Ellie Potts's Blog, page 33

30 Days of Writing day 5

Day 5 is a place I would like to live, but have never visited.

I would have to say unless I am forced from California I don’t want to live any other place. I have no extreme weather. I have lived my life here. I can go to the ocean in under 3 hours. Under 2 I can visit the snowy mountains. There are many places I would like to visit. But I am okay with just visiting.

30 Days of Writing Day 4…

Day 4 Ten Interesting Facts About Me.

1. I am addicted to Holiday tea from Harney and Sons.

2. My favorite Muppet is tied between Animal and Kermit.

3. I like Samuel Adams Cherry Wheat Beer.

4. I daydream more then I should be writing.

5. I have 2 goats Thor and Odin.

6. I am terrified of spiders of all shapes and sizes even when they are in behind glass.

7. If I had super powers I would be evil, or if I had the ability to use the force I would be a sith.

8. I am addicted to Farm Heroes.

9. I wish I had more time to read.

10. I sing Down in the Valley, when I am in the Shower. I sang it in chorus, and I sang it to my baby sister when I watched her.

30 Day Writing Challenge

Day 3 Your first love and first kiss.

I don’t remember the boy’s name that I shared my first kiss with. We were like 5.

My first love will always be my husband. All the ones before I had thought they were love, but it was meeting him and everything changed. I learned that love is finding that perfect person. That person that builds you up, makes you better. One who loves me for me, and not an idea.

30 Day of Writing Challenge

Day 2 Your Earliest Memory.

I really can’t be sure which was is the earliest. I have memories of a lot of things when I was little. Some good some bad. My first trip to Disney Land, when I was 4 or 5. It was during the 30 celebration, I remember the parade. I remember being terrified on The Pirates of the Caribbean.

When I was little, we lived in Santa Maria California, where I was born. I lived there until the age of 6. I remember us going to Pismo, Oceano, and Avila beach. Once I was running in the water, and a cross tide grabbed me. It pulled me under. I remember looking up at the sunny sky as the ocean water tried to kill me. My dad saved me.

One other I think maybe four. I was visiting my aunt in Los Banos California. It was my birthday, which happened to land on Thanksgiving. My cousin’s father’s family had been very nice and got me birthday gifts. I remember my aunt making me stand in front of these strangers I just met, and thank them. Even then I was a shy thing. I still have one of the gifts I received in one of my plastic storage bins.

30-Day Writing Challenge.

Since I will not be participating in NANOWRIMO because I am working on editing my newest story hoping to release in December. The first question was kind of ehh so I found another one, Name of your blog? I recently changed it from Eclectic Romance Writer, to Nerdy, Wordy and A Little Bit Dirty. It fits better for me. Because I am a huge nerdy, and I try to be somewhat wordy and well my stories end up a little bit dirty. Sex is a normal function in life. So yes there is sex. Who doesn’t like a story with a little bit of steam and heat. Nerdy is me, I write what I like, and I hope people like my stories too. Because I love sharing.

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Winner of the Wicked Reads Blog Hop!

Winner is Jane! You have been emailed. Thanks to everyone who who hopped in. There will be another one in December, in which I will have much more then 1 gift card! :) Thanks again and I hope you all had a great Halloween.

I do have a new release coming out in December so please check back :)

Happy #Halloween! Last Day for the Blog Hop #Giveaway!

Happy Halloween!!

Hope you all have a safe and fun evening. I will be hosting our 5th annual Pot Yuck. Don’t forget to sign up for the $25 gift card I am giving away! Click below to see what you need to do.

http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/0e6394be31/?

Author JD Nelson Stops in to Talk Scary Stuff!

Hi, guys! My name is JD Nelson and I’m here to talk about scary stuff for Halloween!

Thanks to Author Ellie Potts for having me!

Anybody who knows me, knows that I’m not a big fan of super scary stuff. Yes, I like some scary movies, but I also like sleep (stupid Freddy Krueger). Books tend to be easier for me because my imagination doesn’t go to the Saw type gruesomeness movies usually do, however, I’m still a great big scaredy cat that has to sleep with the light on when it comes to all things creepy.

Unfortunately, not every movie is based on a book, so I have to get my courage up to watch something I know is going to scare the bejeezus out of me. And when it comes to scaring the crap out of me, M Night Shyamalan does a great job. His movies are more suspenseful and twisty than most. To me, that’s scarier than gruesome horror movies. It’s a pulse-racing, heart pounding, edge of your seat kind of experience.

So, without further adieu, here’s my top three favorite movies by M Night Shyamalan.

The Village

Members (Bryce Dallas Howard, Joaquin Phoenix, Adrien Brody) of a 19th-century community fear the strange creatures that inhabit the surrounding forest.

This movie freaked me out. I don’t know whether it was the added excitement of the girl being blind or the monster. It just scared me to death. Like all of M Night Shyamalan’s movies, I didn’t see the end coming. I still have mixed emotions about the outcome.

The Sixth Sense

Young Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment) is haunted by a dark secret: he is visited by ghosts. Cole is frightened by visitations from those with unresolved problems who appear from the shadows. He is too afraid to tell anyone about his anguish, except child psychologist Dr. Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis). As Dr. Crowe tries to uncover the truth about Cole’s supernatural abilities, the consequences for client and therapist are a jolt that awakens them both to something unexplainable.

Okay, this movie is truly, truly scary. Number one, ghosts. Two, ghosts. You get the idea. Again, the ending on this one was so unexpected. It made perfect sense, but it was still so stunning. If you haven’t seen it, come out from the rock you’ve been hiding under and watch it!

Signs

Everything that farmer Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) assumed about the world is changed when he discovers a message – an intricate pattern of circles and lines – carved into his crops. As he investigates the unfolding mystery, what he finds will forever alter the lives of his brother (Joaquin Phoenix) and children (Rory Culkin), (Abigail Breslin). A unique story that explores the mysterious real-life phenomena of crop signs and the effects they have on one man and his family.

Aliens are scary, like most of the unknown out there, but this movie…SCARY! It may have been because kids were involved. It’s always a little nerve racking when that’s the case. I think this movie blows Independence Day out of the water. Trapped in a isolated farmhouse with aliens surrounding you…no thank you! Mel Gibson gets a ton of bad press, but you can’t deny he’s a great actor in this. Joaquin Phoenix is amazing, too! Watch it!

There you have it! My top three faves!

Thanks again to Author Ellie Potts for having me here today!

About JD Nelson

JD Nelson is a Bestselling Author of Fantasy Romance and Erotic Paranormal Romance. She is also the owner of Chaste Moon Publishing, an independent publishing house. A transplant from Mobile, Alabama, she gave up Mardi Gras and frequent hurricanes to move to the earthquake capital of the United States, the San Francisco Bay Area. She now lives in Central Valley, California with her amazingly supportive husband and four cats who think they’re dogs.

Always short on time, JD has long ago mastered the art of procrastination and was recently crowned Procrastinator of the Year by her editor, which is only slightly better than her being voted Most Likely to Waste Time by Watching Vampire Movies by her readers last year. All jokes aside, JD is a boringly normal person who thinks that coffee pretty much fixes everything … as long as it’s before 6:30AM and the planet Mars is in retrograde. When she’s not spending time with her sexy Swedish husband, you can find her writing, reading, or on her commute to her day job where she wrangles paint onto canvas for the entertainment industry.

JD loves to hear from her readers. You can contact her through her website, AuthorJDNelson.com, or on Facebook, where she spends an alarming amount of time chatting to her many author and reader friends, much to the dismay of her continually neglected manuscripts.

Stalker Links

JD Nelson’s Official Website – www.authorjdnelson.com

JD Nelson’s Goodreads Page – http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6060770.J_D_Nelson

JD Nelson’s Facebook – www.facebook.com/NightAberrations

JD Nelson’s Facebook Fan Page – www.facebook.com/JDNelsonsNightAberrations

JD Nelson’s Super Secret Fan Club – http://www.facebook.com/groups/269730583130725/

JD Nelson’s Blog – www.nightaberrations.blogspot.com/

JD Nelson’s BookLikes – http://booklikes.com/j-d-nelson/author,2824672

JD Nelson’s tsū – https://www.tsu.co/JDNelson

JD Nelson’s Twitter – https://twitter.com/authorjdnelson

JD Nelson’s Ello – https://ello.co/authorjdnelson

Author Selah Janel Talks Halloween Costumes… #halloween

I love autumn in general, but Halloween is the icing on the cake.   I’ve always loved the special kind of magic that the holiday brings, as well as the odd cast of characters. Though I was perpetually afraid of everything as a kid, there was something about Halloween that made me embrace the idea of ghosts, witches, haunted houses, bats, vampires, and everything else—albeit in cute form. Mom and I would spend hours making decorations and putting out pumpkins, anchoring a giant ghost in one of our trees, making sure Marvin the Mummy sat in his proper spot at the window. The night, itself, always seemed longer to me growing up, even though I probably never stayed up too terribly late or did anything particularly terrifying. There was always the possibility, though. Plus, we always went out. It didn’t matter if it was a nice night or blustery (and sometimes the windy/drizzly nights added a lot more to the occasion). My costumes may have been homemade, but I felt transformed every time I trudged out into the streets to get candy. The dark didn’t hurt. Darkness is awesome at making costumes look fantastic and putting the idea of something in people’s heads.

I’ve always had a strange taste for costumes. After the typical animals and Princesses of Power, I came into my own with things like Harpo Marx, the Invisible Man, an elf sitting on a mushroom, a baby witch piggybacking on a mom witch (that was when my mother said I could start learning how to make things on my own). There were Jedi and Vader costumes, and other random things that people wouldn’t peg me for liking. Sometimes there was a sundry ulterior motive (I’d learned how to predict what would win me local costume contests), and other times I just went with what I happened to like at the time. Granted, it wasn’t like I was building professional-quality outfits in my pre-teens and teens, but there’s something about Halloween, especially a small town Halloween, that makes everything look awesome. There was never the option of buying costumes. That simply wasn’t a family tradition. Just as a only the decorations we really, really liked were bought, only the pieces that we needed to buy for a costume were purchased and the rest was left up to us and our imaginations.

In a lot of ways, it was my family’s DIY take on Halloween that led me down the path to theatre, costume design, and, of course, horror and dark fantasy writing. I love the act of taking bits and pieces and making new and unusual things. It doesn’t matter if it’s cloth and things lying about the house, or ideas and bits of archetypes. The stitching together into something else is the same to me, and I love parading them about and collecting people’s reactions like candy.

The possibility of Halloween is the same possibility I find in the horror genre, or in a lot of the other genres I write. The question of “What’s gonna happen tonight?” has turned into “What can I do with this?” It’s a challenge, that same tightrope walking feeling that I felt as a little kid walking down dark streets with my parents, obviously safe in our neighborhood…but never quite knowing if that was the case until we were back home again. I never quite know if an idea or an outfit I’m thinking of will actually work, and sometimes things definitely get harder before I have my answer.

Still, all that possibility and the gleefulness of creating something carries me through and makes me feel at home. It doesn’t matter if it’s a knitted ghost, a purse made out of latex skin, a troll suit, or a book I’m working on. The love of exploring all those little corners and what if’s is the same joy that wandering Halloween aisles in stores, getting the decorations out, and wondering what it would be like to explore a haunted house gave me as a kid.

***

Selah Janel is the author of horror, fantasy, and cross-genre stories and books. You can find her ramblings on her blog, on facebook, and twitter.

Like many young men at the end of the 1800s, Bill signed on to work in a logging camp. The work is brutal, but it promised a fast paycheck with which he can start his life. Unfortunately, his role model is Big John. Not only is he the camp’s hero, but he’s known for spending his pay as fast as he makes it. On a cold Saturday night they enter Red’s Saloon to forget the work that takes the sweat and lives of so many men their age. Red may have plans for their whiskey money, but something else lurks in the shadows. It watches and badly wants a drink that has nothing to do with alcohol. Can Bill make it back out the shabby door, or does someone else have their own plans for his future?

http://www.amazon.com/Mooner-Selah-Janel-ebook/dp/B00JSVJEU4

Welcome to the Shadows:

Journey with authors Selah Janel and S.H. Roddey to a world where every idea is a possibility and every genre an invitation. In this collection of forty-seven short stories, lines blur and worlds collide in strange and wonderful new ways. Get lost with the authors as they wander among fantasy, horror, science fiction, and other speculative musings.

Shadows can’t hurt you, and sometimes it’s all right to venture off the path.

http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Shadows-S-H-Roddey-ebook/dp/B00E1ODLIY