Christine Amsden's Blog: Christine Amsden Author Blog, page 35

Cassie Scot Exclusive Excerpt

Cassie Scot: ParaNormal Detective
By: Christine Amsden
Excerpt from Chapter 5

…

Belinda’s collection of potions was extensive and many of her customers believed in the power of her brews. They were probably crap, especially those offering up money and wishes, because if she really could brew them, why would she need to sell them? Others, such as those offering weight loss or hair regrowth, might have been legitimate–I had no real way of knowing.

Then my eyes fell on a tiny vial with the word “MAGIC” on the label. I picked it up and turned it over to read the details: “Tap into magical energies you never knew were there. You’ll be able to cast spells and brew potions. Curse your neighbors and find true love. $15.95”

“Impossible,” I muttered. Surely, if such a thing could be, my parents would have fed it to me years ago.

“That stuff is crap,” Evan said.

I jumped. I had almost forgotten he was there. He stood by a bulletin board, where he had been staring at pictures of Belinda, her friends, and her family. “Belinda mostly knows how to brew love potions, and even then she keeps the strongest ones to herself…the ones that truly ensnare the mind and heart.”

I replaced the vial of MAGIC, with just a tiny twinge of regret, and moved on to Belinda’s love potions. She had one full shelf dedicated to love, decorated with pink hearts and red roses. A lot of these potions were in the form of perfumes, creams, shampoos, and most especially–chocolates. The bottom third of the shelf was dedicated to boxes of chocolate candy in different flavors and potencies.

While a strong love potion will ensnare the mind and the heart, most of the weaker love potions are what you might call suggestive magic. They could cause you to feel affection, adoration, or arousal, but they typically left the higher brain functions intact.

At random, I picked up a bottle of perfume from the top shelf and read: “Induces powerful lust. Spray on your intended and make sure you are the first person they see. Lasts about an hour.”

The thing you have to understand about any magic is that there are good ways to use it, and bad ways to use it. The concept of black magic is a hotly debated topic among sorcerers. Even death, in self defense, is a shade of gray. As I stood there, reading the functions of the various love potions, I thought of all the innocent and harmful ways they could be used. A couple in a committed relationship might have a lot of fun with a spray of lust. On the other hand, using it on an unwilling victim…

I shuddered as I replaced the bottle and accidentally knocked one of the neighboring bottles of perfume to the ground. It shattered, splashing perfume all over my open-toed sandals.

“Crap.”

“What happened?” Evan asked, his voice hard and alert. I could hear him moving closer.

“Stop! I don’t want to see you right now.”

“Which potion was that?” Evan asked, still in that hard-edged voice of command.

I pointed to the row of similar bottles on the top shelf. “Lust.”

One of the little bottles floated away from the shelf, but I did not turn around to see what Evan was doing with it. Instead, I started looking through my purse for a pack of tissues to clean the mess off my feet.

“Cassie, I have some bad news for you.”

“Worse, you mean?”

“This potion doesn’t take affect until you actually look at someone. Your hour starts then.”

“Crap. I don’t suppose there’s an antidote?”

“Sure,, but it will take me about three days to brew, once the moon is full.”

“Okay.” I considered my options as I wiped the mess off my foot and started gathering the tiny shards of glass. “Well, I guess I could-” I stopped, I had nothing to put at the end of that sentence. I kind of hoped Evan would have a suggestion, but to my surprise, he started laughing at me. “This isn’t funny.”

“Come on, it is a little funny.”

Maybe it would be funny in a few days, if I didn’t die of embarrassment first. “I suppose I could call my boyfriend.” I didn’t want to explain any of this to him, and though I trusted him, I didn’t really want him to become the object of my uncontrolled lust for an hour. I just didn’t know what else to do.

“Who are you seeing?” Evan asked, all traces of amusement gone.

“Braden,” I said.

“Who?”

“Braden Walker. He was a year ahead of us in school. He was on the football team.”

“Oh. I think I remember him.” Evan paused for a long moment. “You know you could do better, right?”

“It’s none of your business.” I had to fight the urge to glare at him when I said that. He barely knew Braden, so what made him think he could make any judgments? Besides, I didn’t know why he thought I could do better, when I had done very little dating in high school. I hadn’t known if my family name scared people off, or if there was something fundamentally wrong with me, but Braden had at least restored my confidence that the latter was not true.

“Listen,” Evan said. “I need to do another spell. It’ll just be a few minutes. We’ll figure something out after, just don’t look at me until I’m done.”

“I get that.” I sounded more annoyed at the admonition than I should have, because his quip about Braden still stung.

Within seconds, I smelled candles and incense, and heard Evan muttering under his breath. I found a trash can by a nearby desk, and tossed the damp tissues inside. Then I spotted a black day planner on top of the desk. It was the sort of thing that ancient relatives used to buy me for school, but I never used. Belinda seemed to have liked it, though. Nearly every page through the end of July was covered in notes and reminders.

Over the weekend, she wrote, she had rented a cabin in the woods by the lake. She should have been back, though, because in about half an hour, she had a dinner date at Hodge Mill with Sheriff Adams. I blinked and re-read the name several times to be sure I had seen it correctly, but unfortunately, I had. My old boss and friend had been acting a little strangely that afternoon, but I hadn’t guessed he might be under the influence of a love spell.

“Finished,” Evan said. I heard him gathering up his supplies. “This isn’t good. I suspected it this afternoon, but now I’m sure–there’s no threshold on this home. Which either means Belinda has permanently moved, or else she’s dead.”

“Do you think she had something to do with your cousin’s murder?” I asked.

“I don’t know what to think. I can’t come up with a reason she’d do it, but then again, where is she?”

“I found her day planner,” I said, holding it up over my shoulder so Evan could see. “She was supposed to go to the lake this weekend, and she’s got a date tonight at Hodge Mill. You’ll never guess who it’s with.”

“Who?”

“The sheriff.”

“Huh.”

“I know it’s a long shot, but I figure we should go to Hodge Mill and see if she shows up–or if the sheriff does. After that–”

“Cassie,” Evan interrupted.

“Yeah?”

“How much do you trust me?”

“Er-Why?”

“Turn around,” he said.

“Did you figure something out?” I said, my heart beating a little faster. “Some way to stop the potion?”

“Yes.”

“But you said-” I never got a chance to finish, because just then, Evan moved into my field of vision and I turned to stare at him properly.

In all the years I had known him, I had somehow missed the fact that Evan has the most incredible blue eyes. They sparkle like diamonds when he laughs, and darken like the sea when he’s angry. At that moment, I thought I could swim in those eyes. I had never spent much time looking at his lips before, but I suddenly became aware of just how kissable they were. I started towards him, my focus set on those beautiful, kissable lips.

I couldn’t move. Something was forcing my body absolutely still.

“Sorry about that,” Evan said, not sounding sorry at all. He swung a satchel over his shoulder and started out the door. I found myself following behind him, but I wasn’t the one moving my legs. “Nothing to do but let it run its course. If you want to hate me in an hour, I’ll understand.”

…

Delays, Delays, Delays

The latest word from my publisher is that Cassie Scot is probably not going to hit the shelves until May 15. The reason is, simply, that we’re still waiting on cover art. We have to send galley copies of the book to certain pre-publication reviewers three months before publication in order to be considered for review, and we would really like it if Cassie Scot got a couple of big name reviews. The lovely thumbs-up from best-selling fantasy author Kim Falconer a few months ago may help, too. Here’s what she had to say:

“When sorcerers call the shots, what’s a girl without powers to do? Get ready for a ripper of a murder mystery full of romance and intrigue, where magic potions bubble, passions spark and vampires are definitely not your friend. Cassie Scot: ParaNormal Detective grabs you by the heart and won’t let go until the very last page. Well written, immersive and unputdownable. This is urban fantasy at its best. More please!”

If my loyal readers are getting impatient to see this book, it is nothing to how I feel! I am, quite simply, chomping at the bit. I wrote my first draft of this book in 2009 and wrote my final draft in early 2011, a full two years ago. Cassie is, in my humble opinion, the best heroine I’ve written and I absolutely love her. I am SO eager to share her with the world, because I really believe others will love her as much as I do.

But I, like you, will have to be patient for a few months longer. Cover art was supposed to be in last week, so here’s hoping for next week!

In the meantime, I’m going to post a brand-new excerpt (in a separate post) to help whet your appetites.

The Quest for the Three Magic Words (2)

Two years ago, I lambasted that favored plot crutch of romance authors who can’t come up with a more interesting source of tension — the quest for the three magic words. In it, I bemoaned the endless waiting around for two people who already love one another but who are, for whatever reason, afraid to say the words. When nothing else is keeping the two apart, this makes for dull reading.

More recently, I have discovered another type of quest for the three magic words, one in which those words truly are magical. In this version of the quest, the hero and heroine face many seemingly insurmountable problems, so I am usually engaged until the very end. The trouble comes with the three words themselves — “I love you” somehow fixes everything.

I see this in stories about lovers from different worlds — perhaps one is a city socialite, the other a rancher; or perhaps one is an aristocrat while the other is a servant. The problems are real, and assuming that I think the two are a good match, the tension is real. But “I love you” is just a phrase. It doesn’t make a countrified born-and-bread farmer into someone who can mingle at parties, and it doesn’t force a Victorian-era society to accept the presence of a servant to their glorified ranks. It may mean that the two main characters desperately want to find a solution, but it is not in itself the solution.

I’m sort of a practical woman, which may makes my love of romance a little strange. I do enjoy the fantasy of it, but I confess that I often feel I have to hold my nose and pretend away the annoying undercurrents that are so central to the genre — soulmates, true love, and destiny. I don’t mind any of these things as long as I can also find some solid comparability between two people… which means their problems must have real-world solutions. If you believe in soulmates and destiny, then I’ll put it this way: Would destiny thrust two people together who simply cannot be?

I’m starting to develop a real fondness for romance novels in which “I love you” is first spoken well short of the end. The idea is important, and the words have their place, but they fail both as the ultimate goal and the ultimate solution. They are simply a part of the path.

Book Review: The Great Escape

In this sequel to “Call Me Irresistible,” we discover what happened to Lucy after running away from her wedding to Ted. I had a lot of fun with Ted and Meg, and was looking forward to following Lucy’s adventure.

Lucy and Ted weren’t right for one another. That was well established in the prequel, and I continued to understand it in this novel. Lucy felt pressured into the match as she tried to live up to high expectation she had dealt with her entire life. I even though I understood why she got on the back of Panda’s motorcycle and went on a joyride with him for a while. I wasn’t sure why she stayed with him for the next two weeks, and then, when he ditched her at the airport, I REALLY didn’t understand why she looked him up, went to his home, and discovering he wasn’t it, broke in and started living there.

There was a lot to like about this book. Ultimately, I did buy into the comparability of the two main characters, but I didn’t buy into the early chemistry or the reasons that they even spent time together. There were a couple of secondary stories, one of which I found compelling — the Jillian Michaels type woman, host of a sensationalist weight loss program, hiring Panda to help her lose weight was really very well done. Best part of the book, IMO.

I liked that the characters had issues, and had to deal with them. (Both primary and secondary.) But in the end, I did not enjoy the reading of this story nearly as much as I enjoyed “Call Me Irresistible.” That one was fun, sassy, and the chemistry was there from the start. This one was more sober, serious, and I had trouble buying into the chemistry at first. Two different approaches by the same author — which I can respect. Some will like the first approach more, some the second. I tend to read romance for entertainment value more than anything else, so while I appreciated what she did in this book, I liked the other one better.

Whichever way you prefer it, serious or sassy, Susan Elizabeth Phillips is a talented romance writer, and I recommend many of her books, including this one.

Rating: 3/5

Title: The Great Escape

Author: Susan Elizabeth Phillips

ISBN: 0062106100

Published July 10, 2012

Book Review: Fallen

Gabriel St. John is a demon, trapped in the city of New Orleans, cursed by his own sins. Sent as an angel to help humanity, he fell under the influence of alcohol addiction, and now if he is with a woman, she becomes hopelessly addicted to him. He hasn’t touched alcohol or a woman in 75 years, but a new temptation enters his life.

Gabriel writes true crime novels, and this time, he has decided to tackle a crime he believes he may have committed in 1849. He wants to find out he didn’t, but he isn’t sure, because he had been under the influence. He works with a forensics expert, Sarah, whose own mother was recently killed. Together, he hopes they can shed new light on both murders.

I enjoyed this book on a lot of levels. Gabriel and Sarah honestly struck me as kindred spirits. Both suffered addictions, Gabriel the alcohol and Sarah sleeping pills after her mother’s death. Gabriel’s newest book was attempting, aside from solving such a personal crime, to prove that modern forensic evidence is still subject to the whims of the court and to the human factor, which is the same today as it was 150 years ago. The book went into some detail, including courtroom transcripts from both trials at the beginning of each chapter.

I did find the writing style to be a little tired. I don’t know if that’s the right word for it — it’s a matter of tone and definitely of personal opinion. I had trouble getting into the story early on, and I never felt that compulsion to turn pages. I both put the book down easily, and picked it up again easily. Maybe that’s a good thing for a busy reader.

In terms of character, mystery, theme, and suspension of disbelief I am a big fan of this book and would highly recommend.

Rating: 4/5

Title: Fallen

Author:  Erin McCarthy

ISBN: 0515144622

Published April 2008

A Letter to Santa

Dear Santa:

You’ve pulled off the jolly old fat man image for centuries, and I think that’s terrific. I really do. It’s wonderful that you enjoy life, cookies, and cocoa, and particularly amazing that you have a special kind of magic sustaining your health so that year after year, you can be a symbol of giving at Christmastime.

The thing is, though, that the rest of us mere mortals have to worry about heart disease, type II diabetes, arthritis, back pain, and any number of other weight-related issues in a world full of sugar. So when you have us waiting in line for 45 minutes to see you, and you set a table of donuts right along that line so that we have to spend 10-15 minutes passing it, it’s sort of a nightmare scenario for those of us who don’t want to wait for New Year’s to resolve to live a healthier life.

So my Christmas wish this year is very simple. World peace would be great, if overly optimistic. Toys and games are fun, but I don’t want to be selfish. All I want you to do is move the table. It’s a way to help make the world a healthier place, one donut at a time.

Wishing you all the best this holiday season!

Yours,

Christine

P.S. Those sweet little instruments of torture looked at me through their hollow sockets. “Eat me!” said hundreds of temptations. “You can just run harder tomorrow. Eat me!” And do you know what I said? I said, “NO!”

Writing Tips: How Can I Become a Writer?

Write.

Here’s the thing: I often get people asking me how I became a writer and most of the time I start gearing up to talk about finding markets to publish stories or how to write a professional cover letter. But then it turns out, that’s not what they want to know, they’re still just toying with the idea of becoming a writer. They haven’t written anything yet, or at least, not much. Or maybe they used to write as a kid but they haven’t in years. That last one comes up a startling amount, leaving me to wonder if we really do set aside our imaginations when we grow up like all those Christmas movies would have us believe.

The good news is, you don’t have to believe in magic to become a writer. All you have to do is write. This won’t necessarily make you a published writer, let alone a famous best-selling author, but if those kinds of dreams are the only reason you’re picking up the pen you might want to put it back down. I’m not saying it can’t or won’t happen, but since over a million books are published each year and only a handful make it to the best seller list, you may want to find some intrinsic motivation. You need something that will hold you through years of practice while you churn out your first million words of crap, and then through years of rejection letters as editor after editor sends you a cold, remote form letter.

A few years ago, just after I finished The Immortality Virus, as a matter of fact, I had an artistic crisis. I wasn’t sure I was supposed to be a writer. I had no ideas that excited me and I was disillusioned with the marketing end of the business. So I decided to stop writing for a year to see what would happen.

What happened is I didn’t make it a year. Aside from the fact that I kept going to the computer almost daily to play around, about three months into my year I was hit with a new idea that absolutely demanded I write it. It wouldn’t take no for an answer.

I’m not saying that you need to have an experience like that in order to become a writer. Nor am I saying that if you don’t currently write, you shouldn’t or aren’t meant to. In fact, plenty of artists are blocked for whatever reason and go through life never fully expressing their creativity. It may not even be through writing, it could be through art or music or creative cooking. Around the same time I had my writing earphone, I began to read and really use the ideas in a book by Julia Cameron, “The Artist’s Way.” If you’re not sure whether you should be a writer or not, you may want to give the book a try and see if it helps you sort out what kind of artist is buried within.

But in the end, the one-word cliché does hold true. I can’t promise you fame, I can’t promise you fortune, and I can’t even promise you talent (although practice helps), but I can promise you that if you write, you are a writer.

Couch 2 5k

Couch 2 5k is a popular fitness program I first ran across a couple of years ago, when a friend of mine tried (and successfully completed) it. The idea is simple: You live a sedentary lifestyle? In nine weeks, this program will get you running a 5k, or about 3.2 miles. You workout for about 30 minutes, 3 times a week, either on a treadmill or outside.

I don’t own a treadmill, and the weather has been unseasonably warm, so I’ve been going outside. If Santa brings me a treadmill for Christmas, I can keep this up during the real winter months, and also during the summer, when it gets too hot to go outside. (I’m a heat wimp. I’d rather run in the snow.)

Week one is only tough is you’re really a couch potato. All you do is run a series of nine, sixty-second intervals with ninety-second walks in between. Don’t want to look at a watch? No problem! Check out Podrunner Intervals for some nice interval mixes with chimes to cue you. They have mixes for all nine weeks, plus a graduation mix.

So, how’s it going? Well, I finished week 4 yesterday, and am supposedly ready to move on to week 5, although the program is accelerating so rapidly at this point that I’m not sure I can keep up. Week 4 had me doing 2 3-minute runs and 2 5-minute runs, at the end of which my lungs tried desperately to heave themselves out of my chest through my esophagus.

Weeks 5 and 6 have different interval schedules each day, but to make a long story short, at the end of this week, the program wants me running for 20 minutes straight. Week 6 actually backs off a bit on days 1 and 2, then pushes ahead to a 25-minute run, which continues into week 7.

I think this is when a lot of people give up. It’s hard, and as much as I respect the program, I think that for some of us, the transition is a bit much. I’m going to spend the next week doing day 1 of week 5, then move on to day 2 of week 5, then maybe play around with week 6. I haven’t made up my mind exactly. What I really intend to do is listen to my body. If I’m still trying to eject my lungs after running for 15 minutes, I just can’t honestly believe I’m ready to run longer than that.

Three’s a 5k race the last weekend in January, so that’s my goal.

Book Review: Lucky Penny

What a wonderful, heartwarming story. This actually had me in tears at one point, which is not at all easy to do. It has been too long since I’ve read one of Catherine Anderson’s novels. I was thrilled to see this one come along at the library, and not the least bit disappointed when I stayed up too late last night reading it.

It’s Colorado, 1891. Brianna Paxton is raising her twin sister’s child as her own, doing the best she can for the child in a world that has no pity for unwed mothers. She works several jobs, gets little sleep, and still goes hungry sometimes to feed her child. To protect them both, she made up an errant husband years ago by the name of David Paxton. She even sent letters to him at the Denver post office to keep up appearances.

Marshal David Paxton of No Name, Colorado received six years’ worth of letters one morning, a few of them written in the childish hand of Daphne, who begged for help. Something in them got to him, and he had a terrible suspicion — in his early twenties he was wild, frequently got drunk, and more than once woke with no memory of the night before. Could he have fathered a child and not known it?

He had to know for sure. He started by searching Denver for any record of another David Paxton. When he found none, he went to see Brianna, to put his mind at ease. But when he saw the child — the spitting image of his mother — he knew he could not walk away. He didn’t even want to. He fell in love with “his daughter” at first sight.

One of the things I loved about this book was that the two characters did not lie to one another. Well, Brianna did right at first — spinning the same tale she’d told everyone to protect herself and her child — but the guy was nobody she knew or trusted. As soon as it became obvious that she could not shake him, she told him the truth… that he wasn’t Daphne’s father and in fact, she wasn’t really her mother. He doesn’t believe her, which is also understandable given the lies she spun out at first. Far too often in a novel like this, the whole thing is steeped in deception and the two main characters get together under false pretenses. Such was not the case here, a fact that made the characters more likeable, the situation more bittersweet, and the tension far more compelling.

My only little complaint was that I felt some drag in this book, especially as we were waiting for truth to finally be established.

I thoroughly recommend this book to romance lovers, especially if you like historicals. And if you haven’t read Catherine Anderson before, give her a try! Her books are high on emotion, very sweet, and not overly sexual. (Although she doesn’t skip the sex scenes.) This book is further on in a series, so it might be an odd one to start with, but reading them in order isn’t hugely important.

Rating: 4.5/5

Title: Lucky Penny

Author: Catherine Anderson

ISBN: 0451236033

Published January 31, 2012

Zook Country

Great books start with great characters and a strong narrative voices. The most intriguing plots in the world fall apart when the voice/writing style won’t hold your attention, and the most been-there, done-that plots in the world shine like new pennies when the right voice brings them to life. This, I think, is the gift of the debut author.

Zook Country is about killing zombies. I’m not going to try to sell it to you on that, though. There has been a bit of a zombie craze recently, and maybe you’re into it, but personally I could take ‘em or leave ‘em. I’ll take this particular zombie book any day.

Ten years ago, metamorphic plague began turning human beings into zooks. Crazed and half alive, their only purpose seems to be to bite, and continue transmitting the plague. Jake Chestnut survived the early years of the disease, but his family didn’t, and when he fought back, his country betrayed him.

Now he and his zook-hutning partner have been hired by a consortium of billionaires to clear some land, but they stumble upon something that isn’t quite right, and when they investigate, people start trying to kill them.

What I loved about this story was, quite simply, Jake. He’s wounded. He’s been kicked down, but come back up. This is told in the first person, from his point of view, and in his voice — which is instantly captivating. Seriously, just read the first couple of pages and see what I mean. There’s a bit of dark humor, wit, irreverence, and the occasional matter-of-factness that these sorts of stories really need. The world sucks, but people are still living. Well, really, they have to. What else would they do?

This is a violent book, but not an unnecessarily violent book — it’s just the reality of the situation. I am not a fan of violence for violence’s sake, and this didn’t bother me. But if you’re one of those who doesn’t like violence at all, this may not be for you.

Otherwise, if you have even a passing interest in science fiction, especially those featuring dystopian realities, you should give this a try. At least read the first chapter, which you can do for free online right here.

Rating: 5/5

Title: Zook Country

Aurtho: Bill Swears

ISBN: 9781606192

Published March 10, 2012