Amazon Giveaway – Your Chance to Win a Copy of Red August

Win a copy of Red August from Amazon! No purchase necessary.

https://giveaway.amazon.com/p/082f0b80cd426345#ln-fo

Red August is newly out in print this past month and this is your chance to win a copy!

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What if you found out that you were descended from a long line of clandestine fighters, and that your family was still at war? August Archer thinks she’s a normal teenage girl—even if she has been having disturbing erotic dreams about wolves lately. Still grieving over the loss of her father, and wondering over his final gift of a red hooded cloak, August is uprooted from her big city apartment to a tiny town in Maryland, where she meets an enigmatic, irresistibly fascinating man who refuses to talk to her, yet who fuels her most intense romantic fantasies. But it’s when August begins talking to her feisty Scottish grandmother that a strange tale of werewolves and hunters emerges—one in which the man of her dreams may be her family’s oldest enemy—in this modern-day telling of the Red Riding Hood story.

The Wild Child

At the top of the valley, crags and ferns frozen in mist watched as she climbed onto the boulder, an island almost wider than the stream that rushed around it, heading towards the plunge.  The boney bottom of a scrawny nine-year-old girl, naked and cold on the slippery surface, she surveyed her surroundings.  A surefooted thing, she stood on the ancient thrust and held her arms out, wide, as if to call down the sky.  Long stringy wet hair, dark on pale, clinging to her back, snaking under her arms and making squiggles on her shiny damp torso, hugging ribs and looping around birthmarks and flat nipples.  She was by herself, but not alone in this place.

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The Writer’s Circle posted a “story starter” (pictured above) and this is what I came up with.  I actually want to know more about this girl, even if nobody else does, so maybe I’ll write more later.

Fairy Tale Fortnight Event and Giveaways

I posted a few posts back about an event by The Book Rat and A Backwards Story – Fairy Tale Fortnight.  It’s pretty much just an awesome online celebration of fairytales.  Please go by and see what they are featuring, which by the way includes some contests for free stuff.

Which also includes a contest to give away five e-copies of my book Red August, which is coming out in August.

Go directly to that part of Fairy Tale Fortnight HERE.  That page features a Safe For Work excerpt from Red August that can only be found at the Fairy Tale Fortnight page.

Below is the book synopsis or blurb.

Stretching Outside of the Comfort Zone

Yesterday a friend send me a message encouraging me to enter a contest she’d entered at Tentsquare.com.  They have a monologue challenge going.  Writers can submit two writing pieces – up to 250 spoken words.  The theme is “Love Letter” for the past two weeks.  Then for the next two weeks actors can submit up to two, two minute readings of the items that were entered.  There are money prizes – $200 for first place.  No entry fee.  250 words is not much writing.  So after some more cheer-leading from her, I went ahead and decided to do it.  At first I was going to submit just one entry.  It poured out of me.  And it was really different than anything else I’d written, so I went ahead and wrote another.  Which was also different than what I would expect myself to write with the theme “Love Letter.”

I’m a hopeless (hopeful) romantic and I had expected I would channel my feelings towards my partner.  But instead I just wrote some pure fiction out of nowhere in a style I am totally not used to, about things that were a little weird for me to write.  I was fine right up until the moment after I hit the submit button for the second piece, because then my heart started pounding.  I couldn’t take it back.  It was out there for people to see and share and like or hate and my face was in the corner of the submission and my name, too.  And ACK!  So, naturally, I shared it to Facebook to say I was freaked out, but to also let my actor friends know about the contest.  It would be cool to see my actor friends read the letters.

You can find each letter in the link below.  If you felt like sharing them on Facebook or twitter, that would be great.  If you are an actor and want to perform, I can’t wait to see what you do with them!  The letters are both female.  One is for a teen girl – but it’s sort of mature subject matter.  And the other would work for any woman between 18-30.  But that’s just inside-the-box thinkin’.

Waiting For Carl

Precocious