Ride the Moon edited by M.L.D. Curelas
Source: Review copy from publisher
Links: Amazon, Smashwords, Goodreads

For thousands of years, the Moon has inspired stories and legends about heroic animals, violent deities, and criminal humans. In modern times, those tales have been overshadowed by vampires and werewolves. It’s time for the Moon and her denizens to take back the night. Follow us down a twisting path of fantasy and science fiction and rediscover the magic of the Moon. From Mermaids that collect souls to lunar colonies on the brink of disaster, inside these pages you will find out which lunar gods still walk among us and what new breed of monster should keep you fearful of the night. Ride the Moon contains 19 speculative fiction tales that showcase the breadth of writing styles from around the globe.

This collection of short stories was an eclectic mix of happy and sad. The moon was featured in several different ways, more than just the average outerspace feature or mythical goddess.

I enjoyed most of the stories in this collection. My favourites were:

• Small Seven’s Secret by Billie Milholland – This would make an intriguing full length story. It was centered around the message “don’t judge a book by its cover”.
• Cherry Blossoms by Amy Laurens – This was a sad story about waiting too long for something and having life pass you by.
• Je Me Souviens by Edward Willett – This was a poignant reflective on the importance of remembering history.

Overall, I enjoyed the somber stories in the collection more than the joyful. They were more powerful and emotional. Each seemed to have a theme or message that made for more than just a brief moment of entertainment.

Challenges read for:
The Canadian Book Challenge 6
2013 Ebook Challenge

Related posts:

1. The Moon and the Tide
2. Fool Moon
3. Under the Moon

This week things have started to feel real, and I’m beginning to get nervous. We move in less than 2 weeks, and we haven’t gotten rid of much stuff yet. Time seems to be moving really fast, and I’m not keeping up with it. I really just want the next few weeks to be over already and not have to deal with everything. I don’t usually try to hide from reality, but I’d like to this time round. Not that things are bad or scary, they’re just nerveracking and happening so fast.

Books read:
An exciting look at the life of Margaret Beaufort, a bitter, jealous hard woman whose conniving knows no bounds.

An exciting warrior-quest story featuring an amusing, bickering group of characters led by the fierce Malja.

A gritty urban fantasy starring a fascinating reluctant heroine.

Books received:

Nails this week:
none

Related posts:

1. Week in review Mar 31
2. Week in review Apr 28
3. Week in review Nov 18

On My Wishlist is a weekly meme started by Book Chick City and is now hosted by Workaday Reads. Every week I’ll introduce you to a book that’s on my extensive wishlist. Sometimes it’s a new book, but quite often it’s an older book. Let me know if you’ve read it, and what you think. Please also join in and link up your On My Wishlist post each week.

Debris (The Veiled Worlds #1) by Jo Anderton

In a far future where technology is all but indistinguishable from magic, Tanyana is one of the elite.

She can control pions, the building blocks of matter, shaping them into new forms using ritual gestures and techniques. The rewards are great, and she is one of most highly regarded people in the city. But that was before the “accident”.

Stripped of her powers, bound inside a bizarre powersuit, she finds herself cast down to the very lowest level of society. Powerless, penniless and scarred, Tanyana must adjust to a new life collecting “debris”, the stuff left behind by pions. But as she tries to find who has done all of this to her, she also starts to realize that debris is more important than anyone could guess.

This story sounds like a fairly familiar sci-fi plot, but the reviews I’ve seen have all raved about the first person narrative. It’s tricky to pull off, and to see several big sci-fi reviewers love it really makes the book stand out to me. I love a good fantasy book that pulls the reader in and makes the pages fly by. I’d love the chance to see if I love this book as much as most other readers seem to.

Related posts:

1. On My Wishlist #104
2. On My Wishlist #94
3. On My Wishlist #85

Today is the cover reveal for Endre, the second book in the Elsker Saga series by S.T. Bende.

Sometimes, finding your destiny means doing the exact opposite of what The Fates have planned.

Winning the heart of an immortal assassin was a dream come true for Kristia Tostenson. Now she’s knee deep in wedding plans, goddess lessons, and stolen kisses with her very traditional fiancé. But her decision to become immortal could end in heartbreak — not only for Kristia, but for the god who loves her. Because while Ull would do anything to protect his bride, even the God of Winter is powerless against the Norse apocalypse. Ragnarok is coming. And the gods aren’t even close to ready.

About S.T. Bende
Links: Blog, Twitter, Goodreads

Before finding domestic bliss in suburbia, ST Bende lived in Manhattan Beach (became overly fond of Peet’s Coffee) and Europe… where she became overly fond of the musical Cats. Her love of Scandinavian culture and a very patient Norwegian teacher inspired the ELSKER series. She hopes her characters make you smile and that one day pastries will be considered a health food.

Related posts:

1. Interview: S.T. Bende
2. Cover reveal: Stars In Her Eyes + Giveaway
3. Cover Reveal: The Crimson Hunt

As part of her blog tour for Stars In Her Eyes, today I have a guest post by Clare Marshall entitled Getting Over the Hump: Finishing a Writing Project.

I look down at the dishes. I’ve got two things left to do: wash a pot, and wash a bunch of forks and knives that have sunk to the bottom of the sink.

To my left, there’s a bunch of bowls, plates, and utensils that need to be dried.

I take off my gloves and I grab the towel, abandoning the pot and the unwashed utensils to increasingly dirty soapy water in the sink.

Like washing the dishes, my problem with writing is that I will often stop at the 90% mark.

I’m not sure why this is. Hitting the 90% mark on any project should mean, “Hey, I see the finish line, the end is nigh!”

But no. Not for me. The 90% mark is: “Thank God, I’m almost done, I’ve put in so much work and I deserve a break.”

And then I take a break. A loonnnnng break. So much of a break that my anxiety starts kicking in, and I start making schedules just to satisfy myself, just to tell myself that I was productive today. It’s only when I’m getting down the wire, or when I’ve exhausted another activity, that I go back to my important writing project.

With writing Stars In Her Eyes I had this problem. I got caught up in my other freelance work that I allowed myself to leave the manuscript at an unfinished place, when I knew that if I spent a couple hours on it, I could bring it to a place where I would be satisfied. But I kept putting it off. I kept prioritizing more “important” tasks over something that I could’ve finished quite easily.

It’s easy to “give up” when you’re so close to the end, whether you’re doing dishes or you’re writing a book. But this is the time when you have to push the pedal to the floor. You’re so close to finishing, you have to remind yourself how great you’ll feel once the project is done! You can hit save, you can brag to yourself and your friends that you’ve completed the manuscript, you can finally set it aside for a few days before going at it again for a second round. Of course, you can do all of these things when the manuscript is at 90% completion–but you’ll only be fooling yourself into thinking you’re done.

Did I finish doing the dishes? I dried a couple before forcing myself back to the task of washing the pot. There’s nothing quite so satisfying as lifting up the drain stopper and hearing the water gush down the pipes.

About Clare Marshall
Links: Website, Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads

Clare Marshall grew up in rural Nova Scotia with very little television and dial up internet, and yet, she turned out okay. She has a combined honours degree in journalism and psychology from the University of King’s College, and is a graduate from Humber College’s Creative Book Publishing Program. She founded Woulds & Shoulds Editing and Design in 2010 for self-published authors looking for quality editing and design services. When she’s not writing, she enjoys playing the fiddle and making silly noises at cats. Within is her first published novel.

Stars In Her Eyes (Sparkstone #1) by Clare Marshall
Links: Amazon, Smashwords, Goodreads

Burn hot and cold.

Read minds.

Disappear at will.

Dream your own death.

Welcome to Sparkstone University, where some students are more gifted than others.

When Ingrid learns she’s been accepted at the hyper-secretive Sparkstone University, she is sceptical. It’s an honour to attend, apparently, and yet barely anyone has ever heard of the place.

And everyone seems a little too happy that she’s there: especially when she meets Sunni and her group of friends. They seem to already know Ingrid. As if she was expected. Expected to save Earth from an imminent alien invasion. Like she has superpowers or something.

As if magic and mutations exist. As if aliens are really planning to attack.

That just sounds ridiculous. There’s no such thing.

…right?

Wrong.

Tour Giveaway

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Related posts:

1. Cover reveal: Stars In Her Eyes + Giveaway
2. Guest Post: Bryan Cohen + Giveaway
3. Guest Post: Bryan Cohen + Giveaway

The Emperor’s Edge (The Emperor’s Edge #1) by Lindsay Buroker
Source: Free download
Links: Amazon, Smashwords, Goodreads, Author’s website

Imperial law enforcer Amaranthe Lokdon is good at her job: she can deter thieves and pacify thugs, if not with a blade, then by toppling an eight-foot pile of coffee canisters onto their heads. But when ravaged bodies show up on the waterfront, an arson covers up human sacrifices, and a powerful business coalition plots to kill the emperor, she feels a tad overwhelmed.

Worse, Sicarius, the empire’s most notorious assassin is in town. He’s tied in with the chaos somehow, but Amaranthe would be a fool to cross his path. Unfortunately, her superiors order her to hunt him down. Either they have an unprecedented belief in her skills… or someone wants her dead.

This was a fun, quirky steampunk read featuring a strong heroine. Amaranthe starts out as a good-guy all the way, and through some bad luck ends up on the wrong side of the law. She still has the best of intentions with a noble and good goal, however she is learning that sometimes rules need to be bent.

As the leader of a motley group of guys, she is the heart of the story. Amaranthe has the ability to talk her way into and out of any situation, and can get almost anyone to do anything. For example, she somehow managed to talk the world’s best assassin into not just letting her live, but also into joining her crew and helping her out.

The dialogue in this book is great. It feels real with the various characters bickering and provoking each other. Amaranthe’s smooth-talking is amusing and believable. She could totally talk me into anything.

Overall, I was surprised at how quickly this story drew me in. It has steampunk and fantasy elements, but it’s more of an adventure story than anything else. The characters are a crazy crew, and I want to see what adventures, and misadventures, they get up to next.

Challenges read for:
2013 Ebook Challenge
2013 Self-Published Reading Challenge

Related posts:

1. Grave Mercy
2. Sarah’s Shadows
3. Cameo the Assassin

As part of the blog tour tour for L Andrew Cooper’s debut novel Burning the Middle Ground, I have a guest post about his writing style.

Being a closeted/unpublished novelist made sense when I was a graduate student in English—all English professors have as secret novel tucked away, right? (FYI: wrong). The further I drifted from teaching literature—which I still love, honest!—the weirder my novel-writing habit became, to the point where now, as a film studies professor who has finally published some fiction, I get cock-eyed looks like I’m ramming my film-critic career into a brick wall. But I like movies and know a lot about them. And at the present moment, I don’t want to make them. Which makes teaching them much easier than teaching a book and having to stop and think—Wait, how would I have written that?

But the question I’ve been getting from my small, beloved audiences at recent shows is more often this: being a film teacher, do I write like the movies? On the level of scene, I most certainly do. My imagination works in cuts—eyeline matches that lead me from writing about the person looking to what she or he sees, for example. I rely on settings familiar from movies so I don’t do all that much place-description; instead, I try to focus on cultural flavor, primarily through dialogue and the point-of-view characters (of whom my novel Burning the Middle Ground offers four). Some of my more experimental moves are also based on film experiment. For example, I play with jump cuts, or sudden leaps in a movie that call attention to omitted time. An example from my novel is a joking jump-cut from the characters saying they should stay together, leaping to everyone being alone. A more hallowed example would be in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, which elides an awaited conflict almost entirely through a jump in the prose (adapted for the movie by the Coen Brothers as a jump cut).

I build my novels in my imagination around key scenes, often the more violent and cinematic ones, but putting those scenes together is where my imagination becomes less cinematic. The reason I keep returning to novels is that I like what words can do by themselves, and in spinning long-form narratives—novels—I like what they can do with time. Burning the Middle Ground has a three-part structure. Part one, good guys encounter bizarreness that raises lots of questions as the town spirals under the control of a conspiracy involving supernatural mind control. Part two, leap backward, giving story of bad guys’ conspiracy, answering lots of questions asked in part one. Part three, continue where part one left off, careening toward the epic conclusion. While I hope I’ve enticed you through this tantalizing way of approaching a plot about a supernatural plot, if I were to make a screenplay to tell a similar story, I would NOT write it that way. Movies that effectively leap around in time usually do it quickly and as part of some time-travel scenario, family saga, or artistic fragmentation. Here, my sustained time-leaps create and resolve mini-mysteries on the way toward addressing the big mystery… but their sustained-ness requires a sustained narrative form, the novel. For a standard-length movie, I’d have to compress crucial elements of the bad guys’ back story into the unfolding of the good guys’ present timeline. Otherwise, I think it’d either be boring or a miniseries. Or both. Look what keeps happening to Stephen King’s wonderful long novels.

I have endless hours of fun imagining different actors playing characters in my work. Most of the people I think of are older than the characters I wrote… I think of Seth Green for Ronald, Susan Sarandon for Jeanne. I’ve gone through quite a few Jake Warrens. The media are, in my mind, inextricably mixed, but however comparable their uses, a novel is a novel, film is film. If I further blur the already-translucent line between then, all the better.

About L Andrew Cooper
Links: Website, Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads

L. Andrew Cooper thinks the smartest people like horror, fantasy, and sci-fi. Early in life, he couldn’t handle the scary stuff–he’d sneak and watch horror films and then keep his parents up all night with his nightmares. In the third grade, he finally convinced his parents to let him read grownup horror novels: he started with Stephen King’s Firestarter, and by grade five, he was doing book reports on The Stand.

When his parents weren’t being kept up late by his nightmares, they worried that his fascination with horror fiction would keep him from experiencing more respectable culture. That all changed when he transitioned from his public high school in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia to uber-respectable Harvard University, where he studied English Literature. From there, he went on to get a Ph.D. in English from Princeton, turning his longstanding engagement with horror into a dissertation. The dissertation became the basis for his first book, Gothic Realities (2010). More recently, his obsession with horror movies turned into a book about one of his favorite directors, Dario Argento (2012). He also co-edited the textbook Monsters (2012), an attempt to infect others with the idea that scary things are worth people’s serious attention.

After living in Florida, South Carolina, Georgia, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and California, Andrew now lives in Louisville, Kentucky, where he teaches at the University of Louisville and chairs the board of the Louisville Film Society, the city’s premiere movie-buff institution.

Burning the Middle Ground by L Andrew Cooper
Links: Amazon, Goodreads

BURNING THE MIDDLE GROUND is a dark fantasy about small-town America that transforms readers’ fears about the country’s direction into a haunting tale of religious conspiracy and supernatural mind control. A character-driven sensibility like Stephen King’s and a flair for the bizarre like Bentley Little’s deliver as much appeal for dedicated fans of fantasy and horror as for mainstream readers looking for an exciting ride.

Brian McCullough comes home from school and discovers that his ten-year-old sister Fran has murderer their parents. Five year later, a journalist, Ronald Glassner, finds Brian living in the same house in the same small town of Kenning, Georgia. Planning a book on the McCullough Tragedy, Ronald stumbles into a struggle between Kenning’s First Church, run by the mysterious Reverend Michael Cox, and the New Church, run by the rebellious Jeanne Harper. At the same time, Kenning’s pets go berserk, and dead bodies, with the eyes and tongues removed from their heads, begin to appear.

Related posts:

1. Guest post: Elizabeth Loraine
2. Guest Post: Mayra Calvani
3. Guest Post: LM Pruitt + Giveaway

Beyond Asimios by Martin Fossum
Source: Review copy from author
Links: Amazon, Goodreads, Author’s website

When the Tacitus III came to Asimios Station to evacuate the crew and stop the terraforming project, Dr. Avery Graf had only hours to decide if he would return to Earth with the others or stay behind and let Asimios decide his fate.

This was an exciting start to the series of short stories. As the start of a space adventure, the story jumps into the action, and yet still manages to provide a lot of background info without the dreaded info-dump.

Graf is easy to feel sorry for. He is consumed with grief over his wife, job and life in general, yet he isn’t ready to give up quite yet. He has his convictions, and is willing to stand up for them, regardless of the consequences.

I loved this short story, and can’t wait to see what happens next.

Challenges read for:
2013 Ebook Challenge
2013 Self-Published Reading Challenge

Related posts:

1. Evidence of Life
2. Interview: Martin Fossum
3. Rumors of My Death

My son’s birthday was this week. I can’t believe he’s already 4. It’s amazing how fast time seems to pass when you’re an adult. We didn’t do much on his actual birthday, but we did go to the Toronto Zoo on Thursday. I love the zoo, and so did my son.

Books read:
Fun and sassy, I will likely buy the rest of the series to read. If anyone has noticed how little I buy, you will know that this is a huge deal.
A dark sombre collection of dystopian stories, this is an upcoming blog tour.
A short story by Workaday Read’s occasional reviewer, this was a fun space-based read. Note to self: check if next part is available yet.
A disappointing story with unrealistic dialogue and drop-of-the-hat mood swings.
A collection of stories about the moon, with a good mix of happy and sad.

Books received:

Nails this week:

Related posts:

1. Week in review Apr 7
2. Week in review Sept 23
3. Week in review Mar 31

On My Wishlist is a weekly meme started by Book Chick City and is now hosted by Workaday Reads. Every week I’ll introduce you to a book that’s on my extensive wishlist. Sometimes it’s a new book, but quite often it’s an older book. Let me know if you’ve read it, and what you think. Please also join in and link up your On My Wishlist post each week.

My Fairytale Life (The Vampire Hunter Series #1) by Heather M. White

17 year old Jadyn and her dad are vampire hunters. That is until her dad decides it’s time for Jadyn to have a “normal” life. When he moved them to Miami, Florida the last thing Jadyn expected was for there to be vampires.

Jadyn doesn’t want to have a normal life, but then she starts to make new friends. She starts to think that maybe a normal life might not be so bad after all. But soon she realizes that maybe her friends aren’t “human” as she once thought they were.

On top of everything else a very powerful vampire, Tabatha, seeks revenge on Jadyn. People from her school start disappearing, and people start dying. She wants to stop the deaths, but Tabatha has other plans for her.

Can Jadyn stop the one vampire that is impossible to kill before its too late?

I will admit, the cover is what draws me to this book. The overall feel is so gritty and sad. The girl looks beaten and scared and vulnerable. It’s a powerful cover.

The story itself sounds a bit average, but still exciting and fun. The reviews I’ve seen indicate the story moves fast and the ending is killer.

Related posts:

1. On My Wishlist #94
2. On My Wishlist #71
3. On My Wishlist #102