Regan Summers's Blog, page 3
May 26, 2013
Night Runner on Sale
May 9, 2013
Cover Reveal, Sneak Peek & Giveaway: Don’t Bite the Bridesmaid
Don’t let the title fool you. This paranormal romance isn’t related to my Don’t Bite the Messenger. Although, it is fun, and it does feature vampires.
But there’s also a cruise ship!
And hijinks!
And smexy times on the high seas!
***
Don’t Bite the Bridesmaid
Alice Shepard needs one thing: a date for her sister’s wedding. And not just any date. A hunk who will make her fiancé rue the day he left her for her best friend. Her drop-dead gorgeous neighbor fits the bill—even if he is a bit quirky and never comes out during the day—and Alice has downed just enough appletinis to ask him. But she makes it quite clear that there will be no funny business.
Spending a week on a cruise ship full of humans while sleeping close to his sexy next-door neighbor sounds like a helluva bad idea to vampire Noah Thorpe. But his friends need time to get him out of a shotgun wedding—a vampire bonding that will tie his fate to a female vampire he’s never met. And Alice’s offer comes at just the right time.
What could possibly go wrong?
Pre-order Don’t Bite the Bridesmaid here:
***
And, if you’d like a taste of what’s inside that gorgeous cover, here’s a sneak peek excerpt:
“That sounded like it hurt,” he said, kneeling in front of her and taking her foot into his hand.
“It’s fine. I’m just a klutz.” Her toe throbbed slightly, calling her a liar with every beat of her pulse.
He grinned at her red toe. “You didn’t seem like a klutz on the volleyball court today. I think you were trying to hide your blush. No doubt, terribly perverse thoughts about me were flying through your head.”
She gaped at him.
“Your toe is fine,” he announced, but he didn’t release her foot. He looked up and met her eyes, and the intensity of his gaze swept over her. Desire hit her like a bag of bricks, a swift blow that robbed her of her breath and made her whole body ache.
“I was thinking no such things,” she said, wishing her breathlessness didn’t give her away.
“Liar.”
“We aren’t right for each other. And what happened last night isn’t happening again.” It wasn’t. It couldn’t. There was no way she’d be able to stop things again like she did the night before. Not if he kept looking at her like that. And he was a vampire, just like Olivia. And she’d run off after swearing to love her brother forever. What would stop Noah from doing the same? Vampires weren’t normal people. She had to remember that.
“You’re right. We aren’t right for each other.”
Anger flashed through her, fanning her desire in a most annoying way. The greatest defense is a good offense. “We’re not. In fact, I can’t think of anyone less suitable for me.”
“Oh?” He quirked an eyebrow at her and she ignored it. How could he look so scrumptious and be so annoying at the same time?
“No. Besides, I’m not looking to be tied down.”
A feral grin blossomed on his face. “Don’t worry, Miss Shepard, if I tied you down I’d be sure to untie you in the morning.”
***
Tiffany is also generously offering a chance to win a $10 Amazon gift card. Enter here for a chance to win:
About the Author:
CPA-turned-romance-author Tiffany Allee used to battle spreadsheets in Corporate America, and now concentrates on her characters’ battles to find love. Raised in small-town Colorado, Tiffany currently lives in Phoenix, AZ, by way of Chicago and Denver. She is happily married to a secret romantic who tolerates her crazy mutterings.
She writes about ass-kicking heroines and the strong heroes who love them. Her work includes the suspense-driven From the Files of the Otherworlder Enforcement Agency series which revolves around a group of paranormal cops solving crimes and finding love, and Don’t Bite the Bridesmaid, a lighthearted paranormal romance (Entangled Publishing).
Tiffany has an MBA in accounting and nearly a decade of experience in corporate finance. All super useful stuff for a writer who spends far too much time trying to figure out fun ways to keep her characters apart, and interesting ways to kill people (for her books—of course!).
Tiffany is represented by Jill Marsal of Marsal Lyon Literary Agency.
May 4, 2013
A Little Less Epic Clever, Please
Last week I encountered someone behaving…let’s call it “unprofessionally” at work. The behavior snowballed throughout the week and took on a kind of arrogance, and it affected a number of good, hardworking people. Incensed, I devised this elaborate metaphor for what this person had been doing. It was something to the effect of a toxic spider spinning a web of bullshit and needing someone to come along to be both a boot and the anti-venom to stop these antics and squash the perpetrator.
Then someone asked what I thought of this situation, and all I could manage to say was “pissed. poop web.”
Which brings me to my next – only? hardly a? – point: don’t spend forever concocting a metaphor or description of such mythologically-proportioned cleverness that it’s either unintelligible or sends readers skimming onward to escape it.
I’m guilty of it and, perhaps worse, I’m exceedingly aware of it with other writers. I recently finished an acclaimed fantasy by a very good author telling a large story rather brilliantly. Well, the first half of it anyway. The second half devolved. Less forward progress with the large cast of characters. Most authorly tricks and twists of language. Did that make the story better? The first one or two might have added. By the tenth, I’d grown weary and irritated.
Never let the words get in the way of a good story.
April 20, 2013
Relevant to Your Interests
I’m working on things. New things. Related to other things found here.
Stay tuned…
February 2, 2013
Working Around Life
Photo from: International-critics
Real life has the terrible habit of inserting itself between you and your goals. There are bills to be paid, illnesses to endure, the crises of family and friends. There are small spaces filled with loud little people and long commutes that carve hours out of your personal clock.
And eventually you look up, and months or years have passed and you’re no closer to your goal, whether it’s to bike across the state, restore the hardwood floors in your house or write a novel.
This isn’t how it has to be.
Sometimes it is difficult to insert the concept of a large goal into the small pieces of free time in your busy life. That doesn’t mean the goal is impossible. It just means that it needs to be reconfigured. Real life isn’t going to go away, but your goals don’t have to cede to it.
Take writing that novel. Writing and editing eighty to a hundred thousand words is a daunting task. But what about ten thousand? A thousand? Two hundred and fifty?
250. That’s a single page.
But, by writing that mere 250 words, that single page, each day, you’ll have a novel complete inside of a year. How long does it take to write that? That, of course, depends on the writer. But if writing a novel is your goal, and you find yourself stealing time in order to do it, I’d wager you would write that page inside of 20 minutes.
Sometimes making the time and space to follow your dreams comes at the price of your dignity. Deal with it.
Where will you find that time each day? That’s one and one third coffee breaks, for those who take them. That’s a notebook on the lap for the bus ride there and back. That’s the kids in the tub at night or sitting at the Laundromat waiting for the spin cycle to finish.
There are 20 minutes in each day that you can shape until they belong to you. And it doesn’t matter if the house is full of people or kids. There are coffee shops and benches and stairwells all over the world, waiting to welcome you for that repurposed time. All you have to do is decide you’re going to take it.
Cross-posted at Here Be Magic
January 29, 2013
Here Lies a Writer Who Could Not Spell
Some of my favorite authors, in an attempt to please and destroy me, regularly post snippets and scenes from their WIPs (works in progress). The teasers – for if they come from series I enjoy, they tease relentlessly – are almost always good. Dramatic, tense, funny, brilliant.
They are also often flawed. I’m not criticizing them for that. The draft and early revision stages of novel-writing are about getting the story down. The precise moments when, if something were to go wrong, it would achieve maximum effectiveness. The exact line of dialogue needed to steam or sting. The best balance or interplay of plot threads and characters. Storytelling is a skill, and storytelling is an art.
After that, it’s time to clean and polish. To check for errors and consistency. This is the point at which I, as a writer, have the most difficult time. When you’ve had a story living, breathing, growing and evolving inside your head for months or years, there’s no neat way to extract it. The words don’t fall cleanly onto the page, in order. They have to be extracted, hammered into shape, then smoothed back out.
Unfortunately, sometimes the story consumes the writer so wholly that insignificant things like “words” no longer matter. I can’t spell. I write “table” instead of “door” because I’m picturing the scene and there is a table, but it’s in front of the door, so that’s what gets written. Luckily, I don’t lose track of all words. I’ve started a list, in fact, of those I most commonly fail to write correctly, so that I can do a quick edit of my most obvious weaknesses before critique partners or editors have to see them.
Following, in no particular order (but with the help of two dictionary sites) is a list of the words I cannot, for the life of me, spell on my own:
Silhouette
Unnecessary
Camouflage
Vacuum
Bureaucrat (removed from the list effective 1/27/2013 – achievement unlocked!)
Me (I know, I know. It’s not a difficult one, but I, nine times out of ten, write is as “my”)
Icicle (I spell this correctly the first time, then proceed to delete and misspell it five or six times before returning to the correct spelling. It just looks weird, okay?)
January 20, 2013
Q&A and Giveaway with Tiffany Allee
I’m in the unique and oh-so-lucky position of being a critique partner for paranormal romance author Tiffany Allee, so I got to read Lycan Unleashed, the latest in her Otherworlder novella series, a long time ago. I adore Astrid and Mason and can’t wait for other readers to fall in love with them as well.
Blurb
Detective Astrid Holmes is a sensitive, a human capable of feeling the energy of otherworlders. When she is dispatched to the horrific murder scene of a local vampire, she expects it to be just another day on the job. But when evidence is stolen on her watch, she is removed—not only from the investigation, but from her job as a member of the Chicago police department’s paranormal unit.
Astrid’s only hope of reinstatement lies with her ex co-worker and almost-lover, Lycan Mason Sanderson. But convincing the OWEA agent to let her assist with the investigation isn’t nearly as difficult as staying alive when the murderer realizes that Astrid may hold the key to unlocking his identity.
Fighting to take down a killer could have deadly consequences for Astrid and Mason, but working together puts their already fragile relationship in jeopardy.
I love the explosion of cross-genre romance. There are so many possibilities and quite a lot of freedom in bending familiar tropes. What are your favorite aspects of writing these types of stories?
First of all, thank you so much for having me here!
Cross-genre romance is such a wonderful phenomenon. My favorite part is that I get to entertain myself by blending the types of stories that I enjoy, in a way that hopefully makes the story interesting to readers across genres. It keeps it interesting for me anyway!
I love romance. I love urban fantasy. I love mystery and horror. Blending these elements together into a balanced story is tricky! Sooo tricky. But, I enjoy the challenge inherent in getting it all to come together for stories that (I hope) satisfy readers on a couple of different levels.
Your first series with Entangled, From the Files of the Otherworlder Agency, is paranormal romance. But each story also revolves around an intricate mystery. Is it difficult to balance the mystery with the romance, or does the plot help to facilitate it?
Like I mentioned in the last question, blending elements is difficult. And it’s especially tough to have characters fall in love in a convincing way, while solving a mystery and fighting for their lives.
But you’re also correct in saying the mystery plot helps to facilitate the romance to a certain extent as well. Striving to solve the mystery and bring the bad guys to justice is what keeps the characters in close contact during each of the books. This close contact allows romance to blossom. Or explode. Whatever.
I do appreciate a nice blossoming explosion of romance.
On the spot time! What are a few of your favorite lines that you’ve written?
This was a tough question. I decided to pick one line from each of the OWEA books, and hopefully they’re entertaining outside of the context of the story. And I love dialogue, so these are a little dialogue heavy.
From Banshee Charmer, said by the male main character, Aidan:
“I’m a sex god. That’s my special power.”
From Succubus Lost, said by my heroine to the hero, Costa:
“Sorry that your pyromaniacism is so limited.”
And from my new release, Lycan Unleashed (okay, totally cheated and chose two):
“It suddenly struck me that I might not be the only one who still thought about that kiss.”
“Lo and behold, even old vampires used Outlook.”
The Outlook line totally cracked me up!
You’ve written some memorably steamy scenes, so I have to ask: do you discuss these with your spouse? Do you let him read them?
Nooooooo! Oh, excuse me. No. I don’t discuss them nor do I let him read them.
Not anymore.
Let’s just say I let him read one of my first stories—which included my very first sex scene—and for days after he’d sing-song, “Panties, panties, panties!” And he still does it anytime anything close to sex scenes are mentioned. I’m not sure which of us is more scarred at this point.
One of us will need to grow up before I let him read another. 
I’m guessing this isn’t something we should hold our breath on. You’ve been crazy busy this last year. What can we expect to see next from you?
Whew! It has been a busy year. Next out will be my light paranormal romance novel about a vampire stuck on a cruise ship with his far-too-sexy neighbor for her sister’s wedding, called Don’t Bite the Bridesmaid. It will be released early this year from Entangled Publishing’s Covet imprint.
The fourth book of the From the Files of the Otherworlder Enforcement Agency series is scheduled for June, 2013. And expect to see a romantic suspense novel from me before the end of the year!
I can’t wait! Thanks so much for stopping by, Tiffany.
You can find Tiffany at: Website Goodreads
You can find Tiffany’s books at: Amazon Barnes and Noble
Tiffany has graciously offered a giveaway of an e-book copy of either Banshee Charmer or Succubus Lost to one lucky commenter. I’ll draw the winner on 1/28/13, and announce the winner here and on twitter!
About the Author
CPA-turned-romance-author Tiffany Allee used to battle spreadsheets in Corporate America, and now concentrates on her characters’ battles to find love. Raised in small-town Colorado, Tiffany currently lives in Phoenix, AZ, by way of Chicago and Denver. She is happily married to a secret romantic who tolerates her crazy mutterings.
She writes about ass-kicking heroines and the strong heroes who love them. Her work includes the suspense-driven From the Files of the Otherworlder Enforcement Agency series which revolves around a group of paranormal cops solving crimes and finding love, and Don’t Bite the Bridesmaid, a lighthearted paranormal romance (2013, Entangled Publishing).
Tiffany has an MBA in accounting and nearly a decade of experience in corporate finance. All super useful stuff for a writer who spends far too much time trying to figure out fun ways to keep her characters apart, and interesting ways to kill people (for her books—of course!).
January 17, 2013
Now You’re Speaking My Language
I can never understand what my dentist is saying. Well, except for that one time she told me one of my molars was shattered, and keeping itself together only through habit, but I only remember that because I made her repeat it three times because it was such a fantastic thing to say.
I went in today for two small fillings and, while I didn’t record it, I’m pretty sure it went a little like this:
Now it’s time to seat the orsch.
A lemur and a sendar are no good match.
You might want to cut back on the rocks and gummy spores.
For the record, I stopped eating gummy spores in 1997 after the Attorney General came out and said they make all testicles within a five kilometer radius harden and fluctuate at a rapid pace so that, everywhere you go, it sounds like tiny drums are being played within the pants of men.
January 15, 2013
Moment of Zen
When I get busy, I tend to cut back on sleep. Then, even when sleep deprived, I have trouble falling to sleep. Someone suggested that I learn meditation in order to settle my mind before going to bed. Unfortunately, I’m terrible at it. I’ll settle into a comfy position, take some deep breaths, and clear my mind…
…which immediately results in every possible thought – wanted, unwanted and WTF – rushing in to fill the void. So, I resorted to setting up an external noise on which to focus. It helps if it’s a low, repetitive sound. The following should have been ideal. But things don’t always go according to plan. 
December 30, 2012
Happy New Year, Vodka Edition
For reasons unknown, I find myself busy, busy, busy at the end of the year. So, because I don’t have time to properly reflect on the year and spin my thoughts into something borderline profound, I offer you some of my favorite cocktail recipes. Consume to a quantity sufficient to make your own thoughts appear profound:
Lemon Rosemary Infused Vodka Topped with Prosecco
Moscow Mule – Russian Standard Edition
Happy New Year, readers.
Stay safe. Stay smart.
I’ll see you on the other side.
