Victoria Danann's Blog, page 38
August 28, 2012
FREE Labor Day Weekend.
Put it on your calendar and tell your friends.
E-book version FREE on Amazon.com all Labor Day weekend, three days, Sept. 1-3.
Link to download.
My Familiar Stranger Now Available in Print.
Click here to buy in paperback form from Amazon.com.
FINALLY! To all of you who have asked for this book in print form, here you go. Enjoy.
August 23, 2012
Guest Post on Creative Writing
Victoria pens a guest blog on the future of creative writing for Ravencrafts’s Realm Blog. August 23, 2012
People ask me about “writers’ block” more often than you might guess. Honestly I don’t know exactly what it is or how it feels. I’m into creativity on several different fronts including art, music, and writing fiction. When I need a dollop of inspiration, it’s always there for me – KNOCK ON WOOD !!!!
My process is that I get completely quiet and completely still, close my eyes, and simply say, “Bring me a melody.” Or plot point or whatever. Fill in the blank. This method is as reliable as my belief that the sun will rise tomorrow in the east with or without me. I should add that a lifetime of “seeking” is a factor in the sense that I have been practicing meditation for twenty years and can achieve a state of concentration fairly quickly.
What do I need to make that happen? Not props or tools or other people or magick words or ritual or any other external thing. EXCEPT silence. Of course those of us who live in or near a city never experience true silence because our nervous systems are under siege by thousands of refrigerators humming and thousands of motor rpm’s grinding on the roads, whether we’re consciously aware of it or not.
Don’t get me wrong. I love the advantages of living in a technological age as much
as the next person and even more than most. Were it not for the internet I would not be sharing these thoughts with you now because my first book wouldn’t have taken off due to Amazon.com and electronic reading.
My problem is not with technology. Truthfully, I do love it and could probably write love
sonnets about movies, TV, recorded music, the convenience of internet research, not to mention electric guitars and fast cars. I would hate giving up all that cool stuff and would fight to keep it. No. That’s not the problem. The problem is that I feel like my choice is being taken away. Little by little, in a most insidious fashion, I have experienced what I’ll call “noise creep” which finally came to a head at the gas pump. See the thing is that all I need to be creative is to be left the hell alone. Give me a few minutes and I may have a great idea. Whether that idea is a book or song or painting isn’t important. What’s important is the creative exercise.
There was a time when I could get something else done if I was forced to be on hold. I trained myself to “tune out” elevator music, but there’s just no way I can “tune out” looped commercials. PLEASE, I’M BEGGING YOU, NOT AGAIN!!!
There was a time when I could wait in line at the bank and keep the company of my own thoughts. Now I get CNN on overhead TV monitor.
There was a time when I could wait for a plane in the boarding area with my book or my thoughts. No more. Overhead speakers wired into the fancy flat screens spaced at regular intervals mean I’m held prisoner by whatever is playing.
When I was in Ireland, the pubs that had been a place of gathering and conversation for literally centuries were being retrofitted with big flat screens for football (soccer) and turned into sports bars. Progress? You decide.
For me the tipping point was the new gas pumps with the viewing screen and obnoxiously loud speakers with snippets of news and commercials. I started pushing every button I could see. Eventually I found one that turned the sound off. Thank the gods.
So, with all this encroachment on our “alone” time and by that I mean the time when we get to enjoy the companionship of ourselves sharing communion with ourselves, how are we supposed to be creative? How can we function in this riotous new world that seems to CONSPIRE to keep us from thinking?
Don’t think it hasn’t crossed my mind that, the more you can distract people and keep them from thinking, the easier they are to lead. Shades of decades-old science fiction. Do I think all these portals that are vying for my attention are interlocked in a conspiracy with that old guy who runs G.E. at the helm? I’m not willing to go that far, but, I will say that merchants are always looking for a bigger, louder megaphone than the vendor in the metaphoric stall next to them.
Can we rise above this? Sure. But only if we’re aware of it.
Why should you care? Because our one true expression of the divine is creativity. All the other mammals eat, work, play, and procreate. This is the only thing that sets us apart. Whether you find that expression in writing fiction or sculpting mud pies with your kids is unimportant. What is important is finding a path to that expression even when it gets harder.
Now I really should say something about my books since I was given the opportunity to guest post.
The second book in my paranormal romance/fantasy/18+ series (heavy on the romance) will be released October 14th on Amazon.com in print and ebook. Being the second book in a series, The Witch’s Dream draws from characters and situation presented in the first book, My Familiar Stranger, available in e-format and in print within a few days. I will be releasing more excerpts between now and mid October and the book trailer will be available October 1st. Visit me on Facebook for up to date news. www.facebook.com/vdanann
August 20, 2012
August 18, 2012
Today is FREE DAY on Amazon.
I want everyone who wants to read Book One before Book Two is released to have the opprotunity to do so. You can grab a copy for free from now until midnight. If you miss it, don’t worry there will be one more chance over Labor Day weekend.
http://www.amazon.com/My-Familiar-Stranger-Paranormal-ebook/dp/B007V8RAKW/
August 16, 2012
August 15, 2012
Guest Blog on Grave Tells
http://gravetells.com/2012/08/09/book-tour-what-do-women-really-want-romance-or-action/
MY GUEST BLOG FOR GRAVE TELLS:
For me, there are two basic categories of fiction. Is it fiction set in reality as we experience it or is it fiction that takes place in a world that exists only in someone’s imagination?
I’ve never understood why someone would opt for the first if they could have the second. I mean, have you been here? To contemporary life on Earth? Why would you want to spend your precious leisure hours reading about that when you could be transported to a world that has been tweaked and debugged?
Taking that a step further, I write paranormal ROMANCE, heavy on the romance, because I think it holds the key to the answer to the giveaway question I love to ask which is: what do women really want? I love men, but I write for women. We want different things. Again, what’s in my imagination is better than what’s actually outside the door.
I mention that my books are heavy on romance because there is a lot of confusion between paranormal romance and paranormal suspense. A book can be classified as a romance when unless the love interest is the main plot and not the subplot. An action/thriller with paranormal elements and romantic elements is paranormal suspense.
One of the most satisfying things about reactions to the first book of the PNR series The Order of the Black Swan, entitled My Familiar Stranger, is that different readers fall in love with each of her three suitors and then write to tell me they wanted her to end up with this one or that. Someday I’m going to take a poll: Were you rooting for bachelor #1, 2, or 3?
Don’t worry. Each of them gets a story. In fact the next book, The Witch’s Dream, to be released in electronic format on October 14th, is one of those. Whereas My Familiar Stranger could be read and enjoyed as a stand alone novel, the second book picks up where the first ends which means readers will benefit greatly by reading the first book first. That’s why I have insisted the cost of My Familiar Stranger be kept to $.99 so that everyone who is so inclined has a chance to get in on the beginning of the series.
August 11, 2012
What I’m reading?
Something DifferentWhen I was in L.A. at the Romance Writers of America conference a couple of weeks ago, I met with Tara Gavin of Harlequin Nocturne. She put together a concept project and encouraged me to read it. I was excited about the idea because it’s so innovative. Gavin put four PNR authors who would each write one of the four books.
Each book begins with…
Once upon a time…the Blood Sorcerer vanquished the kingdom of Elden. To save their children, the queen scattered them to safety and the king filled them with vengeance. Only a magical timepiece connects the four royal heirs. Now they must return and save Elden…and time is running out….
Book One is Lord of the Vampires, by Gena Showalter.
Book Two is Lord of the Rage & Primal Instincts, by Jill Monroe
Book Three is Lord of the Wolfyn, by Jessica Anderson
Book Four is Lord of the Abyss, by Nalini Singh
I have just finished Lord of the Vampires and started on Lord of Rage. It’s a really fresh approach to read each of the books in the series written in a different voice.
August 8, 2012
Barrons Books and Baubles
I don’t make any secret of the fact that my two favorite series are Kresley Cole’s Immortals After Dark and Karen Marie Moning’s Fever Series. This post is about a central feature of the latter.
This picture was poached from a Facebook fan site because I just had to share. http://www.facebook.com/victoria.danann.9?ref=tn_tnmn#!/pages/B-B-B/318302944881239
You know I LOVE my e-reader. With the new backlighting (thank you, been salivating for it for many years now) I can read in the middle of the night, under the covers, without disturbing my spouse. I can take 20 books on vacation and it doesn’t weigh me down any more than does my wallet which is stuffed with stuff I don’t need.
All that said, let me add a big HOWEVER!!! When I saw this picture, I fell in love with books all over again. I remembered the days when I used to get two kid-free hours a week and would use them browsing (translation: prowling) the bookstore aisles. I can’t remember seeing anything more magical.
Like Moning’s heroine, Mac, I would want to live there and take care of it, too. I could just put a mattress down and be happy. Nothing could be better unless, of course, it was shared by Barrons.
Wonderful. Wonderful. Wonderful.
August 3, 2012
Sneak Preview: The Witch’s Dream
The Witch’s Dream excerpt #1
When Kay’s bunch arrived it suddenly seemed as if the one hundred seventy five room palace on twelve thousand acres would not be nearly big enough. His family had migrated to South Texas in the nineteenth century and found it agreeably inhospitable. Berserkers enjoy a good challenge. So they founded an organization to clean up the mess, taking on rowdy itinerants who heartily embraced a get-it-done, no-rules philosophy and called it the Texas Rangers. Were it not for berserkers it seems unlikely that the frontier mix of Comanche, desperados, and javelina could have been subdued so relatively quickly and by so few.
Chaos Caelian, named such by his maternal grandmother as was her privilege in berserker society, was affectionately known as Kay. It was the nickname bestowed upon him by his teammate Rammel Hawking soon after they’d met. Ram had thought a knight named Kay – like the foster brother of King Arthur from Arthurian legend – was amusing. So Chaos became Sir Kay and it stuck. Even his own parents eventually began calling him Kay.
Yes. Everybody knew the near giant knight as Kay except for his three older sisters who refused to give up calling him Bubba, never letting him forget for a minute that he was the “baby” of the family. The four youngest Caelian children were close in age, only a year apart, and in familial ties. There was a much older brother, but he and their parents almost seemed to comprise a second family. The three preschool girls started out calling him “brother”, but the nickname quickly degenerated into Bubba and would not go away.
Their grandmother, sometimes called Evil Gran by those she had named, gave the girls similar hardships to bear. Having inherited the “sight” from her own grandmother, Evil Gran claimed she knew three girls were coming and set out to name them after the Norns; the three keepers of time according to Norse myth. Hence, they were named in order of linear time – past, present, and future: Urda, Verdandia, and Skulda. In a triumph of sibling camaraderie and conspiracy over custom, their names had morphed into something more suitable before they entered kindergarten. Urda became known as “Urz”, Verdandia as “Dandie” and Skulda did a triple twist into “Squoozie” which, odd as it was, seemed like a custom fit.
Elora had once heard Kay say that opening the door to his boyhood home was like going through the wardrobe to the land of “Nornia”.
The entire family resembled the popular perception of Vikings: tall, fair haired, fair skinned, with blue eyes, an abundance of athletic ability, and an indomitable desire to know where to plunder the best jewelry. Fortunately the family had accumulated multigenerational wealth in land, cattle, and oil in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century so the quest for jewelry did not require going a’viking as it was known in the old days. Kay’s sisters were content with the occasional plunder of Gump’s, Tiffany, and Cartier.
