Sommer Marsden's Blog, page 58

Kiss Me, You Fool!

Thanks to Miz Angell for having me today as part of the Lion Hearted blog tour. I'm at her place discussing...Mmm...two boys kissing.

Stop in and say hi for an entry to win my LH prizes.

Happy...Tuesday. I had to think about it for a mo'. @.@

XOXO
Sommer

First Kiss

Thanks to Cassidy Kingston for having me on her blog today as part of the Lion Hearted blog tour. Talking about that first rough kiss. Rawr. Good stuff.

Come say hi if you get a moment. Giveaways details apply to this stop as with every :) There's stuff up for grabs.

XOXO
Sommer

For some reason I like noon...

But ya know, morning or night works for me, too. I'm easy *cough*. Speaking of Morning, Noon and Night, Alison Tyler's blog tour for her lovely new book is live tomorrow. Here's the lineup. Come say hi, no matter what time of day it is!


11/13 Alison Tyler
11/14 Sasha White
11/15 Vida Bailey
11/16 Cheyenne Blue
11/17 Donna George Storey
11/18 Aisling Weaver
11/19 Teresa Noelle Roberts
11/20 Cora Zane
11/21 Angell Brooks
11/22 Justine Elyot
11/23 Kristina Lloyd
11/24 Preston Avery
11/25 Ashley Lister
11/26 Victoria Janssen
11/27 Always Each Other
11/28 Tamsin Flowers hosts Jeremy Edwards
11/29 Tenille Brown
11/30 Kat Watson
12/1 Alison Tyler
12/2 Sommer Marsden

Kiki Howell: The Story Behind Story

I was very excited when I saw the submission call for the Hungry For Love antho being that I am not only a paranormal author but also a diabetic. Problem was, I'd never written a zombie story before. But, I have written stories about necromancy, where sorcery is used to conjure the dead, usually to look into the future. But, this story was my world, so I pushed a bit, stretched my imagination, and found a place where someone born a necromancer, with special skills to raise the dead, could be kidnapped and used in a spell to raise an army of zombies. Then I set the story in an old factory because I liked the idea of scary scenes written in delapidated rooms - don't judge now ! LOL And, Zombie Factory was started...
I guess as authors we all start from what we know and find our way to our story. I read, here on Sommer's blog, actually, in one of the first story behind the story posts, that Alison Tyler had done the same in a way, not being a paranormal author, she found her way to a zombie story through a bit of a different path, through the use characters watching a zombie movie. Curious, I went to that story first as I started to read the anthology. 
That fun hot and sexy fun was Alison Tyler's Head Full of Zombie story. I appreciated the old-time feel of the setting, the little touches of zombie movie feel around the whole plot, and of course, the heated sex that I have come to REALLY love in Alison Tyler's work. She never disappoints! 
I have to admit though, I was so engrossed in where the sexual escapades had gone that my heart gave a little skip for a few reasons in the end, a little surprise for reader and character that could have gone several ways *winks* 
Okay, I'm going back in for more. Can't wait to read all the stories in this anthology that I am just so thrilled to be a part of :)
More about Kiki Howell:
Ever since she was young, Kiki Howell has loved to listen to a well-woven tale with real characters, inspired plots, and delightful resolutions. Kiki could spend hours lost in a book, and soon she knew that creating lives, loves, and losses with just words had to be the greatest thing that she could do. To that end, she pursued her study of literature and writing, earning a bachelor’s degree in English. She then followed in a Master’s program in Creative Writing.  

She has now had over thirty stories published between eleven different publishers.  She could not be more thrilled or grateful to see her creations polished and out in the real world. Although, a bit of caution, most of her stories tend to hang out on the graphically sexy side of town.

In May, 2011, Kiki was chosen as an Ohioana Book Festival author for her novel, Torn Asunder. 
Kiki resides in the  Midwest  with her incredibly handsome and talented, singer/songwriter husband and two children. When she is not writing, she is spending time with her family, reading, baking or knitting.
Kiki's most current work is the paranormal, romantic suspense novel, Hidden Salem, released in October 2012.

Cry me a river...

I'm at Liv Honeywell's today talking about how I can get a bit verklempt when my characters fall in love. Or...ya know...happen to tug my heart strings in any way.

There's a $10 ARe gift card and some tentacle gifties just begging to be claimed. The only thing you have to do is go to any (or all) of the Lion Hearted tour stops listed in blogs below and drop me a line. Say hi...say boo! Say anything. (Great movie ;) )

Every say earns you a chance to win.

Thanks to Liv for having me. Have a supah Saturday!

XOXO
Sommer

Slip sliding away...

Thanks very much to Tenille Brown for having me on HER BLOG for today's blog stop where I discuss...(drum roll please) shower sex! Rolling along with the Lion Hearted blog fun. Awesome :)

Drop by and say hi for a chance to win my goodies. Well, not my goodies, but some goodies. You know what I mean.

XOXO
Sommer
p.s. My mom had surgery today. All went well and she's home totally fine. Just a quick thanks to all those who sent well wishes and good thoughts. You rock. :)

Another busy, swept away day...

I'm popping in to say I'm double booked again today for my Divination Falls blog tour. I'd rather be too busy than not busy enough.

Today is stop 3 and 4. Yay!

#3 is Tabitha Rayne, a fellow Xcite and award winning author. I'm over at HER BLOG talking about secret places. If you think I mean your naughty parts, not quite. ;)

#4 is the lovely Lucy Felthouse, a phenom in the erotica community. She's a writer and a promoter and a...candlestick maker. Okay. Maybe not. But she does a lot. I'm at HER BLOG talking about unlovable people falling in love.

Please stop by and say hi. Giveaways mentioned below, apply. Of course they do!

XOXO
Sommer

Busy day, awesome day!

 
I'm not only announcing stop #2 on my Lion Hearted Blog Tour but stop #3 as well.

Stop #2 is at Willsin's World where I talk about 'writing like a man'. Willsin is a fellow eXcessica author and a top notch cover artist if you don't know. (which you should). He's also part of my upcoming antho Coupling 2. Woohoo!

Go HERE to visit his blog and leave a comment to get a chance to win a $10 All Romance eBooks gift card and the tentacled gifties pictured below!

Stop #3 is at Tamsin Flower's blog where I blog about my fixation--ahem, I mean love--of roadtrips.

Tamsin is a fellow Xcite author, so go HERE to check out her blog and drop me a comment because the above giveaway listed applies!

Happy hump day. It sure is a busy one! ;)

XOXO
Sommer

The Story Behind the Story: Lynn Townsend

Another story that stuck with me, I can still remember it vividly as I type this. Today we hear from Lynn Townsend who penned the story Dead in the Water for Hungry for Love. Woohoo!
XOXOSommmer


My first exposure to the macabre genre was a tattered paperback copy of the Amityville Horror by Jay Anson. My cousin - who lived in a by-God Log Cabin out in the middle of nowhere New York with outdoor "plumbing" and no power (her parents were really odd, so it's not her fault) - had swapped it out of the local library's "leave one, take one" book pile. She'd read about two chapters, freaked out, and threw it under her bed. I'd found it there a few weeks later and - being bored out of my MIND - started reading.

I was ten. 
(It is not the place of this writer to comment on the controversy surrounding the Amityville Horror. Whether or not the events are true did not, in the slightest, matter to me. I was fascinated by the book as a story, not as a documentary. That being said, I have read a lot of the surrounding media sensations. It is a true story? I have no idea. I've never really decided if I believe in ghosts or demons. I have had a few "weird" experiences that might be considered paranormal activity... maybe I'll tell you about them someday.)
And I was hooked on the horror genre. 
I grew up in a small, very conservative town. I'm not sure I'd quite say the local residents were suspicious of that new-fangled stuff, "fire" but... they were not particularly open-minded. 
I had to get a permission slip from my parents to check out books from the library in that genre. 
But I read everything I could get my hands on. Rosemary's Baby. The Omen. Stephen King - who had not quite started publishing his laundry list.... 
In an odd twist, reading horror led me to reading Watership Down. (King mentions the book in the Stand, and I went to check it out....) and Watership Down led me to reading Fantasy (the Dragonriders of Pern) and Fantasy led me to Science Fiction (Asimov, Heinlein, Nivens, Brin, Clarke. May I take a moment to recommend Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke and The Practice Effect by David Brin as some of the best damn novels I've ever read, ever? Thanks.)
And... oddly enough, the Sci-fi/Fantasy fan club I was a member of in college... introduced me to my best friend. Who much, much later, introduced me to the genre of Romance with my very first romance book being a gift from her. When He was Wicked, by Julia Quinn.
And now... I write erotic/romance stories in steampunk settings (Golden Moment, Deep Breath, Shadow of Kenfig, and Blister Effect) or horror settings (Dead in the Water and W.O.L.) or fantasy settings (Garden Variety).
My upcoming and recent publications include Coming Together: Hungry for Love (Dead in the Water), Ladies of Steampunk Magazine (Deep Breath) and Duty & Desire: Military Erotic Romance (Snake Dance). You can find out more about my writing on my blog, Paid by the Weird http://paidbytheweird.blogspot.com/ or on my Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/LynnTownsendwriter.

The Story Behind the Story: Cora Zane

I'll cop to it! Cora's story Little Deaths was the very first story I read for consideration from the pile for Hungry for Love . I remember thinking, Oh baby, if the rest are like this...I am in for a treat. It really worked for me--her torrid little tale.

Now let's peek into her pretty head and see what she has to say about it, shall we?

~~~~
The idea for setting Little Deaths in Houston, TX came from a trip to a writing conference several years ago. Instead of flying, my husband and I drove the distance, and this was before we had a portable GPS we could swap between our cars. In fact, this was the trip that convinced us we needed to buy a GPS...so we would never, ever get lost like that again.

The drive took six hours, and all we had with us were printed directions to the hotel. We had downloaded them from the internet, so as you can probably guess, they were half-assed directions at best.

We had no trouble actually getting to Houston. However, we came into the greater metro area at rush hour on Friday afternoon. The traffic was insane. Picture multiple lanes of bumper to bumper traffic at a stand still. We ended up trapped on an overpass, in a center lane, with no way on or off the interstate. To make the experience even more memorable, we had an ambulance howling behind us. We couldn't go anywhere. I jokingly told hubby, if this was the start of the zombie apocalypse, we were totally screwed.

At the time, he wasn't feeling my sense of humor. We'd been sitting in traffic for about thirty minutes, and the directions we'd downloaded from the internet didn't take into account the post-Hurricane Rita road closures and detours.

It had been a couple of years since the hurricanes (Katrina, and then Rita), and you could tell there was still a recovery effort going on. The road signs along the interstate were a beat up mess. Some signs were torn in half, others were either covered up with plastic sheeting or were missing entirely. So, basically, we were in a strange city, driving blindly to a hotel we had never been to before.It was a nerve-wracking situation.

Our first goal was to simply get off the interstate before we ended up out of our target area and on the other side of Houston. When hubby finally managed to get to an exit ramp, we ended up in probably the worst possible neighborhood. Again, many of the street signs were missing so we didn't know exactly where we were, and by that time, it was getting dark. After driving around in circles for another thirty minutes, we decided to call the conference cooridintor to ask for clear directions to the hotel.

It's not something you often think about when traveling only a state or two away from home, but there is a definite state-to-state difference in the way people communicate directions. Call it a local flavor. The woman helping us on the phone told us we needed to get on the "feeder road" to reach the hotel. We had no idea what a feeder road was or how to find it, because in Louisiana, we call them service roads. Even so, she somehow managed to explain it, and steer us in the right direction to get us to our destination.

In Little Deaths, when Rachel is trying to make it home to find out if her husband has survived the explosion that kicked off the infectious outbreak, I tried to keep that fearful, nervous energy consistent for her character. I pulled a lot of her internal conflicts from my own experience of being lost in Houston during that trip. You'll also "see" the interstate and feeder road mentioned in the story.

A final thought. Not knowing what you have to do to get yourself to a safe place is terrifying in any situation. It's even more terrifying when you're not familiar with the customs in that area, or in Rachel's case, when the rules of society are suddenly and completely stripped away.Everything she once took for granted as familiar about the local customs, about the area itself, and even about human behavior, turns chaotic and becomes potentially life-threatening within a matter of hours. Now, add the well-being of a loved one to the equation and consider how traumatic it would be to go through something like that while flesh-eating monsters are tearing people apart on the streets.

I believe that sense of being lost within your own back yard in a time of crisis adds to the fear factor when it comes to zombie fiction, and that's one of the finer nuances I was trying to capture in Little Deaths. I hope you enjoy my story.

BIO:

Cora Zane lives in an area of northern Louisiana known as "out in the sticks," which she swears is as good a place as any to wait for the start of the zombie apocalypse. She drinks a lot of tea, and writes sexy fiction every chance she gets. Her publishers include Cobblestone Press, Ellora's Cave, Wild Child Publishing, and Cleis Press. You can find her online at www.corazane.com.

 Cora's latest release: Chasing Moonlight. Available now from Cobblestone Press.