Andy Gavin's Blog, page 173
February 21, 2012
San Fran – Kokkari
Restaurant: Kokkari
Location: 200 Jackson Street (at Front) San Francisco, CA 94111. 415.981.0983
Date: February 9, 2012
Cuisine: Greek
Rating: Really fresh – transported me back to Greece
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Yelp pointed me to this excellent San Francisco Greek place — that and I recognized it from the Zagat guide.
Close to Embarcadero.
Inside this is the modern Greek equivalent of a classy reinterpreted Mexican space like Las Ventanas in Cabo. Things don't really look like this in Greece, but maybe they ought too.
Case in point.
The menu. It's mostly traditional fare, but the Greek names have been dropped.
Pretty plates that match the decor conceptually.
"Cheese Pies – traditional feta cheese filo pies." SPANAKOPETA, but particularly artisanal versions.
And same goes for this "Tzatziki." Not only was it great, tasting of fresh dill and garlic, but the bread was superb and very very Greek. The marinated vegetables were also a nice touch.
"Saghanaki- pan fried Kefalograviera with lemon & oregano." Melted cheese! I was just bummed it didn't come out on fire!
"Kokkari Salad – mixed baby lettuces with shaved apples, beets & candied walnuts."
"Moussaka – traditional casserole of spiced lamb, eggplant, potato & yogurt béchamel." I love this traditional dish.
And this was easily the best I've had in the states (I've spent months in Greece). You can see the meat there and it had that lovely cinnamon / nutmeg thing going on which pairs with the rich béchamel.
And on the plate.
Kokkari was a great "find." In truth flavors are rarely even this pure in Greece, although there was this one restaurant I ate at on Rhodos that was very similar.
For more San Francisco dining reviews click here.
February 16, 2012
Game of Thrones – Iceland
Another interesting production video on filming beyond the wall (Iceland). They really couldn't have found a more appropriate location.
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February 15, 2012
Jak & Daxter Retrospective
A video interview of myself and other Jak & Daxter team members talking about the game 10 years later.
February 13, 2012
Waterloo & City – Fat=Flavour
Location: 12517 Washington Blvd, Culver City, CA 90066 310.391.4222
Date: January 27, 2012
Cuisine: Gastropub
Rating: Really tasty!
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I have reviewed Waterloo & City twice before, but it's been a couple of months and the menu has changed up, so it's worth a reprise.
The current menu.
"The Brunello di Montalcino from Poggio Il Castellare is a dark, inward wine imbued with dark cherries, plums, tar, smoke, licorice and new leather, all of which come together on a powerful, incisive frame. This burly, somewhat rough around the edges Brunello shows plenty of length and richness, even if the tannins might benefit from a measure of added polish. Still, I see this working well with boldly flavored dishes. Anticipated maturity: 2014-2024."
This is a "prince" sized charcuterie. We also have the chicken liver (yum yum), the salmon and egg terrine and the fois gras and prune (good, but heavy), and a duck and walnut country pate.
The duck on the left (yummy) and the salmon on the right. The chicken liver was the really winner here.
"Yellowtail Crudo, Shallot & Ginger Dressing." Slightly underwelming as the fish was muted by everything else.
"Arugula, Grilled Bartlett Pears, Smoked Almonds, Parmesan."
A special pasta with parmesan and…
Fresh piedmontese white truffles! This was a really spectacular classic.
Parker 90. "Proprietor Comte de Neipperg is doing everything possible to elevate this estate's reputation. Readers should take note as prices are sure to rise once the world discovers just how sumptuous recent vintages of Clos de l'Oratoire have been. The 1996 is even better out of bottle than it was from cask. The wine boasts an opaque plum/purple color. Intense aromas of Asian spices, espresso, roasted meats, and sweet, exotic cedar and blackberry fruit soar from the glass of this exotic, ostentatiously-styled St.-Emilion. It is medium to full-bodied, with moderate tannin, a sweet mid-palate (always a good sign), and a dense, concentrated, long, powerful finish. This muscular, impressively-endowed offering should drink well between 2002-2017."
"Diver Scallops, Parsnip Ravioli, Chamomile, Mandarins, Basil, French Horns." A nice scallop dish.
"Roast Colorado lamb. English peas, fois gras sauce." The meat was good, but the pea sauce even better.
More of the "sauce" which was really very rich and good.
Brussels with bacon. Bacon does indeed make everything better.
A can't remember what exactly was under there, but it included this Indian-style poofy bread.
The desserts here are really good too (see my previous reviews) but we were so stuffed that it would have been fatal to indulge.
Overall, Waterloo & City is still going strong and this was a great (albiet rich) meal.
February 12, 2012
Brace yourself for Hardcover
Glamour photo
My publisher might be small (one book released and another in the queue) but I was determined to produce a hardcover edition for my debut novel. Why?
1. As a consummate book lover, I've always preferred hardcovers. Sure they're a pain to lug on vacation but they have real weight to them. And the paper doesn't yellow or the binding fall apart after ten years.
2. Serious books always come out in hardcover. A straight to paperback book is like a straight to DVD movie.
3. Given that most independent books don't come in hardcover, and it's my goal with The Darkening Dream to hold production values to the standards of New York's finest, I thought a hardcover would help make the book look like the classy publication it is.
4. Since the setup costs for a POD (Print On Demand) book are low, it seemed — erroneously as it turned out — that it wouldn't be much extra work to create a hardcover edition. And even if I didn't sell many, I wouldn't be out much money.
5. They smell nice.
Enough with the reasons. How did I do it?
Finding a POD printer was a given. No way was I going to pay to print and warehouse an offset run. And as far as I know, LightningSource is the only mainstream POD printer that will do a proper black and white, novel-sized hardcover. Others do photobook hardcovers, but those have color interiors, and are way too costly. LSI is owned by Ingram, distributes through them and Amazon, and offers seven sizes of casebound (integrated color cover) and three sizes of color dustjacket hardcovers. All of them are priced well. A friend of mine had used them, so I ordered her book. The quality is good, very similar to most offset hardcovers. The cut of the pages is smooth and aligned, which I actually prefer, but you don't have the option for that ragged sewn look that was popular in the 80s and 90s. The paper is heavy and comes in white or creme (which is what I used). The printing itself is about 5-10% worse than the best offset hardcover printing. It's nice, but I can tell it's not the world's nicest. Still, it's much better than a BookClub hardcover and more than acceptable. It's certainly no worse than most of the hardcovers in my extensive (10,000 book!) collection (photo at the end of the article).
Inside. I used a professional book designer and had custom chapter headings commisioned
My book designer recommended that we choose the same paper size for both the trade paperback and the hardcover, that way they could share the print ready file. To that purpose, I went with 6″x9″ for both. The hardcover is actually slightly bigger anyway because the binding is thicker and overhangs the paper, so both feel about right. The hardcover is much denser and heavier.
But first I had to get an account with LSI. This proved to be one of the more subtasks. First you sign up on their site and fill out like a million pages of forms. Then days later they send you questions. Then you answer them. Then you fill out more forms online. You need to provide credit terms or a credit card to fall back on. The don't take Amex — Grrr Arg! You need proper tax information (like an EIN). Then they insist that you print out about 75 pages of contracts, sign them, fill out lots of paper forms, and fax them back! This almost defeated me. I detest forms, paper, and fax machines. But I plunged on.
LSI's interface is also a bit obtuse, nowhere near as easy as CreateSpace. But it was manageable. You need your own ISBNs too, which wasn't a problem as I'd bought a block of 100 from Bowker. The hardcover, paper, and e-book editions all need separate ISBN's, but the various e-book versions all share the same one. An additional tip with this is to make sure that all of your ISBN's are listed on your copyright page with the edition names (i.e. hardcover XXXX paperback XXXX). That way the same interior PDF will work for all.
The hardcover mechanical in all its glory
Now the only thing that is really different is the mechanical. For those of you who don't know, a mechanical is the big carefully assembled CMYK PDF used to print your cover. The above hardcover mechanical has the front, spine, back, and both flaps, plus the ISBN bar code and the proper crop marks. There are websites/programs to generate you barcodes (pro mac one or a free web one).
LightningSource has a nice (but buried) tool that generates PDF or InDesign templates. You pick the size of your book, the type of paper, and the number of pages (which affects the spine) and it will generate these files and email them to you. Then fire up Photoshop or InDesign and carefully layout the elements on top of the template. The second mechanical (say after the paperback, which is similar) doesn't take too long for someone skilled with these programs. I'm excellent in PS and decent at ID, but I still hired an experienced jacket designer to do the layout. I didn't want any element of my book looking amateur. Having at least some basic skills with both these programs saves you a lot of money and time.
But you do have to decide what goes where and develop all the copy for the hardcover layout. The synopsis on the left flap is typically longer than the one on the back of a paperback, plus you'll need the author photo and bio for the right.
You also have to be careful to use LSI's template. They will not accept the mechanical if it's not on their EXACT template file, even if the dimensions are otherwise correct. My jacket designer used his own template for the first pass (although he matched the sizes perfectly) and I had to swap it out underneath the layout in ID to get LSI to take the file. Also be very careful not to project any important elements like text outside the safety zones. LSI spends some care examining your mechanical and will bounce it if it isn't perfect.
Plus, unlike CreateSpace, they charge some money for the setup. About $125 + an optional $35 for a printed proof. You'll want to pay it too because the digital proof doesn't tell you anything about how your alignment actually looks on the book.
Everything at LSI runs a bit slower than at more automated companies like Lulu or CreateSpace. A day or two instead of hours. But they do pay more attention. I received multiple emails about exactly what issues my first mechanical had, including zoomed jpegs of the problem areas. The LSI agent responded rapidly and helpfully to what was probably a fifteen email exchange. This even included some complicated discussion about the CMYK "ink density," a subject about which I knew nothing. Now I know just a tad more. Apparently, black areas can have too much ink coverage for certain printing processes. Who knew? But we got it sorted. I built a new mechanical and a day later it passed. About two days after that they overnighted me the paper proof.
It looked pretty much perfect. The only problem is in the alignment of the text on the spine, which on this particular proof is about 1/16″ off center. It's not in my file, but they folded the dustjacket slightly off center. POD has a bit of variation from book to book and supposedly some of them will be perfect and some will be a little off. It's not really noticeable unless you are looking for it and a large percent of "regular" books on my shelf have off-center spines.
Also, in keeping with the slower pace, it takes LSI some mysterious time between one and eight weeks to propagate their information to Amazon. Eventually, it's supposed to just show up there, and a few days after that, merge itself with the Kindle and paperback editions. Likewise changing your description and price via LSI takes forever. And this brings up the whole pricing issue.
LSI allows you to set the "discount" on the book. CreateSpace has a hardwired 40% discount but on LSI you can move it to 20% which forces Amazon to take a lower percentage. I chose $24.99 as my list and set the discount to 20%. We'll have to see how this works out and what Amazon does with it.
Like most of publishing, building the hardcover is made up of a variety of subtasks that while individually not too significant, end up taking considerable time. Still, holding the gorgeous fellow, it's worth it.
NOTE: This post was original written as a guest post for NovelPublicity and can be found here.
The flaps and the blue fabric cover. You can pick blue or gray.
In case you're curious about the book behind the pretty cover:
The Darkening DreamAn ominous vision and the discovery of a gruesome corpse lead Sarah Engelmann into a terrifying encounter with the supernatural in 1913 Salem, Massachusetts. With help from Alex, an attractive Greek immigrant, Sarah sets out to track the evil to its source, never guessing that she will take on a conspiracy involving not only a 900-year vampire, but also a demon-loving Puritan warlock, disgruntled Egyptian gods, and an immortal sorcerer, all on a quest to recover the holy trumpet of the Archangel Gabriel.
Relying on the wisdom of an elderly vampire hunter, Sarah's rabbi father, and her own disturbing visions, Sarah must fight a millennia-old battle between unspeakable forces, where the ultimate prize might be herself.
Find it here on Amazon!
Just one of the 9 shelves in the Fantasy/Sci-fi section of my library
February 11, 2012
Red Medicine – Elfin Feast
Restaurant: Red Medicine [1, 2, 3]
Location: 8400 Wilshire Blvd. Beverly Hills, Ca. 90211. 323-651-6500.
Date: February 6, 2012
Cuisine: Elfin Fantasy Food
Summary: A feast for for Elrond's table
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For some reason it took me a year to get back to Red Medicine, even though I very much enjoyed my previous visits. Anyway, as it's the new year and my partner in Foodie crime Erick is back in town, and having a birthday, we made it 2012′s first official Foodie Club meeting.
The frontage.
The easier to read version
And the new menu. Things look vaguely similar, but most of the dishes have changed up since last time.
Red Medicine technically has a $35 dollar corkage (except no corkage on Fri and Sat), but they nicely allowed us their original policy of waiving a corkage for every bottle of their wine we bought. This ended up being 2 and 2, theirs being this excellent JJ Prum Kabinett (a fav of mine). Parker 91: "Extremely bright in aroma as well as palate impression, the Prums' 2008 Bernkasteler Badstube Riesling Kabinett is dominated by lemon and grapefruit, with village typical cherry and cassis manifesting themselves as an invigorating chew of fruit skin that is delightfully complimented by estate-typical impingement of CO2. Lush yet light, this finishes with not only blazing brightness but a cress-like pungency and strikingly intense salinity and suggestions of wet stone, making your palate stand to attention, wide awake! Plan on following it for a couple of decades, although, unlike many Joh. Jos. Prum wines, I find it (and many of the estate's 2008s) downright irresistible already."
"FOIE GRAS / mousse, tete de cochon, beet, kohlrabi, chicory, croissant." First, let's not some of the unique elements of this cuisine, what we came to call "dollop and dust" was just as present as last year. But this time the vegetal/natural/flower thing is out of control. Every seemed like that crazy forest elemental from Hellboy 2 had snuck into the kitchen. This one has difficult to get all the flavors in one bite. What I had was good, but I had the feeling that if I had gotten a more substantive chunk it would have been better (we were splitting 5 ways and it was difficult).
"AMBERJACK / red seaweed, buttermilk, lotus root, tapioca, succulents." The flowers overwhelmed the fish a bit, but it was tasty. And the dish looks like a Christmas crown for a fairy!
"WINTER PEAS / yuzu, soymilk-yogurt, trout roe, purple cabbage, coconut." More dust. As instructed, we mixed this up and it then looked kinda like a pea pasta. It was actually really good that way.
"RABBIT / five flavor berry, pandan custard, roots, tubers, black currant, sesame leaf." There are 2-3 rabbit loins hidden under the foliage. Again very tasty, but hard to get all the elements in the mouth, particularly with they very long and fluffy leaves.
"DUNGENESS CRAB / passion fruit, brown butter, black garlic, vietnamese crepe, hearts of palm." Besides being wrapped in another fairy wreath, this is one giant ravioli but it was darn good. Really good. I just wish I had more than one bite.
"HEIRLOOM BLACK CARROTS / guava, winter kale, dulse, young walnut, tamarind." Legolas, sir, have you seen the Ent? He was last observed heading into the kitchen! Seriously, while this dish was actually very tasty it looks like the forest floor!
"WILD STRIPED BASS / charred mustard leaf, boiled peanuts, wild garlic, burnt onion syrup." Is there a striped bass in there under all those flowers?
Indeed, there is!
"CHARRED LEEKS / taro "vichyssoise", parsley root, chinese celery, vietnamese herb." And here we have the wild garden of doctor Suess!
"HEIRLOOM RICE PORRIDGE / egg yolk, hazelnuts, ginseng, echire butter + SANTA BARBARA RED UNI." This frightened me slightly, looking as it does a lot like congee (Chinese rice porridge). But we stirred it up and it turned out to taste incredible, like a fantastic creamy uni risotto!
After two bottles of the Kabinet, we decided to go red (the Auslese on the left we had later for dessert) with the meat. Parker gives this lesser known Bordeaux 91 points. "A fully mature, elegant 1990 with an exceptionally flowery, berry, white chocolate, and smoky oak-scented nose, this fleshy, mid-weight La Lagune exhibits a velvety texture and no hard edges. It is an endearing wine that needs to be drunk over the next 5-6 years."
Then the riesling: Parker 93-94. "A Prum Wehlener Sonnenuhr Riesling Auslese offers an impressive combination of white raisin-studded apple jelly, mango, caramel, honey, and vanilla in a creamy textural context, with a remarkable, parallel, and somehow perfectly-integrated sense of fresh apple and pear juiciness that guarantees a finish of genuine refreshment, enhanced by near-weightless buoyancy. This is quite thrilling to savor even now, but deserves at least a dozen years' cellaring and is likely to perform well three decades or more hence."
Then the meats. "LAMB / glazed in tamarind, hibiscus onion, swiss chard, salted plum." Tasty!
"WAGYU BEEF / creme fraiche, garlic chive, cashew, lovage, charred cucumber." Some tasty beef, although not as fatty as one might expect. The creme went very nicely, although again I felt like a rabbit with all those big leaves sticking out of my mouth.
"PORK / caramelized black vinegar, goji berry, spring onion, dried almond." Underneath this little forrest of green was one of the tastiest dishes of the night, some delectable pork!
"BEEF TARTARE / water lettuce, water chestnut, nuoc leo, chlorophyll, peanu." This is the first real "repeat" from the menu a year ago, although it's gone to seed — but it still tastes fantastic.
Shrimp chips to go with the tartare. One puts some steak on a shrimp chip, adds some dust and eats. It's a pretty wonderful flavor combo.
"MAITAKE MUSHROOMS / cauliflower, snake beans, bacon x.o., walnut." Sauron's curse! Someone stole Elrond's crown! But seriously this was a difficult dish to cut as the wreath of beans snaked around. But it was worth it as it was surprisingly tasty. Perhaps because of the bacon.
The dessert menu.
"COCONUT BAVAROIS / coffee, condensed milk, thai basil, peanut croquant." This was the most successful dessert — wonderful in fact. The peanut, chocolate, coconut cream thing was pretty amazing.
"BITTER CHOCOLATE / kecap manis, oats, parsnip, brown butter, soy milk sorbet." Dust and dollops! But this was also very good.
"RHUBARB / mahlab cremeux, hibiscus, gentian, lemongrass meringue." And so was the rhubarb, although the texture is very fluffy and airy.
"PEAR / wild anise, cream, raw chestnut, mead syrup infused with pear skins." Where's it hiding? Inside this natural fortress?
Quick, break down the walls to find… white stuff and pear.
One of the dominant flavors here was anise. It was all pretty good, although probably the weakest of the four.
Overall, I was pretty surprised to find out how far the chef's cuisine had evolved (see the older meals), and in such an unexpected vegetal direction. Lords of the forest, this was some unique stuff. The flavors were a bit more understated and far less Vietnamese than a year ago. Ultimately odder, but certainly more unique. Still, although every dish was successful in some way, and many were fantastic. They just pursue a unique visual and textural vision. Despite basically ordering the entire menu it was pretty light too.
All in all, unique and playful, but we could have used a little more light in the forest, it was so dark we could hardly appreciate the masterpieces. On a technical note this was the first night that I used my Canon 5D Mark II with a little table top tripod. I found that I still needed to use the flash otherwise (the restaurant being VERY dark) I needed like a 3s shutter time. The tripod was a tad awkward and I'm glad it was only us foodies at the table, but the pictures did turn out very well. I ended up gong full manual and stopping down to about 7, setting a 1/15 (quarter second) exposure and just relying on the flash to fill.
For more LA food reviews, see here.
February 10, 2012
Kindle Select – The Results
On February 7 and 8 I put The Darkening Dream on 48 hours of Kindle Select free promo. The book tore through the charts to "sell" (I mean give away) over 21,000 copies. In the first 24 hours it propelled itself to #7 free book in the entire Kindle store and for February 8 spent most of the day camped at #4.
I was duking it out with that shirtless romance for two days!
But that's not my favorite shot, that's below. Side by side with A Game of Thrones!
But what was actually more gratifying than people picking it in mass was the comments (mostly on twitter) from those that read it — uniformly awesome!
But even if you missed the sale, the Kindle version is still just $2.99, so pick it up!
February 9, 2012
Q&A on Reddit
A Twitter friend during on big promo push for The Darkening Dream that I create an AMA on Reddit. I had no idea what this is, but I looked it up and it sounded like fun.
This is an interactive page where anyone can ask me anything and I will (mostly) answer. Now of course you could do this anyway on my blog, but random comments might seem out of place. The readers can also vote up and down both questions and answers. More or less it dynamically evolves into a sort of FAQ. Most of the questions — no surprise — are about my video games. But I'm trying to answer them all as best I can.
Last time I looked it had over 450 questions — and I tried to answer most of them!
February 8, 2012
Great Free Fiction
Who doesn't love FREE books? My novel The Darkening Dream is still free on Kindle until midnight. So if you missed it, grab it now! Yesterday it enjoyed massive success reaching rates of over 20 copies downloaded per minute and hitting #4 in all Kindle sales, #2 in Fiction, and #1 in Fantasy!
Then flipping the tables around after so many helped me with the promotion of my own novel here are some other recommended free novels from "friends of the family" (my online family).
TWO DAYS ONLY: Wednesday, February 8th and Thursday, February 9th! Come and get 'em!
For those with a love of YA paranormal: Family Magic (The Hayle Coven novels, #1) Sixteen year old Sydlynn Hayle is the daughter of a powerful witch and a demon lord but she just wants to be ordinary. Find it HERE.
And for those who like a thrill in their YA fiction: Run (The Hunted, #1) Reid thinks life has gone back to normal when his sister rescues him from the foster system. All that changes when he is kidnapped and dumped in the wilderness, forced to run from those who want to kill him. Find it HERE.
Don't have a Kindle? No problem! Download a FREE app for your computer, iPad, smartphone and more!
Family Magic
Raising the Demon
"Haralthazar," my mother glided closer to the statue, "we summon you this third night of Power, nine days and nine nights from Samhain Eve, to tighten our bond with you and your realm." She knelt at the foot of the altar, the picture of the submissive handmaiden. Could she be any more ridiculous? Seriously. "My love, come and be welcome."
The blinding flash that leapt from her to the statue continued to pour out of her in a deep blue rush of light. I turned my head slightly to the side, squinting in the glare, grateful for the edge of the cowl and the shadow it made. The whole room started to thrum, the floor vibrating with condensed magic as Mom used the energy we had given her to make the doorway that would let my father through.
Sixteen-year-old Sydlynn Hayle is the daughter of a powerful witch and a demon lord of the seventh plane. The trouble is, she just wants to be ordinary. Syd struggles to survive the minefield of her new high school while being torn between her attraction to football hero Brad Peters and the darkly mysterious Quaid Moromond. When her coven comes under attack, Syd is forced to face the fact only her power can save her family's magic.
What readers are saying about Family Magic:
"This book has everything. Great family drama, hot boys, magic, witches, demons and difficult choices. This is one of my new favorite books of 2011 and I CANNOT WAIT to read the rest of the series."
"With a fantastic, empathetic heroine, plenty of magic, an intriguing mystery and incorporating themes involving the search of self, familial relationships, duty and free will, Family Magic is an enchanting and enjoyable read."
"I think Syd is one of my all-time favorite characters. She is funny and snarky but has a fierce love for her family. I am ready to follow Syd's journey through this series. I was hooked from the first paragraph. I thoroughly enjoyed Family Magic, and I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys paranormal novels."
(You can read the full reviews on Amazon.com)
Run
Kidnapped
Alone, Reid gasps in one deep breath, another. It hurts his ribs, his lungs. He manages to roll over on his right side and regrets it. His shoulder screams in protest. Still, he is finally able to wriggle his numb hands loose from what holds him and claws at the cloth around his eyes.
Darkness. But not complete. The moon is up. Trees loom over him, the smell of spruce and fresh air so sharp it almost hurts. He jerks at the plastic ties around his ankles while. his vision swims through a veil of pain-laden tears. He manages somehow to force his screaming hands to work the ties loose and he is free.
Sixteen-year-old Reid thinks life is back to normal. His sister Lucy pulls herself together and cuts him free from a year of foster care. She promises to take care of him, that her new boss and her new life are what they both needed to start again. Until Reid is taken in the middle of the night, dumped in a wild stretch of forest far from home with no idea why he is there. Lost and afraid, he learns to run from the hunters who prowl the darkness, their only pleasure chasing down kids like him. And killing them.
What readers are saying about Run:
"The fear, the thrill, the emotion that comes through in the writing is amazing. There is never a dull moment in this story of survival."
"If you're a fan of YA books that make your heart pound with the unknown and leave you cringing at places (but in a totally cool kinda way) then Run's the book for you."
"Reid is such a great strong character and when the story ends, we are left begging for what is to come in the next of the series. This story was unique and SUPER fast-paced! It was a great festival of suspense."
(You can read the full reviews on Amazon.com)
Thank you for taking the time to check them out!
Happy reading!
About the Author: Patti Larsen is a middle grade, young adult and adult author with a passion for the paranormal. Her YA thriller series, The Hunted, is available now. The first four books of The Hayle Coven series, Family Magic, Witch Hunt, Demon Child and The Wild are also out now. Her YA paranormal novel, Best Friends Forever, and steampunk series, Blood and Gold, are due early in 2012. She is a full time writer and a part time teacher of her Get Your Book Done program. Patti lives on the East Coast of Canada with her very patient husband and four massive cats.
You can find her:
On her website
On Facebook
Her writing blog
On Twitter
On Amazon.com
On Goodreads
February 7, 2012
The Darkening Dream – Free on Kindle
The title pretty much says it all. The Darkening Dream, my dark fantasy novel, is free on Amazon for the Kindle for just 48 hours — all of February 7 and 8, 2012.
Download it here!
This is a special two day only promotion via Kindle KDP Select. Make sure to grab it while you can, tell your friends about it, and promote everywhere. At the end of Wednesday at midnight it will go back to its normal price. If it does well during the promotion Amazon will bump it up in their internal ranking and it should get a lot of regular sales afterward. That's the theory at least.
A few words about the book:
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As the Nineteenth Century gives way to the Twentieth, modern science and steel girders leave little room for the supernatural. But in dark corners the old forces still gather. God, demon, and sorcerer alike plot to regain what was theirs in Andy Gavin's chilling debut, The Darkening Dream. 1913, Salem, Massachusetts – Sarah Engelmann's life is full of friends, books, and avoiding the pressure to choose a husband, until an ominous vision and the haunting call of an otherworldly trumpet shake her. When she stumbles across a gruesome corpse, she fears that her vision was more of a premonition. And when she sees the murdered boy moving through the crowd at an amusement park, Sarah is thrust into a dark battle she does not understand. With the help of Alex, a Greek immigrant who knows a startling amount about the undead, Sarah sets out to uncover the truth. Their quest takes them to Salem's brutal factory workrooms, on a clandestine maritime mission, and down into their foe's nightmarish crypt. But they aren't prepared for the terrifying backlash that brings the fight back to their own homes and families. Can Alex's elderly, vampire-hunting grandfather and Sarah's own rabbi father help protect them? And what do Sarah's darkening visions reveal? No less than the Archangel Gabriel's Horn, destined to announce the End of Days, is at stake, and the forces banded to recover it include a 900 year-old vampire, a trio of disgruntled Egyptian gods, and a demon-loving Puritan minister. At the center of this swirling conflict is Sarah, who must fight a millennia-old battle against unspeakable forces, knowing the ultimate prize might be herself.
NOTE: Free downloads do not count toward tickets for the Naughty Dark Contest.
