are?" My answer has always been complicated, but for now I reel off "fantasy, fantasy romance and erotic contemporary romance."

People nod at this, sometimes looking a bit glazed over. It's really not kosher to reply with more than one genre, but sue me - I've always been an eclectic kind of gal and I'm used to getting funny looks.

The thing is, to me, it all feels more or less like the same thing. Or, at least, like a continuum. The erotic contemporary romances of my Facets of Passion series have no magic per se, but I write post-apocalyptic ones (Blood Currency) that feel much the same, only in a more broken world. I'm working on edits for MASTER OF THE OPERA, a modern retelling of Phantom of the Opera, which is contemporary, erotic and also full of magical realism. The Covenant of Thorns books are about a modern woman - a scientist - trapped in Faerie. When I was shopping it (before I knew better), I called it "an urban fantasy that takes place in a non-urban landscape."

You all should have just SEEN the way the agents' eyes would roll back in their heads when I said that. One might have frothed at the mouth a little bit.

Even my own agent, who loves my work and says she wants to make me the Queen of Fantasy Romance (which apparently does not come with a tiara - what a gyp), said of one of my books "it's like epic fantasy and urban fantasy had a lurid affair and this is their baby."

Now I've been assigned yet another genre - my trilogy coming out in 2014, The Twelve Kingdoms, is being called Adult Fantasy by the publisher.

I just roll with it.

Because, really, on a fundamental level, genre is irrelevant to me as a storyteller.Yes, it's meant to convey a promise to readers, but this dividing and sub-dividing is not something that really serves anyone. If we have to spend all this time and effort parsing the difference between fantasy, fantasy romance, epic fantasy and epic fantasy romance, obviously we're not clearly communicating anything at all. When I mentioned I was writing this post, @e_bookpushers, a reviewer for The Bookpushers and fan of all kinds of fantasy, with and without romance, commented "Sometimes I think we subdivide to far and use descriptive terms that turn people off."

This is where we see the eyes glaze over. 

After all, those of us in our 30s and 40s remember an era before the Young Adult (YA) "genre" even existed. I think that's part of what's happening now. So many of us writing variations on the Fantasy theme grew up reading a melange of books - Judy Blume and Judy Garwood. Anne McCaffrey, Ann Tyler and Anne Rice. Orson Scott Card, Jack Chalker, Margaret Atwood and Mary Stewart.

We all started as readers and, as readers, we didn't really care what genre a book fell into, as long as we could find more like it. That's the key - helping our readers, and ourselves, find more of what we love to read.

I suspect that, more and more, that will occur through blogs like this one. And like The Bookpushers. Maybe we've moved past the need to describe books with a one- or two-word label. We can talk more broadly and allow more room for stories that don't quite fit neatly into a product mold.

As Miranda says in The Tempest, arguably a fantasy story, "How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't!"

Brave new world, indeed. 

Epic Fantasy: Where’s the Love?

Welcome to the second installment of Fantasy Week, the first in a series spotlighting the different speculative fiction subgenres we write in here at Here Be Magic.

I’m a fantasy writer, not a romance writer. I say this repeatedly to anyone who will listen—not because I think there’s anything wrong with romance; au contraire! I think romance belongs in everything. But I want to make sure no one is disappointed when they read my books expecting a traditional romantic plot with the push-pull of a hero and heroine trying to resist one another and failing, full of erotic tension and the eventual surrender of both in the unequivocal HEA. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve got that, too, but it’s only a part of the story.

My agent recently confirmed as much when I tried to write a traditional romantic suspense to sell to an established line. “I love your writing, as always,” she said. “But this isn’t really feeling like a romance to me.” Try as I might, I just can’t resist the allure of building my own world, creating my own mythology, and dragging my characters on an epic journey fraught with peril and rife with high stakes that can bring down entire kingdoms—or entire worlds.

Nevertheless, I spent the past week enmeshed in a different kind of alternate world: the world of the romance writer, at the RT Booklovers Convention. Because despite the fact that I don’t write romance, I can’t write fantasy without it. Fantasy without romance feels like it’s missing one of the most epic of adventures—the adventure of the human heart.

And that puts me smack-dab in the middle of a publishing conundrum. Romance readers are often a bit intimidated by the epic-ness of the epic fantasy. And fantasy readers have a tendency to be a tad suspicious when something looks like romance—despite the fact that at their core, many fantasies have a love story, though often underdeveloped. As a kid devouring both romance and fantasy, I always wished the fantasies had more of the former, and the romances more of the fantastical.

So there I sat at RT, surrounded by romance writers and readers, and feeling just as much a fish out of water as I did last November at the World Fantasy Convention. I’m some kind of chimera that can’t be classified. I have chocolate in my peanut butter. I may even be Frankenstein’s monster, stitched together with parts that work well together though they’ve come from different origins, but seeming a little scary and misshapen to those who’ve never seen one of me before. “What do you write?” people would ask. “Epic fantasy,” I’d reply, and then quickly add “with romantic elements” before they came at me with torches and pitchforks.

To most people who haven’t read the genre, when they hear “epic fantasy,” they think of 1,000-page paperweights full of elves and orcs and dragons, page after page of painstaking descriptions of drab medieval customs and complicated court intrigue with names no one can pronounce, and lots and lots of swords and sorcerers. And to be sure, books with those elements are epic fantasy, but none of those things are required to make a book an epic fantasy. What it requires, generally, is a uniquely invented world that is not our own, a protagonist whose problem is much larger than herself (her people and her world are depending on her and she usually has to fight someone powerful to save them), and magic. And what’s more magical than love? I say it fits right in with the epic.

Some of my favorite epic and romantic fantasies are Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Legacy series—its court intrigue woven together through highly charged erotic scenes, sacred prostitutes, and a healthy dose of BDSM; Lynn Flewelling’s Nightrunner series, with its sexy, fae-like m/m lovers as medieval Sherlock Holmesian detectives who are also scoundrels and thieves; and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. Yes, Harry Potter is as epic and romantic as they come.

So, really…what’s not to love about epic fantasy?

Don't forget to check out Sunday's kick-off post for Fantasy Week from Angela Highland on why she reads fantasy, and be sure to stop by every day this week for a new post from one of our fantasy writers.