Ingrid Hall's Blog, page 33
February 6, 2014
Pay As You Go Manuscript Assessment Service
Hey,
Just a reminder that I am offering a manuscript assessment service on a PAY AS YOU GO basis, with no contract or tie in. You can pay for your editing in bite sized, affordable chunks enabling you to remain in complete control of your budget.
Interested? Find out more here.
Love Ingrid xxx
Indie and Proud…A.T. Weaver talks Gay Fiction
Hey,
It’s Indie and Proud time…Today, Grey Wolf is interviewing A.T. Weaver. Check out this grandmother’s amazing take on writing gay fiction at http://www.alternate-history-fiction....
Simply click on the blog section (Left hand side)
IF you are not already doing so please like our Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/indieandproud
Have a lovely day
Ingrid xxx
February 5, 2014
Review of The Bride and the Brute by Laurel O’Donnell
Hey,
If you are looking for a FREE historical romance set in medieval England, then check out Luna Ballantyne’s review of The Bride and the Brute.
http://lunaballantyne.wordpress.com
Love
Ingrid xxx
February 4, 2014
Competitions!
Hi
I just wanted to remind everyone of several fab competitions that are currently running…
Indie and Proud in partnership with The Writer’s Drawer are running a Short Story Competition, with some amazing prizes including publication in the next Writer’s Drawer Anthology. Closing date for entries is 31st March 2014 and I can’t stress how good this is. In addition to winning free books you have a chance of PUBLICATION AND FREE PROMOTION…You can find all the details by visiting the following site:
http://www.thewritersdrawer.net/short-story-competition.html
I am also running a poetry competition based around the subject of “Friendship” for https://www.facebook.com/pages/2014-Year-of-the-Friend/460928470677862?fref=ts and there is a CASH prize of £20 ($32.74) for the winning entry! Find out more here.
There are also several ways that you can get your hands on free paperback copies of my recently released novella The Tunnel Betwixt…
1. I am currently running a prize draw where 2 lucky people will win signed copies of The Tunnel Betwixt… Closing date for entries is 01st April 2014. Simply leave a comment on my competition page so that I know you have stopped by and I will select the winners at random after the closing date!
2. I am giving away 5 copies of The Tunnel Betwixt… over at goodreads. Simply follow the link!
https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/80779-the-tunnel-betwixt
Make sure you keep regularly checking my competition page for details of new competitions/prize draws/giveaways
GOOD LUCK
INGRID xxx
February 3, 2014
Review of Behind The Closed Door by Charles Prandy
Charles Prandy was born on 14th November 1973 and grew up in Derwood, Maryland. He has written several novels including The Last of the Descendants. Behind The Closed Door is the second book in the Detective Jacob Hayden series.
I am always a little reluctant to read second and third books in a series unless I have read the first book as nine times out of ten they are a direct follow on and there is a lot of presumption of knowledge. I was pleasantly surprised to be able to leap straight into Behind The Closed Door because the action starts straight away and this is a brand new case for the incredibly sexy and grieving Detective Jacob Hayden. The author is also very clever at drip feeding vital information about the character from book one that anyone picking up his books for the first time might have missed. There are also hooks a plenty leading into the third book in the series and I will definitely be looking out for it.
There are bank robberies and brutal murders galore, and some very strong and compelling characters. The plot is fast paced and sufficiently layered to keep readers guessing right up until the very end and while I figured out early on who the bad guy was, I had absolutely no idea about his motive until the author reveals it. There is also a great twist right at the end that had me chuckling.
My only issue with this book is the viewpoint which I think the author needs to go back and do some work on as some chapters are written in first person from the viewpoint of Detective Hayden and others are written in third person. I guess the author has done this so that people get the full picture from all angles however this is at times really confusing and looks clumsy. You can’t have your cake and eat it when writing a novel. You either write the whole thing from one person’s viewpoint (which wouldn’t work in a book like this) or you write it third person (which would have meant losing some of the inside the head moments with Detective Hayden) OR you go for an omniscient narrator throughout.
It is however a testament to the author’s storytelling skills and the strong male lead that I was completely hooked throughout in spite of the issues with viewpoint. I will definitely be reading more in this series as Detective Jacob Hayden has managed to get under my skin!
You can find more at:
February 2, 2014
Yves Fey talks French Courtesan’s…ooh la la!
Morning,
Well, it’s indie and proud time again and what better way to kick off than by handing over to the sensual Yves Fey for a quick foray into the world of French Courtesans…I am going to do a blatant shout out here, because her novel FLOATS THE DARK SHADOW, is possibly one of the best books that I have read…ever. Click the link to check out my review….
GUEST POST BY YVES FEY
One of my favorite characters in my Belle Époque mystery, Floats the Dark Shadow , is the sharp-witted and sensuous courtesan Lilias. My detective, Inspecteur Devaux, has been having a torrid affair with her for some time. Going to meet her one night, Michel is struck once again by her deceptive delicacy.
Lilias was small, with the fragile, brittle beauty of fine porcelain. She had the bearing and self-possession of an aristocrat. He could picture her at the court of the Ancien Régime, softly powdered, bewigged, clothed in continents of silk and glittering with jewels. But something raw and ferocious lay hidden below the surface. He could just as easily imagine her carrying the flag through the streets in the Revolution, her feet bathed in blood. Either way, she would be plotting intrigues.
It was said that the most successful Parisian courtesans came from the provinces—it took longer to tarnish their innocence. The ones born in the city had an ironic edge that cut into a man’s lust. Perversely, Lilias had triumphed and endured because of that sharpness. Her precision was strangely erotic. Her bitter intelligence and cynicism contrasted with her abandon in the heat of passion. Michel supposed some of her patrons wanted to subjugate that. None had. Though perhaps Lilias offered them the illusion. He would not know. She stirred his desire just as she was.
In researching the courtesans of 19th Century Paris, the customers preference for as yet unspoiled young women from the provinces, as opposed to native Parisiennes, was an interesting idea that I encountered. The Golden Age of the Courtesan was waning by the fin de siècle. While France was late in granting women’s rights, it was more sexually indulgent in many ways that contemporaneous countries. As the turn of the century approached, the shop girls were kicking up their heels with even more abandon than previously, and both official brothels and the glamorous demi-monde were fading from view. Elegant and beautiful women with erotic talent have always been in demand, but their venue was quickly changing. Like Sarah Bernhardt and later Coco Chanel, many women who might have been courtesans became instead mistresses whose lovers financed their careers,
The epitome of the fresh-faced country girl, not yet made cynical by the wanton life of a courtesan was the exquisite waif, Marie Duplessis. She is most famous and most appealing of the courtesans who inhabited the Parisian demi-monde because one of her renowned lovers, Alexandre Dumas, fils, immortalized her as Margeurite Gautier in La Dame Aux Camellias. If you’ve never seen the lovely old tearjerker, Camille, with Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor, it’s worth it for her performance. Baz Luhrmann usurped a good deal of the plot for Satin’s story in his musical, Moulin Rouge. Both fictional versions of the original die young of consumption. Marie Duplessis did not have even a decade of notorious glory as the most desirable woman in Paris, before she died of tuberculosis at twenty-three. If that is indeed what killed her, for her doctor was dosing her with arsenic. A deadly cure.
This same doctor claimed to be the one who introduced her to the man who is now her most famous lover, Franz List. He was as much of a celebrity as she was at the time, the equivalent of a rock star, with enamored fans battling for any memento to be had of his romantic performances. The rather modern term, Lisztomania, was coined by Heinrich Heine in 1844 after watching Liszt’s performance sends his fans into a sort of mystical ecstasy. Liszt may or may not have been the great love of Marie Duplessis’ life. She did beg him to take her away with him when he left for Turkey. He promised to return, but lingered, caught up in his own career. He was still abroad when news came to him of her death. He wrote, “I do not know what strange, mournful note vibrates in my heart at the memory of her.”
He also wrote that she had an enchanting nature, and that the corrupting life she lived did not touch her soul. Certainly, her image conveys innocence and her contemporaries all seemed, to some extent, to echo Liszt’s view of her charm, her gaiety, and her sense of sadness. She gambled wildly and was addicted to luxury, spending 100,000 francs a year on her clothes, jewels, and carriages. Easily bored, she flitted from lover to lover, a fragile butterfly aware of her own doom.
You can find out more about Yves Fey at:
Please also check out our Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/indieandproud
Review of The Loving Husband And The Faithful Wife by Kit Powers
Kit Power’s fiction straddles the horror, thriller and fantasy genres. He is also part of a rock band called The Disciples of Gonzo. The Loving Husband And The Faithful Wife has been published by Black Beacon books and also includes another short story, The Debt.
Both of these short stories are incredibly dark, with the author focusing on what happens when circumstances cause previously normal, hard working decent men to go over the edge…
The Loving Husband And The Faithful Wife, is really the story of one man’s paranoia and how it drives him to violently murder the man he suspects of having an affair with his wife. The main character is an accountant and the author is incredibly successful at getting inside his head, showing him functioning normally at work and in front of his wife, while inwardly he is imploding. This guy clearly loves his wife deeply and will go to any lengths to protect his marriage. I did think it was a little creepy that all of his wrath was directed towards the other man and aside from “punishing” his wife with one rough sex session to “prove” his love for her, he doesn’t take any further action against her…but maybe that’s the point! I was also impressed by the ambiguity. The did she/didn’t she actually have the affair? Which I felt added an extra layer to the story.
The Debt tells the story of a man who is up to his eyes in debt and on the brink of losing his house (Very apt in the current climate) and charts the desperate lengths that he goes to in order to get out of the situation, with some pretty grim consequences. There is a lot of swearing in this story, which didn’t trouble me but might offend some readers and is written with a heavy Cockney dialect which did add credibility to the main character, but at times I found a little overpowering.
Both stories are very well written, however I definitely resonated more with the character in The Loving Husband and the Faithful Wife as I found Del’s naivety infuriating at times…
You can find more about the author at:
https://www.facebook.com/Kitpowerwriter
http://www.disciplesofgonzo.com/
February 1, 2014
The Tunnel Betwixt…is available to download!!!
I was going to wait until tomorrow, however I am just too excited! The Tunnel Betwixt…is now available to download from Amazon. The paperback version should be live within the next 48 hours and I am hoping to get it onto Smashwords within the next week or so.
Please share like crazy and please download!
If any bloggers would like a review copy, simply let me know!
Love
Ingrid xxx
January 29, 2014
How to turn a trip to the dentist into cash…
Morning Everyone!
Wow, I am still trying to catch my breath after a busy indie and proud week! First up on Monday we had the Daddy of Time Travel…Mr Dennis Higgins and then just last night, Lenora posted a FABULOUS review of Dark Messages by Daniel J Weber and now today, I have written a guest post for DZC’s blog entitled “How to turn a trip to the dentist into cash…” Intrigued? Check it out!
http://www.dzc-books.co.uk/#!how-to-turn-a-trip-to-the-dentist-into-c/cch4
Love
Ingrid xxx
P.S. Fingers crossed The Tunnel Betwixt… should be live and available for sale by Monday…
Book Review: Dark Messages by Daniel J Weber
A Review by Lenora
Daniel J Weber is a Canadian writer of horror fiction, and something of an international man of mystery. You can find our more about what makes Daniel tick on our Indie and Proud page.
Dark Messages a short story anthology by Daniel J Weber
Dark Messages is small volume containing 6 tales of horror, fantasy and allegory many addressing issues of self-esteem.
The first thing I should say is that this is a very short collection, coming in at only 42 pages, but oh what pages! Weber takes the reader on a rollercoaster of a ride, intense, surreal, visceral even visionary at times. Yes, he uses some visceral horror, but a lot of the horror stems from the mind, how people perceive themselves, how they react to each other and their environment.
The first story, Undying Memories, depicts a grieving mother trapped in side her own grief and memories. She appears as lost as her dead son, lying trapped beneath the waters of a lake. The forest setting and the allegorical and yet dangerous wolf that stalks her, and the timeless quality of this story, created the atmosphere of a claustrophobic fairy tale where there would be no happy endings.
A Mile in My Shoes was another almost surreal tale of a man who inherits a collection of shoes and finds he can ‘feel’ the lives of those who wore them. From the emptiness of his grandfather and his dead-mans’ shoes, to the shoes of a lost and dispossessed boy, until he finds the shoes that really fit, and brings the story full circle.
My favourite story was Master of Death. This was a surreal story where the narrator/observer watches a tattered man struggling through the desert in a final battle of wills with death. The story is as wild and intense as the desert wind that whips through it, with Breughel-esque imagery repleat with lakes of blood. My other favourite tale was They Know Not What they do, an emotional re-imagining of the crucifixion complete with warring demons scenting victory as the failed Saviour doubts himself on the cross. Doubt, fear, redemption – it’s all there!
In fact as well as self-esteem, one of the predominant themes in this collection was the power of death, always stalking you, seldom bested – a suitably dark message.
Occasionally the stories were a little over-blown, and occasionally a bit opaque in their message, but overall I think this represents a very strong, thoughtful and gripping collection of tales, told in a very vivid and at times quite moving style. I was quite disappointed that there were only 6 stories in the collection – I could easily have read more.
All in all a great short read!
Dark Messages by Daniel J Weber is available on Amazon:
