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Movie Trailer: The Secret of Walter Mitty

So, the problem with writers is that we are boring people in real life. Or maybe, to be nice about it, we are like twinkies. Yummy on the inside. That is the point of the short story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. (Maybe not the twinky part.)

This doesn’t translate well to movie form so well. Who wants to follow a boring character for two hours? Even if he has a vivid imagination? A movie version of this short story was made decades ago, and Hollywood decided that it would be more interesting if Mitty, who dreamed of being an adventurous spy (among other things), became embroiled in a crazy plot and really became a spy!

That was much more interesting, but completely missed the point of the story.

I’ll be interested to see what this movie does with the story.

Eternity by Teresa Federici

Anna Greer is a quiet microbiologist with her feet planted firmly in reality. Her life gets turned upside down when she finally meets her elusive employer, Gareth Macgregor. Gareth is mysterious, sexy, powerful…and a vampire.

Soon she’s drawn into a world she only thought was mythical, creatures and beings that existed only in nightmares that turn out to be very real.

Anna and Gareth are drawn together in a fight for their lives and Anna finds that there is a part of her that has lain dormant since her childhood, a power that could save them, or mark them for death.

Gareth’s powerful enemy would stop them from finding what Gareth has been trying to find for centuries—a cure for vampirism and a love that transcends time.

Excerpt

We stared at each other across the small space between us, our chests equally rising and falling. His strange brown eyes locked onto my green ones, and he moved toward me.

I put my hand out in a stop gesture, not sure where I dredged the strength from to accomplish it.

“Please, don’t.” I whispered, and what he heard in my voice must have stopped him from coming closer. “Look, Gareth, I don’t know what is going on here, but I can’t do this.”

“What do you think is going on here?” he asked. He ran his hands through his hair then shoved them into his pockets.

I shook my head futilely. I didn’t know.

“I think that we’re two people that are attracted to one another. You just happen to work for me.”

He tried to make it sound as though that’s all there was to it; just two people, man and woman, with an attraction between them. I could tell from his eyes he didn’t believe it.

“No, there’s more, and you know it. What is it?”

“No, there isn’t anything more.” He ground out. He moved toward me again, and as much as I wanted to fall into his arms a second time, I backed up a few more steps, my hand still held out in front of me, palm out.

“Please stay away. You’re just making it harder for me to continue working for you.”

That made him stop again, just inches from my hand.

“I don’t want you to go. I need…” he paused, his words hanging between us. My heart stuttered, waiting for him to say he needed me. Did I want to hear that?

“I need someone like you on my team. I would hate to see you go.”

That was not what I expected to hear. My heart rate dropped immediately, the desire that had turned my bones to liquid quickly drying up.

“Isn’t that what you wanted to hear?” he asked quietly, and my damaged pride had me nodding my head. It may have been what I thought I wanted to hear, but a fissure began to form on my newly exposed heart.

He closed the gap between us, my hands caught against the press of our bodies, and I clutched at his jacket, my knuckles pressing into the hard wall of his chest. This time his mouth possessed mine with irrefutable ownership, and I kissed him back feverishly, the rush of desire flooding my veins a second time.

How did he know that I wanted him to kiss me again before I even knew it? How could his mouth, his lips, his tongue, elicit the response from me that no other man had been able to get? I wanted to pour myself into him, feel him drive into me in an act of possession that a kiss could never duplicate.

He broke away from me slowly, leaving lingering fires on my cheeks, my eyes, my forehead, everywhere his lips caressed. He pressed his forehead to mine, his eyes closed, breathing deeply.

“Your heart is pounding so hard.” He murmured.

With a jolt I pushed away from him. I stared at him, wanting to place my hands on his chest again, to see if I was mistaken, but I stopped myself.

“What? What is it?” he looked puzzled, and not a little frustrated. My mind was a complete blank, and I couldn’t process what had just happened.

“Gareth, I…I have to go.” I stammered. He came toward me again, and I moved as quickly as I could around him, almost dodging out of the way as he reached for me.

“Please, let me go. I have to think about this.” I pleaded as I backed away from him, my mind completely consumed with getting out of his office.

I turned my back on him, not even waiting for him to say anything, and yanked open the office door. Here I was again, in front of the elevator, praying harder than I had prayed in a long time for that door to open.

I could feel his eyes on me, and as soon as I was in the elevator, I turned to look at him. I dropped my eyes briefly to his chest then met his gaze again. What I saw there was a mixture of shock and resignation. Then he was gone, back into the office.

As soon as the doors slid closed, I closed my eyes. What I had discovered was not possible; what had made me run out of there could not exist in the realm of science. It was a staggering impossibility.

What I noticed as I was clutching his jacket, my hands pressed so hard against his chest, was the absence of internal movement. He had commented on how hard my heart was beating, which was ironic.

Because his heart hadn’t been beating at all.

Find more from Teresa Federici on her website, blog, Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.

15 Minutes by Jill Cooper

The future can be a dangerous place when you changed the past….

15 minutes is all the Rewind Agency gives a person when they travel to the past, but for Lara Crane it’s enough for her to race through the city, find her mother, and stop her from being killed in a mugging that happened over ten years ago.

But the story she’s been told all her life is a lie. When Lara takes a bullet meant for her mother, her future changes forever. A new house, new friends and a new boyfriend turns Lara’s life upside down. She thinks if she can save her father from prison, reunite him with her mother, everything will be fine.

15 Minutes is an edgy high octane YA thriller where the people Lara trusts change in an instant. She is in a timeline she doesn’t understand, and is about to make one fatal mistake as she faces an enemy so familiar, he’s family.

Book Trailer: Gamer’s Quest by George Ivanoff

George Ivanoff talks about how he made this fantastic trailer over on Writing for Children.

Only $0.99! The Complete Souls of the Stones Trilogy by Kelly Walker

A convenient omnibus edition of the three main works of the Souls of the Stones series.

Souls of the Stones follows Emariya Warren as she navigates the three divided lands of her world, as well as the three families striving for control. The series incorporates traditional fantasy elements such as prophecy and magic with a love story that transcends genre and time. Books 1-3 are included.

Cornerstone – When Emariya Warren learns enemy forces have captured her father, she’ll do anything to save him. Anything. Even marry a mysterious prince she knows nothing about in order to rally the strength to arrange a rescue. During her journey to Torian’s foreign castle, Emariya comes face to face with her mother’s killers–and a deadly secret.

Not only does Emariya possess a powerful but unexpected magical gift. So does the prince she’s promised to marry, and an ominous prophecy has warned their gifts must never be combined.

If she breaks her promise to marry Torian, she won’t be able to save her father and if she keeps it, she may bring a curse upon everything she holds dear. Determining which choice is best won’t be easy, but when she meets the gorgeous prince who may desire more than just her heart, she realizes she will have to fight just to have a choice at all.

Her heart wants him desperately. Her head begs her to run. If she doesn’t want to share her mother’s fate, she’ll have to find a way to untangle the truth from the lies in time to save herself.

Second Stone – In the second installment in Souls of the Stones, the stakes are higher, the romance is hotter, and Emariya’s power as a Cornerstone is growing.

Determined to make sense of the betrayals, lies, and her undeniable attraction to Torian, Emariya and her prince begin the journey to Sheas to confront her uncle and bring her father home.

Broken Stone – Unable to avoid her destiny any longer, Emariya has become the leader her mother always envisioned. Before she can focus on embracing her gifts to unify her three lands, she must first stop her own land from dissolving into civil war.

The Defiance by A.G. Henley

It hasn’t been long since Fennel, a Sightless Groundling, and Peree, her Lofty Keeper, fell in love and learned the truth: the Scourge, and their world, are not what they seem.

Fenn and Peree are determined to guide their people to the protected village of Koolkuna, but first they must convince them that everything they believe is a lie. An impossible task, especially when someone seems hell-bent on trying anything–even animal sacrifice and arson–to destroy the couple’s new bond and crush the frail truce between the Groundlings and the Lofties. Not everyone wants to uproot their lives in the forest, and those who stay behind will be left terribly vulnerable.

Fenn and Peree’s resolve to be together, and the constant threat of the Scourge’s return, push both groups to the breaking point. Unable to tell friend from foe, Fenn must again decide how much she’s willing to sacrifice to ensure the future of the people of the forest.

Only this time, the price of peace may be too high to bear.

The Defiance (Brilliant Darkness, #2), the highly anticipated sequel to The Scourge (Brilliant Darkness, #1), a 2013 Next Generation Indie Book Award Finalist!

Download The Defiance on Amazon.

For more from A.G. Henley, visit her website, Facebook and Twitter.

Hilda the Wicked Witch by Paul Kater

Hilda and William leave for another vacation, some time away. Knowing the witch and her wizardly partner, this will end up in work of course. Tremors, flower witches, dwarves and trolls are only some of the elements that will turn this trip into yet an unforgettable one for the magical couple who will also have a few fun surprises along the way!

“Readers are not simply page turners, they are thought turners…”

“Readers are not simply page turners; they are thought turners, as well—true imaginative partners, not passive audience members.”

I love that.

This is from a thoughtful essay about the mid-list by the author of the traditionally published Red Sonja series, and also the now indie-published Fall of the First World series:

Midlist authors reaching their readers in this age of instant gratification brings me to another observation, this one regarding my former agent, Don Maass, who has been spectacularly successful in developing precisely these sorts of instant-gratification, industrial-quantity products that regularly appear on the bestseller lists, where sales “consistently override all product development decisions.”

Maass and I once talked about the possibility of my writing my breakthrough novel. When I knew him, early in his career and, as it turned out, near the end of mine, he championed my fantasy trilogy The Fall of the First World, then recently out of print, and tried to get it picked up for republication. No one wanted it, but I credit him for his hard work and his appreciation for a book series that had nothing in common with the Tolkienesque clones that were as popular then as they are now. On the other hand, Maass failed me in a number of ways. He refused to show Magicians(later retitled The Fair Rules of Evil) to Doubleday, even after an editor there asked to see it; he preferred to pitch it to paperback houses. It was published under its new title by Avon, who dropped the ball miserably on distributing it. I also recall Don’s dismissing one my pitches (for a manuscript titled Sinister) because it mixed genres. “Is it a horror novel?” he asked me in 1987. “Or is it a police procedural? It has to be one or the other.” Perhaps I was ahead of my time, given the enormous success we’ve seen over the past fifteen or so years with precisely those kind of cross-genre novels.

Don would have no interest in representing me now because I myself am no longer interested in trying to develop the kind of book-as-product that he has so successfully managed to promote in this modern era of readers-as-consumers. (I know this because I recently pitched him with a new idea and never received a response.) But I think it’s important to keep in mind what Don has helped to accomplish for his brand of writer. His methodology has been undeniably profitable and has helped shape the current system of fiction publishing in New York. However, we are moving at the speed of light into fascinating new regions of author-reader exchange as a benefit of digital publishing, web publishing, independent publishing. In a year-end blog dated this past December, Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords, reports an encounter he had with Maass in which they came down on two different sides of writers publishing independently. Mark Coker thinks that the future for many writers is in self-publishing; Maass, contrarily, says, “If you don’t care to reach readers, then by all means self-publish.” ( http://blog.smashwords.com/2012/12/mark-cokers-2013-book-publishing.html) As a woman who responded in the Comment sections of Coker’s blog says, Maass turned her down when she pitched him, and if she’d listened to him, she’d still have no readers. Instead, she now has thousands as a result of self-publishing her novels. It’s simply the difference between writing to reach readers, even if the cost-benefit ratio does not look good in a purely business sense, and writing to produce a product that will appeal to customers and succeed in a purely business sense. (Again, there used to be room for both types of story, back when we still had the midlist.)

Much of the discussion in the Comments section of Coker’s blog has to do with the concept of black swans—the outliers in any field that seem to come out of nowhere, exactly in the way that the latest writers or hit novels used to appear from the midlist. Where are these black swans now? They’re coming from the self-published authors and independent publishers.

 

Read his whole essay.

Movie Trailer: Kill Your Darlings

Lichgates by S.M. Boyce

Kara Magari is about to discover a beautiful world full of terrifying things: Ourea.

Kara, a college student still reeling from her mother’s recent death, has no idea the hidden world of Ourea even exists until a freak storm traps her in a sunken library. With nothing to do, she opens an ancient book of magic called the Grimoire and unwittingly becomes its master, which means Kara now wields the cursed book’s untamed power. Discovered by Ourea’s royalty, she becomes an unwilling pawn in a generations-old conflict – a war intensified by her arrival. In this world of chilling creatures and betrayal, Kara shouldn’t trust anyone… but she’s being hunted and can’t survive on her own. She drops her guard when Braeden, a native soldier with a dark secret, vows to keep her safe. And though she doesn’t know it, her growing attraction to him may just be her undoing.

For twelve years, Braeden Drakonin has lived a lie. The Grimoire is his one chance at redemption, and it lands in his lap when Kara Magari comes into his life. Though he begins to care for this human girl, there is something he wants more. He wants the Grimoire.

Get your FREE copy of Lichgates, the first novel in the Grimoire Saga, at any of the following retailers:
Amazon
Amazon UK
Kobo
iTunes
Smashwords

Find out more about S.M. Boyce on her blog and Twitter. You can also follow The Grimoire Saga on Facebook.