The Sugar Broom Café, a Guest Post by K. M Jenkins

 

Welcome to the Sugar Bloom Café, at the town square of Hunter Falls. You will find all kinds of magical delights to enjoy, from magic cupcakes, mood swing cookies, and healing remedies in a coffee blend. Oh, and don’t forget the broomstick spoons that make all drinks fancy.

This café is run by Kara Witmore a recent addition to Hunter Falls. She just finished becoming a journeyman apprentice as a witch. Her mother helps her settle into the little shop but she doesn’t get a genuine welcome until the son of the Alpha comes walking in her door. Little does she know that her mother has kept a big secret from her entire life. And this Alpha wolf is about to blow the roof off the shop with one word growled with sexy smoothness — “mine.”

Stryker—Cade Westcott’s wolf has his eyes set on a sexy witch that has a tendency to cause mischief and clumsy mistakes. He just has to get his human on board. Witches and shifters don’t mix but could there be something lurking in Kara’s past that could explain why Stryker is bound determined to call Kara his mate.

Find out by reading along with K.M. Jenkins as she writes Witches & Wolves book 1 in The Hunter Falls Collection. She releases a chapter every two weeks to subscribers on her Book VIP List. If you want to join, please fill out this form here and she will get you added to the specific segment on her newsletter. (Click Here) You can also join her monthly newsletter with updates and insights into her life as she writes. (Click Here)

What special treats do you think get served at The Sugar Broom Café? I believe a lot of treats are mixed with love a sprinkle of luck and a dip of sugar.

Guest Post: Keeping the Romance Alive, by Samantha Bryant

Falling in love changed my life. So did falling out. Which then made falling back in again a totally different experience. I was wary now, having been burned. Now I work to keep the romance alive, making sure I don’t lose track of how lucky I am in the ordinary day to day survival of working, parenting and living.

Love is so much a part of who we are as people that it’s no surprise that it’s so large a part of fiction. Whether a novel is classified as romance or not, love is always there—in the plot, the backstory, in the hope for the future, or in its absence. Love motivates characters and informs their choices. We are creatures of the heart.

So, when I started writing books of my own, I knew romance had to be a part of it. But, I’m not a romance writer. While I love to read a good steamy sex scene in someone else’s books, I get all blushy and awkward trying to write one myself. But neither was I going to pretend that it wasn’t part of the lives of my characters. So, I had to find my way into writing about matters of the heart.

Especially for Linda Alvarez. At the beginning of Going Through the Change: A Menopausal Superhero Novel, Linda is a forty-eight year old grandmother. She’s been married to David her entire adult life, and they are still very much in love. He’s been her rock through all of life’s travails, including her most recent struggle: el cambio de vida, or menopause. The two have survived moving, job and money struggles, temporary separations, raising children, and aging, but their biggest challenge is yet to come.

Linda’s changes are perhaps the most dramatic of any of the women in the book. I don’t want to spoil it for you (because I’m hoping you’ll read it!) but I am proud of my portrayal of a couple that has been together for many years and is faced with a new obstacle. Linda is a crowd favorite of the main characters. I like to think it is because of the warmth of her heart, and the loyalty of her love.

Writing Linda and David is where I got my mushy-gushy on. Like Jessica, another character, said about them: “Watching them, though, she wondered if her own marriage had that kind of strength. Comparing her marriage to theirs seemed like comparing a raspberry bush to an oak tree.”

So, here’s to the oak trees! May all our sapling loves eventually brush the sky!

Going Through The Change

Going through “the change” isn’t easy on any woman. Mood swings, hot flashes, hormonal imbalances, and itchy skin are par for the course. But for these four seemingly unrelated women, menopause brought changes none of them had ever anticipated—super-heroic changes.

Helen discovers a spark within that reignites her fire. Jessica finds that her mood is lighter, and so is her body. Patricia always had a tough hide, but now even bullets bounce off her. Linda doesn’t have trouble opening the pickle jar anymore…now that she’s a man.


When events throw the women together, they find out that they have more in common than they knew—one person has touched all their lives. The hunt for answers is on.

Sale

Going Through the Change is going through a change in price for a couple of days in early August. On August 5^th and 6^th you can get the Kindle edition for free on Amazon. Check it out at: http://bitly.com/face-the-change

Samantha Bryant

Samantha Bryant is a middle school Spanish teacher by day and a mom and novelist by night. That makes her a superhero all the time. Her debut novel, Going Through the Change: A Menopausal Superhero Novel is now for sale by Curiosity Quills. You can find her online on her blog,  Twitter, on Facebook, on Amazon, on Goodreads, on the Curiosity Quills page, or on Google+.

BLOG TOUR: A Change of Mind and Other Stories, by Nick Wilford

Journeys to Publication

Thanks for having me over today, Clare. I’d like to talk a little about how my novella, A Change of Mind, arrived at its destination of publication after a journey of about five years. Sometimes stories take a long-winded route, even if doesn’t take them that long to actually get written.

I was going about my business one day when a scene flashed into my head. This was in 2010, when I was writing a whole lot of short stories. However, I only made a note of the idea at that time and didn’t do anything more with it. The scene involved a very irate woman having coffee with her surgeon in a futuristic shopping mall. However, this is not a traditional plastic surgeon, but one who performs procedures to change people’s personalities. The woman is stating how she intends to sue the surgeon, as instead of becoming kinder and more compassionate as requested, she is harder and more bitter.

Although I didn’t write it at the time, the idea stuck with me. Three years later, I was waiting for my CPs to get back to me with some feedback on what became the first part of my series and I was looking for something to do. I decided to pursue the personality-change idea, only now the angry woman had changed into a timid man in a time not too far removed from our own, who undergoes an operation to become super-confident. Not too surprisingly, in common with the original iteration, things don’t quite go to plan. It’s not that the operation is unsuccessful this time, rather that it’s too successful.

I posted about the ongoing work as part of DL Hammon’s WIP It Blogfest, and was buoyed up by the positive responses. I quickly finished the story which ended up at a novella-length 26,000 words. It took about a month and then I promptly forgot about it again. It sounds like I have a very short attention span, but truthfully I got immersed in the feedback I had now got back from my CPs and really, with writing, I can only think about one story at a time. That was 2013. As some of you know, my stepson passed away very suddenly on November 9^th that year. I abandoned all writing for about six months after that (I was actually doing NaNo and was right on schedule, but I haven’t yet been able to face picking up that particular story again). After dabbling in some A-Z posts in 2014 and generally seeing what people were up to, I decided to have a look through my computer files to see if there was anything I could work on and found my novella again. I sent it to Kyra Lennon to read through, followed by Annalisa Crawford, and was amazed at their responses – they only suggested a couple of minor changes! This was a far cry from any other feedback I had had on longer works, which featured pages of helpful suggestions and copious comments from patient but, I imagined, long-suffering readers. Did I really have something here?

Kyra offered the suggestion of including the novella as part of a collection, for which I am grateful. Hopefully this makes for a more satisfying reader experience. And releasing such a collection seemed to be a good way of dipping a toe into the publishing pool (or ocean) without the long-term responsibilities of releasing a series. So here I am, five years after the original idea, two years after writing it and one year after rediscovering it.

Has a story of yours taken a circuitous route to writing or publication? Did the original premise of the story change over that time? Have you ever had a story come back and surprise you?

Title: A Change of Mind and Other Stories

Author: Nick Wilford

Genre: Speculative fiction

Format: Ebook only

Page/word count: 107 pages, approx. 32,000 words

Release date: 25th May 2015

Publisher: Superstar Peanut Publishing

Blurb:

A Change of Mind and Other Stories consists of a novella, four short stories and one flash fiction piece. This collection puts the extremes of human behaviour under the microscope with the help of lashings of dark humour, and includes four pieces previously published in Writer’s Muse magazine. 

In A Change of Mind, Reuben is an office worker so meek and mild he puts up with daily bullying from his boorish male colleagues as if it’s just a normal part of his day. But when a stranger points him in the direction of a surgeon offering a revolutionary new procedure, he can’t pass up the chance to turn his life around.  But this isn’t your average surgeon. For a start, he operates alone in a small room above a mechanic’s. And he promises to alter his patients’ personality so they can be anything they want to be…  

In Marissa, a man who is determined to find evidence of his girlfriend’s infidelity ends up wondering if he should have left well alone.  

The Dog God finds a chink in the armour of a man with a megalomaniacal desire to take over the world.  

In The Insomniac, a man who leads an obsessively regimented lifestyle on one hour’s sleep a night finds a disruption to his routine doesn’t work for him.  

Hole In One sees a dedicated golfer achieving a lifelong ambition.  

The Loner ends the collection on a note of hope as two family members try to rebuild their lives after they are torn apart by jealousy.

Purchase Links:

Amazon US | Amazon UK | Smashwords | Barnes & Noble | Kobo

Add it on Goodreads

Meet the author:

Nick Wilford is a writer and stay-at-home dad. Once a journalist, he now makes use of those rare times when the house is quiet to explore the realms of fiction, with a little freelance editing and formatting thrown in. When not working he can usually be found spending time with his family or cleaning something. He has four short stories published in Writer’s Muse magazine. Nick is also the editor of Overcoming Adversity: An Anthology for Andrew. 

Visit him at his blog or connect with him on Twitter or Goodreads.

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Keyboard Marathon - Finish That Novel!

Happy Thursday, everyone. I hope you're all still having an awesome week, and looking forward to a great weekend.

Thanks to everyone who commented on my Two-year Blogaversary Giveaway and Can You Handle The TRUTH Blogfest posts yesterday. I'll be hopping around to all the blogs in the fest to try and guess which of your facts is a lie!

Today, I'd like to welcome fellow British author, Alex Tanner, to my blog with a guest post about finishing a novel.

Take it away, Alex ... 

Old typewriter with a paper by Bazaar Designs

I’ve been writing novels for nine years. Over nine years I’ve finished seven novels (even though it took me until December 2013 to actually release anything officially) and over that long stretch of time I’ve come to realise some things about the writing game:

1. Anyone can come up with a premise
2. Few people can take the plunge and actually start writing
3. Even fewer will continue with that novel to its final, ready-to-read, finished product

It sounds so easy when you read a guide or a book on how to write a novel, doesn’t it? ‘Think of an idea, set aside an hour a day to write, and eventually you’ll have a novel! Congratulations!’ But it’s never that simple.

Ask any novelist and they will tell you, that starting a novel is easy; I know Clare and I share a common trait that we both love starting brand new stories so much that finishing our current projects can feel like a slog. The new ideas want all the attention, and as writers, we have to plant that seed, as it may grow into our best work yet.

Even though I am fortunate to have a backlog of complete (or nearly complete) novels, I also have almost a hundred premise ideas, several dozen abandoned projects that are anything up to 7,000 words in, and two ‘in progress’ novels that are about 30,000 words in. Oh, and let’s not forget the novel I am meant to be editing, plus the novel I started writing yesterday. I know I will finish them all eventually, but whenever I try, a new idea pops up and I have to write it down.

It’s like writer’s ADD.

The best piece of advice I can give when it comes to finishing a novel, despite all the distractions and new ideas getting in your way, is this: don’t focus on what you hope the finished product will be like. Take your novel one word at a time. Even if you take part in NaNoWriMo in November, use it to get 50,000 words down. If you finish, that’s an added bonus. But looking at that four paragraph premise and thinking about the 80,000 words you’ve yet to write, edit and edit again is daunting.

It’s like looking at weight loss, knowing you’ve 80lbs to lose, but rather than focusing on each pound at a time, you’re focusing on the finished product and thus, many people give up half way through because it’s much less stressful.

Another tip that I learned the hard way is to never give yourself a time limit, wherever possible. It is nice to think that you’d like your novel done by the end of the month, but this may lead to you quitting when you realise you will have no choice but to write 4,000 words every single day for the next 30 days. Take it slow, focus on getting the next sentence out before thinking of anything else.

About Alex Tanner:

Alex Tanner is the author of the tense travel thriller Paradise Incoming and the psychological short story Coffee. Tequila Bartender, a fast-paced revenge thriller, will be released in March 2014 through many online retailers.

Find Alex Tanner Online:

Website | Facebook | Twitter | Google Plus | Youtube | Goodreads | Amazon