Maree Anderson's Blog, page 3

Guess what I’ve been listening to…

Guess what I’ve been listening to!

You’ll never guess in a million years *evil grin* so how about I put you out of your misery right now?

You may recall me mentioning last Christmas holidays that I added a soundtrack to a couple of chapters of Freaks of Greenfield High?

Well, if you missed that post, then in a nutshell I used Booktrack; a website thatprovides ano-brainer interface,whichmakes it super-easy for the layman like me toadd sound effects, ambience, and background music — i.e. soundt...

September was simply Delicious!

That moment when… youget all excited about a (supposedly) new-to-youbook, and then, a few pages in, you realize you’ve already read it… but it’s soooo good, you don’t even care, and you hide yourself away from the world until you’ve demolished it from cover to cover…. Yeah. That happened to me in September. Possiblybecause I was still fighting a horrible flu, and my brain was a little fuzzed. Or possibly because my subconscious figuredI needed what this particular book had to offer, at this p...

August was The Deal

So sorry about the rather belated August Reads post, folks! I’ve been down and out with a constantly morphingflu for the past three weeks, and as my PCis upstairs, and I don’t own a working laptop or tablet, it’s been all I cando to crawl up two flights of stairs and power up theold PC to wrestle my email inbox into submission, let alone publish a post to this blog. Serves me right for attemptingto do a little too much, too soon, I guess. But hey, at least I can remove my mechanical keyboard’...

Opal’s Wish – Koru Award of Excellence finalist

A few months back, I decided on a what-the-heck-whim to enter Opal’s Wish (Crystal Warriors #4) in the “long romance” category of the Romance Writers of New Zealand Koru Contesta reader’s choice award for excellence in a published novel. So two days before the contest entries closed, I found myself swearing at my printer, which, although it claims to print double-sided copies, was so NOT doing what I asked it to do. And after far too many frustrating hours, very late that afternoon I gave in...

A different kind of hell

Since I’m awfullylate posting July’s reading list, I’ll try’n keep my ramblings short and sweet. Which means choosing only one book to rave about from the list. But oh, it’s gonna be sooo hard to choose just one *sobs piteously* *takes a deep breath and…*

Okay, I’ve chosen one, and it happens to bethe sole sci-fi/futuristic one of the bunch. Yep, I’m talking about Perdition by Ann Aguirre. (Pssst. The link takes you to the book’s page on the author’s website, where you can read an excerpt fro...

New Release: Freaks Series Bundle

I haz new release! *does dorky celebratory-style dance*

Okay, so it’s not quite as exciting as a brand new book but hey, a three-book bundle is nothing to be sneezed at, right?

Right.

And besides, there IS a shiny new coverinvolved:

SQUEEEEEE! I love this cover :)

The Freaks Series Bundle contains three full-length novels (approximately 215,000 words) andincludes:

Freaks of Greenfield High, Book One of the Freaks series Freaks in the City, Book Two of the Freaks series Freaks Under Fire, Bo...

Some Boys pulls no punches

Hi all,

The most commented upon lines from my books on Wattpad come from my Young Adult story, Freaks of Greenfield High: “Humans were lamentably prone to exaggeration. How bad could high school possibly be?”

Well, according to numerous commenters the world over, the answer to the question about how bad can high school possibly be is: Really. Really. Bad.

I don’t recall being particularly happy during my high school years, but aside from being the victim of some short-lived bullying, and feel...

Casting Freaks and Crystal Warriors

So, there’s a “thing” coming up next week and one of the suggestions for participating authors was to “cast” their characters.

Now, last time I cast characters for a book was for the production company who optioned Freaks of Greenfield High; they wanted to get a feel for how I envisioned the characters.Fun? Hell, yes :) But that was a few years ago now, so DD and I figured it was time for an update. Hence, after we cast the characters in The Crystal Warrior, we tackled Freaks of Greenfield Hi...

May’s serial musings

A few days backthere was an interesting discussion on one of my writing loops about series. And given that I’ve recently ordered a bunch more books in Ilona Andrews’ Kate Daniels series (which is ZOMG-so-freaking-awesome-I-can’t-tell-you!)and that while I’m waiting for them to arrive I’ve been re-reading the all the books in the series I already own for the umpteenth time, I figured this is the perfect time to talk about series in general.

Okay, so from the point of view of an author trying t...

Freaks of Greenfield High gets a soundtrack

Didn’t get much writing done this past week — flu meds and too many broken nights kept mucking with my brain. Even a book-hound like me finds reading a chore when my head’s throbbing and I’m clock-watching to check when I’m allowed to take another dose of Panadol and cough mixture. Fun… not.

So what was a bored, frustrated, cranky author, who’d given up trying to add coherent words to her current manuscript until she’d beaten the flu bugs, to do?

Why, head on over to Booktrack and have a go a...