Debbie Viguié's Blog, page 14

Happy New Year!

I can’t help it, I’m really excited today. I believe 2013 is going to be the best year ever so far. I hope that everyone has an amazing, prosperous year filled with love, excitement, health, family, friends, and awesome work opportunities. I’m also thrilled to announce that I have selected the 2013 Superfans! Thank you everyone who participated!

This year I am planning on writing 1,000,000 words. I fell short last year, but I am confident I will make it this year. What are some of your resolutions?

Superfans and Advent Prizes!

Advent prizes will be getting sent out in the next few days. Congratulations again to all the winners!

The Suuperfan contest is in it’s last few days! Remember the deadline to submit your name is midnight on New Year’s Eve. Ten Superfans have already been selected. Make sure to send me an email if you are going for it so I know to look for your name. Good luck everyone!

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Sorry to have been absent the last few days. Some much needed family time got interrupted by both the hubby and me getting the flu. Still, I’d like to wish you all a very, very happy day!

Advent Day 21

Welcome to Day 21! Four more days until Christmas! I’m spending some quality time with family (much needed!) and I’ll post a much longer post in a few hours with some more announcements!

Advent Day 18

One week until Christmas! I can hardly wait. Congratulations to Bethany G. who won a $15 Fandango Gift Card. I’ve been listening to a lot of Christmas music lately. I’m a fan. My favorite Christmas album of all is Once Upon a Christmas by Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers. I’ll give that away to one person today. To enter just comment and tell me what your favorite Christmas song or album is.

You can click here to see a video showing Dolly and Kenny singing my favorite song from that album, Once Upon a Christmas.

Advent Day 17

Welcome to day 17 of the Christmas Countdown!! I can’t believe that Christmas is next week already! 13 of you commented and told me what you’d want to win for a prize last week. I’m so moved by how awesome you all are, and all the random acts of kindness you guys have been performing, and the fact that there were 13 of you that I’ve decided to give you all what you asked for! So, congratulations to Lisa, Chelsea, Tina G., Melanie, Tina, Kris, Sarah K., bn100, Nicole, Stacey B., Kylie, Natalie ., and Jenelle! I also think all of you should be going for Superfan status, by the way!

Anyway, thought you’d all like to know what it is I’m currently working on. Nancy and I are finishing up the final Wolf Springs Chronicles book (called Savage). I am also working on Restoreth My Soul (book 5 of the Psalm 23 Mysteries) and Circle of Blood (the 3rd Witch Hunt book). It’s going to be a busy few weeks as I finish those all up. Oh! I’m also in the revision stage for the final Kiss book (Kiss of Revenge) as well. I should have cover art to share on a couple of these soon.

I’ve seen The Hobbit: an Unexpected Journey in theaters 3 times now and I have to say, I’m a huge fan. If you haven’t seen it, go and enjoy! And because I’m really hoping someone will use it to go see The Hobbit, today I’m giving away a $15 Fandango gift card. Of course, you don’t have to use it to see The Hobbit, but it’s my suggestion! So, to enter, comment below and tell me what the best movie you’ve seen in the last year or so was.

Advent Day 14

Hello and welcome to Day 14 of the Christmas countdown!! Yesterday’s winner of a $20 B&N gift card is Joe! Congratulations! I’d love to tell you about yesterday and today’s random acts of kindness that I’m participating in, but these are secret. They are cool, though! And keep the suggestions coming everyone, they are most appreciated!

To celebrate the release of the latest episode of my podcast The Thirteenth Hour I’m doing another giveaway. This time, comment and tell me what you want to win! One winner will be chosen. And now, for your listening pleasure, episode 3 of The Thirteenth Hour. It contains some Christmas thoughts, some insights into a future book project, and a revelation that has been a long time coming.

Advent Day 13

Welcome to day 13!!! Congratulations to yesterday’s winner of a B&N giftcard: Sarah! Now, as you all know I love the number 13. I’m also thrilled to announce the newest episode of my hubby’s podcast, Dr. Geek’s Lab. I will have a recurring character on the series, named Claire, who will show up in a few episodes. My character is mentioned in this one, though! So, in honor of all these things, today I’m giving away a $20 gift card to the winner’s choice of either Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Comment below to enter and enjoy listening to the show!!

Advent Day 12

Welcome to Day 12 of the Christmas countdown!! I’m still extra tipping at restaurants and I bought a movie ticket for a friend. Random acts of kindness continue! Thanks for all your great comments yesterday! The winner of the $10 Amazon gift card is Kris. Congratulations! Comment today for a chance to win a $10 Barnes & Noble gift card!

And speaking of Barnes & Noble, I have good news for all the Nook owners. Beside Still Waters (the 4th book in the Psalm 23 Mysteries) is now available! Click here to buy it.

For those waiting for book 5 to come out, here’s text that is likely going to be on the back cover for Restoreth My Soul.

Jeremiah is surprised when a damaged painting is donated to the synagogue, but he quickly discovers that someone else is willing to kill for it when the art appraiser who was assessing its value is murdered. Mark links this killing to an unsolved homicide of a high-end art dealer months earlier. Jeremiah and Cindy set out to solve the mystery behind the painting and soon realize that it is only one of a dozen stolen by Nazis during World War II from a family whose descendants now live in Israel. Cindy and Jeremiah find themselves in a race against time to find the paintings before the killer does and to stop him before he claims more victims.

Advent Day 11

Wow! This month is flying by! I can’t believe there’s only 2 weeks to go until Christmas!! To celebrate, I’m giving away a $10 Amazon gift card. Just comment on today’s entry to be entered in the contest.

And now, the first few pages of Hot Blooded for your reading pleasure!

I outran them.

Katelyn McBride soared into the spotlight on the Mexican cloud swing. The swing was a thick rope of braided fibers connected by either end to the sky-high rigging of the circus tent. To the audience far, far below, the swing looked wispy as mist, but it was as strong as Katelyn herself. Nearly unbreakable. She was seventeen, and she was at the top of her game: a beautifully trained gymnast, limber, made of solid muscle. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a bun and her light blue eyes were edged with kohl.

I outfought them.

Music pulsed like a heartbeat as she sat on her swing and pumped her legs, rocking in and out of the spotlight —

— the moonlight —

— and she gazed down at the werewolves of Wolf Springs. They prowled in their magnificent wolf forms on the floor of the arena, which also seemed to be the forest, in a swelling river of tension. Their glowing eyes narrowed with intense purpose.

You thought you could hurt me, but you can’t even touch me, she sneered as she executed a backward roll on the swing, then shifted her weight onto her hip bones as she came back around. This was the Cirque du Soleil, the world of greasepaint and gymnasts and death-defying feats of daring. Here she was in charge. Wolf Springs was nothing but a fraud, a lie designed to frighten little children. All you had to do was stop believing in ghosts and monsters and Hellhounds, and Wolf Springs lost its hold on you.

I’m free.

But another voice seemed to whisper, Never free from me.

Applause and cheers rose, buoying her up. In the audience were her mother and father, Giselle Chevalier the ballerina and Sean McBride the assistant district attorney, their arms around each other, loving her. Proud, happy. Alive. She swung back and forth, waving. They waved back.

Then a voice whispered urgently, Run.

A sharp, icy fear washed over her; everything shifted. The cloud swing picked up momentum on its own, propelling her back and forth like a pendulum. The frantic to-and-fro rhythm was out of control, like her heartbeat, and she collapsed from her balanced pose, grabbing the two sides just in time to stop her fall.

Run.

As she looked down into the audience, huge tongues of fire shot up between the seats. They rose so high they nearly singed Katelyn’s eyelashes as she pulled herself upward, holding on for dear life. Spectators were screaming, igniting like kindling. Her cloud swing was gone. She was holding onto twin ropes of Spanish moss. Through the sudden haze of smoke, all she could see were the howling werewolves of Wolf Springs, racing around the trees, trying to find a way out.

“Jump, my darling!” Katelyn’s mother screamed. Then her mother tumbled into the center of the wolf pack and the closest werewolves leaped on her. In seconds, she was buried underneath them.

“Mom!” Katelyn shouted.

Some of the werewolves fixed their glowing blue eyes on Katelyn, snapping their blood-drenched jaws. Their eager howls were like the shrieks of demons.

Then a figure streaked with blood and ash rose from the center of the pack. Fists balled over his head, Justin Fenner roared with fury. He stood broad-shouldered in a shredded white T-shirt and ripped black jeans that molded his body. Howling like a werewolf prince, he slashed at all comers.

Wheeling out of his reach, the werewolves scattered into the smoke and began to catch fire. They screamed and tried to retreat from the inferno, racing back toward Justin. But as he lunged at them, they cowered and cringed, preferring to burn rather than to take him on.

Panting, he looked straight up at Katelyn with his deep blue eyes. He held out his arms to catch her.

Capture her.

“Kat. You are my secret weapon,” he whispered, yet she could hear his voice above all the chaos. “Jump. I’ll keep you close.”

“No!” she shouted, flailing in the rigging. “Don’t touch me!”

Then she was falling.

     Falling.

         Falling.

Frantic, she clawed at the smoke-choked air. She landed hard in Justin’s embrace, against his chest. She struggled to get out of his arms but he enclosed her, enfolded her. “I’ll keep you forever,” he said, gouging his nails into her arms. The pain was an icy shock.

And Katelyn McBride woke up in her bed.

~

Moonlight poured down from her skylight and illuminated the bust of her mother that Trick had made for her as a birthday present, presenting it to her earlier that day after Justin had dropped her home. Katelyn stared at her mother’s features, frozen forever and yet so lifelike. If her mom had really been there, what would she say to any of it?

What would I say to her?

Mom, I’ve become a werewolf wouldn’t have been at the top of her list.

Then again, if her mother were still alive, Katelyn would still be with her out in California, pursuing her dreams of becoming a performer, a Cirque star, instead of being trapped in a remote cabin in the Ozarks with a grandfather she barely knew. She’d never have been attacked by a werewolf, being transformed into one herself. She would never have seen Cordelia Fenner, her new best friend, driven from her home by her father Lee Fenner, the leader of the werewolf pack — its alpha — for failing to tell him that she was worried Katelyn might have been bitten.

As she stood up and touched the bust of her mother, warm skin against cold stone, she also conceded that if she had still been in California, she never would have met Trick. Wonderful, crazy, frustrating, secretive Trick—Vladimir Sokolov, to give him his full name — who cared enough about her to shape this tribute, and had talked her grand­father into buying her a computer and a microcell for her birthday so she could use her cell phone in his cabin situated miles and miles outside the town of Wolf Springs.

When Justin — Cordelia’s cousin — had dropped her home, the place had been full of chaos. There had been a break-in while she had been with the wolf pack, and the thieves had stolen her grandmother’s silver and some paintings off the wall in the stairwell. Sergeant Lewis, one of Wolf Springs’ two police officers, had been taking her grandfather’s statement.

Trick had been there, too, planning to give her the bust, and after Sergeant Lewis left, her grandfather had surprised Katelyn with the computer. What she wouldn’t have given to have had it when she first arrived in Wolf Springs weeks before.

As she stretched out her tense body, she remembered her nightmare. Before the werewolves had invaded it had been a happy dream, with her performing in Cirque du Soleil just as she had always hoped. I’m not that girl, she thought. But she was. She still was. She whirled in a circle, slowly, feeling the joy in movement that had been the constant in her life. Back home, dance and gymnastics had both filled nearly all her waking hours — and kept the nightmares at bay. Sean McBride, her father, had been shot down over four years ago in cold blood. Her mother was dead, killed in the fire that had destroyed their home, and she, Katelyn, had been forced to come to Wolf Springs to live with her grandfather, Mordecai McBride, whom she barely knew.

And then . . . the bite. A monstrous gray wolf with blue eyes, a rogue werewolf no one seemed to know.

All those things had happened to change her. But what they had not changed was what it felt like to be graceful and strong. Stretching, bending in ways that had taken years of practice and sacrifice, she held on tightly to the feeling. She was reclaiming something — what it was that made her Katelyn McBride. The core of her identity.

Now, as she moved in the room in the cabin, she felt life surging through her muscles. She slid slowly and effortlessly to the floor in the splits and arched her back until the crown of her head nearly touched the floor — something she had never been able to do before.

My human body is different, she thought, amazed. Because of the change.

She caught her lower lip. She saw herself auditioning for Cirque, imagined people gasping at the incredible things she could do. Her mind began to race with the fantasy. Werewolves only had to change on the full moon. She could still live a normal life. She could get out of Wolf Springs. Be what she was destined to be.

If it was the last thing she did, she would leave Wolf Springs. She would make her dream come true. She couldn’t let what had happened to her, any of it, stop her.

“I swear it, Mom,” she said, gazing at the bust of her mother. “I’ll live enough for both of us.”

Hot and thirsty, she headed downstairs for some water. She crept past the animal heads mounted on the wall and past the empty spaces where the stolen pictures had hung.

Outside in the darkness, the drums of the Inner Wolf Center were echoing off the mountains. A man named Jack Bronson had bought the old hot springs resort Wolf Springs had been named after, and now business executives paid small fortunes to learn how to let out their inner predators. Seen as a nuisance by a lot of the townsfolk, they mostly kept to themselves at the center. It was a good thing, too. Her one encounter with a couple of those executives in town had been less than pleasant. They’d gotten in touch with their inner jerks a little too much.

As she stepped into the kitchen, she thought she caught movement out of the corner of her eye. She turned her head swiftly, but there was nothing there.

Just my imagination, she thought, crossing toward the sink. Then she turned and jumped. Justin was standing outside the window, staring in at her. His thumbs were slung in the belt loops of his jeans, his head cocked beneath the moonlight. A jacket that he didn’t need stretched across his shoulders and she remembered the dream, how he had caught her, trapped her. But now, looking out the window, she remembered riding on his motorcycle, and kissing him in the forest before she knew he had a girlfriend . . . or that he was a werewolf. He had been her first real kiss, and even now, despite everything — despite Trick — she still felt drawn to him.

He gave her a slow nod and she caught her breath, wanting, and not wanting, to go to him. They were two of a kind now, in so many ways.

Well, I hope you enjoyed that sneak peek! You can click here to be shown buying options for the book.