Pippa Jay's Blog, page 81

Rebel by Arlene Webb

My review of Arlene Webb's Rebel is now live on the Critique de Book site here.
For those who like their romance with a hint of humour, and on the hot and dewy side. :)

Six Sentence Sunday #49

Hello, welcome to another #sixsunday. As always, your visit and comments are appreciated. I've gone back to earlier in the story with Keir, back to the opening scene in the dungeon between the two main characters. Keir has pushed Quin away, but she's still trying play the good samaritan.
"Are you wounded?" She knelt down next to him and reached for him again. He shrank from her touch and she stopped just shy of his arm. "I don't want to hurt you, Keir. I thought I might be able to help."He said nothing, could not bring himself to unbend, and after a moment she sat back on her haunches with a sigh. © 2009-2012 Copyright Philippa J. Green All Rights ReservedThanks for stopping by. As always, you can check out the other snippets via the main website - just click on the banner below. :)

Lucky 7 Meme/Seven Sentence Snippet

I wasn't going to play this, but since I've now been tagged by Sonya Clark, Jessica Subject, Katje van Loon and Laurel Kriegler, I felt like a bit of a spoilsport. So here goes with the rules:

1. Go to page 77 of your current MS
2. Go to line 7
3. Copy down the next 7 lines – sentences or paragraphs – and post them as they're written. No cheating.
4. Tag 7 authors
5. Let them know

So here are my seven, taken from one of my four current WIP - a sfr novella called Tethered.


His eyes flickered open, startled. "Tyree?"She opened her mouth, about to protest, but he blinked his eyes and saw her clearly. Pain splintered into her, pouring from him in an icy cascade of shock. "Tyree!"Agony smacked her in the chest. His passion had been for his lost love, not for her.She Misted out and ran away.
So there you go. Now to tag another seven victims...er, authors. :)
1.Gayle Ramage
2.Chantal Halpin
3.Liz Culver
4.Diana Stevens
5.Cary Caffrey
6.Heidi Ruby Miller
7.Diane Dooley

And the first review is in...

Soooooo, after crawling my way back up to something near normality (for me anyway) after a couple of weeks of being generally down in the dumps, I found this in my inbox from my editor last night.

Review for Keir
And also from my yahoo group.
 attn: Pippa Jay - new review for Keir
Now, one of several things I love about Lyrical Press Inc is that they submit their authors' books to independant reviewers, something not all small presses do. But I've been dreading the first a little. Okay, more than a little. After all, I'm a new author and Keir is my first release--my first baby. We've been through a lot together. And while I love my book a LOT, I don't expect everyone else to. Writing is so subjective.
So over the last few weeks I've been hanging around the yahoo group with a sense of deep trepidation. Having seen my fellow Lyrical authors getting their reviews a month or so before release, I knew it was likely one would be coming soon. But yesterday, of all days, I had a more important meeting in the evening--with my eldest's teacher. The notifications arrived without me seeing them until much later. I clicked the link with with one eye closed. And saw...
5 Stars
"Romance was sweet, suspense was very intense…..interesting story!" Wanda
OMG! (and I don't use that abbreviation very often!) The rating blew me away. You can see the whole review here as I'm not sure how much of it I'm allowed to quote. It's short but oh so sweet! I literally screamed when I read it and completely freaked out my husband and eldest child. I cried. Then I posted it everywhere I could think of, texted and emailed peeps, and generally 'woo hooooo'ed myself into the realm of 'completely annoying'. Hey, it's been a tough couple of weeks and I needed this. This has picked me right back off the floor and shot me up to the starry skies. It'll probably take at least a week for me to come back down.
So this post is probably a bit ditzy ( a word my eldest's teacher used to describe her at times). Excuse me while I go and squeee a bit more.... :-P

At Spacefreighters Lounge - The Paperwork behind Publishing

Hello! I'm blogging over at the Spacefreighters Lounge today, on some of the paperwork you can expect as you go through the publication process. Even for those of you who self-publish, you might be interested in some of the things you need to consider before release day.

Addicted to BuddyPoke

If you haven't heard about these, then I'm just going to look completely crazy. Hmmm, maybe rephrase that - crazier? BuddyPoke is an app on Facebook for creating the cutest little avatars/cartoon characters EVER! I'm afraid to say I've been having far too much fun playing with them. In some respects I'm not very artistic - I certainly can't draw my own characters, not to the degree I'd like to. So this has given me the opportunity to bring them partially to life.
So, meet Keir ...
...and QuinOr at least close approximation of them. Sadly you can only have one per Facebook profile (yes, I have two. I write under a pseudonym, so one account is for family and close friends, and the other for all the awesome writer peeps I know). But what I didn't know at first is that they can interact!


So here are my two MCs admiring the stars
and, well, let's just say it's not all watching the stars...
This is Tyree, a Su assassin and my latest creation, the MC from Tethered. And Gethyon from my scifi novella of the same name.

Have you ever used an app to bring your characters to life? Are you more artistically gifted than me and sketch them out? Or do you just find images that come a close second to what you can see in your head?

Six Sentence Sunday #48

Hi and welcome to another #sixsunday post. All visits and comments are much appreciated. I'm continuing with my science fiction romance Keir,  and his reasons for for believing his feelings toward someone were dishonourable might now be explained...


How would she react if she knew? How could he even think she might feel the same for him? Someone who was not even human. Someone descended from the creature that had destroyed everything she had loved - her own words. Bitter disappointment and guilt swamped him at the depth of his desire. What he wanted was impossible and it was madness to think otherwise.

© 2009-2012 Copyright Philippa J. Green All Rights Reserved Thanks for stopping by. As always, you can check out the other snippets via the main website - just click on the banner below. :)

St.Patrick's Day Hop Results

Okay, despite Google's best attempts to sabotage my blog and make this a whole lot harder, I have winners to announce. 
Winner of the Kindle Fire or Nook Tablet:
#136 from Carrie Ann Ryan's Melissa L I'll be attempting Irish Car Bomb cupcakes this St. Patrick's Day! Hope you have a great holiday!
  Winner of the $90 Amazon or B&N Gift Card
#4186 from Wendy Smith's BlogShadowTrue love? To me is being there, knowing you will always have there love and can count on each other for anything. Youd give up and do anything to make the other happy. 

And the winner of the $15 Amazon Gift card on my blog, chosen by Random.org, is comment number 10.
JeanP commented on St. Patrick's Day Blog Hop - http://keirbeyondredemption.blogspot.com/:
Love green, I find it a rather soothing color. Happy St. Patrick's Day.
Jean

All winners have been notified. A huge thank you again to Carrie Ann for organizing the hop, and a massive thanks to everyone who took part and your comments. :)

Google Screw up

Well, due to Google changing me from a .com to a .co.uk overnight, I'm having some serious issues with my site. Aside from losing my Friends Connect widget, I also can't see my comments from the St.Patrick's Day Blog Hop, which makes it kind of hard to post a winner. So today I'm going to try and track down all the comments and get it sorted. BTW, Google, thanks for the total lack of notification and messing up my site. With a book release coming up, I really needed that kind of cr*p!

St. Patrick's Day Blog Hop

It's the St.Patrick's Day Blog Hop! First, a huge thank you to Carrie Ann for organizing this and all the hard work she's put in. Second, as before there's a grand prize up for everyone who comments on the posts for the hop. That means the more posts you comment on, the higher your chance of winning!

So, the prize for the blog hop is....1st Grand Prize Winner: A choice of a Kindle Fire or Nook Tablet
2nd Grand Prize Winner: a $90 Amazon or Barnes & Noble Gift Card

As for one lucky commentator on this blog, the prize will be a $15 Amazon Gift Card.


For the St.Patrick's Day Blog Hop, the suggestion was to tell how I celebrate (which I don't) or why I wear green. Green happens to be one of my favourite colours, so I thought for something slightly different I'd share a university project I had to do on the use of colour for inspiration.

The task - choose a colour. Choose a piece of music that matches the colour in your mind. Sit in isolation with your eyes closed and the music playing. Picture the colour in your head. Then free write, without correcting, without grammar, whatever comes into your mind, as fast as you can.

I chose green - emerald green to be specific, though I don't think the exact shade was required! And my piece of music was the theme from Harry's Game by Clannad - the reasoning behind that may become apparent later on.

I felt a little silly sitting there and thinking green thoughts, but then I picked up my pen and scribbled furiously for the requisite minimum of five minutes, and a little beyond. This is what I came up with.


Emerald green makes me think of velvet, soft and warm. The medieval tunic I bought with a long pixie hood, laced up the front with black cord and through little brass rings, like something out of a book by Tolkien - elves and magic.





Walking through deep, dark pine woods. Needles all glossy green, the dead brown ones crunching slightly under my feet. Soothing silence and the smell of resin. The smell of damp. Black soil beneath the needles as I dig them up with the toe of my boot.

Thick grass shaking in the wind on the hillside in Ireland. (Here the association to Clannad leapt to mind - Irish!) A long green slope down the the cliff's edge before it falls into the sea. Even the water looks green - beautiful blue-grey-green under a cloudy sky.



A circle of stones on the Isle of Arran.Three huge stark slabs of slate or something, 10, 12 feet tall with long brown streaks down them like rust. Grassy slopes leading up to them and then down the other side, open moorland.

Tiny emeralds in a ring my mum wore, one of them missing, replaced by another paler stone.
Pistachio icecream.
Lime cordial, so hard to find now. Am I the only person in the world who drinks it?
Peppermint cordial. Tastes like toothpaste, ug! But looks so pretty in the bottle, clear emerald green.

I'm offering a $15 Amazon Gift Card for one random commentator on my blog. So tell me whether you like green or not, and why (with your email included so I can contact you if you've won.) Then stop by the other blogs on the lists for more prizes and your chance to win the grand prize!

And on the subject of freebies, you can download my free scifi short story - The Bones of the Sea - from Smashwords here.