Imogen Howson's Blog, page 7

In the Shadow of the Volcano available in all formats

Just a quick update.  My V-Day free read is available in all electronic formats now from Smashwords.

Click on the blurb to go to its Smashwords page.

In the harsh, priest-ruled land of the volcano-god, unsanctioned gifts are punished with death. Eleria knows she must give herself up. But her husband doesn't plan on letting her go.

I'm very impressed with how many downloads it's getting in the less than 24 hours it's been available.  Although I know perfectly well it wouldn't be getting so many if it weren't free.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Sparkler and Gloworm's school has a teacher-training day today, so they had a sleepover with their friends last night.  They had Domino's pizza, Ben & Jerry's icecream, and the older girls were up at about midnight baking Valentine's red velvet cupcakes.  And talking about boys.  Abstract and I retreated into the sitting room and shared a bottle of La Jara Prosecco Frizzante.

This means that I'm spending Valentine's Day surrounded by shrilly giggling teenagers making marshmallow frosting in order to ice said red velvet cupcakes.  Gloworm and her friend are more peacefully watching Pretty Woman in the sitting room, having taken themselves to the local baker's shop to buy sausage rolls for their lunch.

In editing news, the authors and I have approved the covers for the Springtime: Come Rain or Come Shine anthology.  I'm awfully pleased with them, so much so that they've currently replaced my Volcano covers on my computer desktop, and I can't wait to be able to share them nearer release day on May 31st.

And in writing news, my Romance Divas 5th Annual Valentine's Day eBook Challenge free read is up.  Click here to read it online or find a downloadable pdf.  It's set in my Volcano world, four years after the end of Heart of the Volcano and about a year before Blood of the Volcano, so although all the stories stand alone it's a nice little fill-in for some of that period of time.  If you read it I'd love to know what you think!

Blood of the Volcano: Release Month Contest

Blood of the Volcano, my second Samhain book and standalone sequel to Heart of the Volcano, will be out in two weeks.

To celebrate (and, you know, promote it to people who might like to read it!), I'm running a contest from now until the end of February. It's super-easy to enter, it's open internationally, and here are the prizes you could win:

First prize:

One of my favourite things: a bag from Clippy.  This will be customized with the Blood of the Volcano cover and contain delicious chocolate all the way from England, but it's totally re-customizable with your own photos or pictures.

AND

A $10 gift certificate to the Samhain store.

Second prize:

A $5.50 gift certificate to the Samhain store (enough to buy a full-length novel such as…ooh, Blood of the Volcano).

AND

Delicious chocolate sent to you all the way from England (you get to specify milk/dark/white).

Third prize:

A $5.50 gift certificate to the Samhain store.

How to enter:

Email me at imogenhowson AT gmail DOT com, giving your name and which type of chocolate you prefer.

Comment on this post, on my release-day post on this blog, or on my release-day post on the Samhain website.

Comment on my Facebook wall mentioning that you're entering the contest.

Send me a direct message on Twitter or an @imogenhowson reply.

Retweet any of my Tweets that mention Blood of the Volcano (there won't be enough to be annoying, I promise!).

Send one of your own Tweets about it using the hashtag #bloodofthevolcano

General Updates

Thanks to Merry Maids, my slow cooker, and the wonderful efficiency of the Springtime Anthology authors, I finally feel I'm getting on top of everything.  The anthology books are nearing completion and will be turned in for formatting by the end of this month, and I no longer have to scroll to see all the emails in my inbox.  This is partly because I've created a folder named Answer for non-urgent, non-work emails, but still…

Work on the Secret Project is going pretty well, and I'm aiming to have it done by the end of February.  Work on Chains of the Volcano has taken very much second place, I'm afraid.  March will be the month I shove it up to first place and work hard on it.

I have some edits to do on In the Shadow of the Volcano, my Valentine's Day Free Read, after my crit partners read it.  And then I'll be formatting that and uploading it ready to go live on February 14th.

I'm also planning promo for Blood of the Volcano, which releases February 22nd.  Stay tuned for details of the release day contest and prizes!

I'm not keeping up 100% with my New Year's resolutions.  However, I have taken photos most days (27 total for January), and although I haven't quite blogged every other day, I have blogged more regularly than I was managing before.

I am managing to both cook seasonally and count calories.  So far, Abstract has lost weight.  Me, not so much!  But it's getting easier now I'm not so completely tired and overwhelmed by busyness.  And I am getting back into exercising, which feels really nice.

I haven't updated my Kindle Reading page for ages, but I have organised all the books into folders on the Kindle, so  updating the page on the blog won't exactly be hard work.  And why I haven't done it already I don't know.

In other news, I'm trying to think of a good series name for my Volcano books.  There'll be two of them out by the end of this month (not counting the free read), and Chains will be the third, so assuming my editor contracts it, it would be useful to readers to have a specific series name they can use to keep track of the books.  I could just call it the Volcano Series or Chronicles of the Volcano or one of those kind of names, but I'd rather go for something that gives more of an idea of the genre and feel of the books.

And finally, I was kind of charmed by the warning in the blurb for this book on the new (gorgeous, by the way!) Samhain site.  The book is Shelter from the Storm by Samantha Sommersby, and the warning reads:

This book may spoil you for real relationships. It contains a beautiful woman with a dark and dangerous past, sensational sailboat sex and a leather-wearing, motorcycle-riding man who loves kids, knows how to cook and actually listens.

Okay, I have no dark and dangerous past, my life contains no sailboat sex (I won't specify on the sensational part for the sake of my children who sometimes read my blog), but a "leather-wearing, motorcycle-riding man who loves kids, knows how to cook and actually listens"?  Yep, I married him.

 

Keeping warm and happy

The nice gas engineer who cleaned up after himself has fixed the gas fire in the sitting room.  Right now I'm sitting with the laptop working on the Secret Project, with a coffee on the table next to me, and flames hissing and glowing in the fireplace.

If this is how this whole month is going to go…

Yesterday my cleaners came (Merry Maids sends them out in a team of two) and left the house all shiny and clean.  Later on, however, we had an incident which involved icing sugar going all over a worktop, some cupboard doors, the floor, a catfood bowl, and Gloworm's (clean on that day) school uniform.

Later, Abstract had to move all the furniture (TV, TV table, bookcase and huge pile of books with associated dust) from one corner of the sitting room into the centre, to make way for the gas engineer due to come today.

Today the gas engineer came and fixed the gas fire in the sitting room and then serviced the boiler in the kitchen, with attendant mess (although he did borrow the hoover and did a great job of cleaning up after himself).

And the cat jumped from the boiler over my bowl of cereal in order to get onto the clean (and forbidden territory) worktop, spraying hair as she did so.

Oh, and yesterday both Sparkler's and Gloworm's shoes broke.  Sparkler's was just a strap, which she super-glued, but the whole heel of one of Gloworm's shoes disintegrated.  Which meant she had to wear trainers today and take a note explaining to her teachers.

And it's only the first day of the month.

Peaceful Saturday

I took Sparkler to her dance and drama thing this morning, then went and had my Oatso Simple and latte in Mcdonald's with my laptop, and worked on the Secret Project.

In the afternoon Abstract and Gloworm went out to buy a birthday present for Gloworm's boyfriend, Sparkler lay on the sitting-room floor and watched TV, and I had the most peaceful time of putting a rice pudding to cook in the slow cooker, then making Virgin Mary Soup and cheese straws for dinner. I haven't spent time cooking without doing it to a looming deadline (hungry people need to eat in the next half-hour!) for ages, and after a few mega-busy weeks with work and writing it was so nice to do something completely non-cerebral.  I did a little bit of work in between dinner and watching Take Me Out with the girls, Abstract, and Abstract's mother, who has popped up to Nottinghamshire for the weekend, but only a little bit.

Tomorrow I have some work stacked up waiting for me, of course, so I'm kind of paying for taking today easily, but oh it was nice!

Time-saving tips, and why Immi is spoiled

So, the other week I asked on Twitter (in a state, let me tell you, of some desperation) for people's best time-saving tips.

These are the things people don't do in order to save themselves time:

Don't clean the house.

Don't have children (oops, too late).

Don't join Yahoo groups.

Don't watch TV or play computer games.

Don't dry up – let the washing up drain dry.

Don't iron.

Don't cook.

These are the things people do or have in order to save time:

Slow cooker.

Bread machine.

Dishwasher.

Batch-cooking every Sunday, freezing meals for the rest of the week.

In the interests of slow-cooking/batch-cooking, I invested in a giant slow cooker (6.5 litres!).  Right now there's three meals' worth of bolognese sauce in the freezer, and a vegeterian shepherds pie waiting to be eaten for tomorrow's dinner.  Definitely a good buy.  It also just so happens that I bought Abstract a bread machine this Christmas, we already have a dishwasher (Abstract rearranged the whole kitchen some years ago in his determination to fit one in), and the only things I regularly iron are the girls' school uniforms.  I watch very little TV (Desperate Housewives, which isn't even on air right now, and a weekly Buffy episode with Sparkler), and I can't play computer games because I get far too excited about even such innocuities as cartoon fish who have to pop bubbles to get points.  Honestly.

I hate the house to be not-clean or untidy, though.  And as I'm working from home, I have to be able to look up from the computer and see reasonable clean-and-tidiness.  So, for the first time in my life, I'm delegating.

Yes.  As well as my slow cooker, dishwasher, bread machine and husband-who-irons-his-own-shirts, I now have a weekly cleaner.  It's awesome.

(It's a temporary arrangement for the next month or so while I'm mega-busy, and won't continue if I become less busy again.  But for the moment, oh the joy – my bathroom is clean and I didn't do it!)

 

 

Chocolate Chilli

I was cooking this in my slow cooker last week, and a couple of people asked for the recipe, so here you are.  It's a slight adaptation of a recipe from Slow Cooking by Katie Bishop, which is a very good slow cooking recipe book, full of really imaginative recipes.

This is not one of the more imaginative recipes, and it didn't end up as chocolatey as I thought it might, but it was a very good, rich brown beef chilli.  I wonder if next time I might replace some more of the flour with cocoa powder for a more chocolatey flavour.  I don't want to overdo it, though – it's not a dessert!

Take one pound braising steak, cut into cubes and with as much of the fat as possible trimmed off, and mix it with one and a half tablespoons of plain flour and half a tablespoon of cocoa powder till it's coated.

Place in slow cooker saucepan or ceramic pot (depending on your make of slow cooker) with one medium onion, chopped, one red chilli, deseeded and chopped, one garlic clove, peeled and chopped, 1 14oz/400g tin chopped tomatoes, salt and pepper, and mix to combine.

Either cover and bring to a simmer on the hob, then move to slow cooker base, or just cover and switch slow cooker on to Low.

Cook for eight hours, add 200g tin of kidney beans, stir, cover and cook for another quarter of an hour.

Serve with rice and creme fraiche or sour cream.

Serves 4, about 260 calories per serving (obviously rice/creme fraiche etc add more, but this is a nice low-fat basic meal, and it's up to you how much extra fat and/or carbs you add).

If you're cooking this in an oven, put in a lidded casserole dish and cook at 150 degrees centigrade (300 degrees fahrenheit) for 4-6 hours.

The same book has a recipe for chicken cooked with chipotle paste and actual dark chocolate, not just cocoa powder.  I'm going to try that next.  Well, after I've made bolognese sauce (tomorrow) and vegetarian shepherds pie (Wednesday) and possibly even slow-cooked eggnog (I know, right?).

Sex and the City II

I'm still at The Model Auntie and Dr T-shirt's house, currently in one of their spare bedrooms, which I'm sharing with some mysterious-looking photographic equipment (The Model Auntie is – surprisingly, I know – a model, and Dr T-shirt is a photographer).

Today The Model Auntie and I sat with our laptops and did much useful work, and then we went out and had delicious lunch (smoked mackerel and creme fraiche baguette, yay!), and then came back and did more work.  And then she cooked dinner and THEN we watched Sex and the City II, which is oh my goodness a terrible terrible movie, with hardly any sex or city and Carrie being a special princess brat who, frankly, deserved to be left at the altar in the first movie.  Oh, sorry, spoiler.

So then we read funny reviews of it and agreed with them.

Why Sex and the City 2 is a science fiction movie.

Sex and the City 2: What happened to good old Sex?

Tomorrow I go home and see my family.  I've had a lovely time away.  I enjoyed the RNA meeting, particularly chatting to old and new friends afterwards, and it's always super to see my sister and Dr T-shirt, but I'm happy that I'll be seeing my own little family tomorrow!