R.M. Ridley's Blog, page 11

Is this irony?

So yesterday was the second day of real issues with the furnace over night.

I dug out 80% of the ashes and found most of that was the consistency of a milkshake. Now even with wet green wood that seemed like a lot. This isn’ the first year dealing with green wood – or wet wood. When��I went back a few hours later and found water on the bottom of the inside compartment I got a bad bad bad feeling.

So I marked the level of the water table inside the boiler —-

Today, roughly 24hrs later, I checked that level – it’s down noticeably… and it sure as hell didn’t boil off.

So now I am busting my ass, breaking my back, and freezing my extremities to get wood for a enclosed fire that has water leaking into it constantly.

I think I’ll let Mr. Kershaw finish off this post

Filed under: Homesteading

I’m alive …ish

There has been silence from me on this blog of mine.

I have been busy trying to keep up on the wood needed to heat the house and too exhausted afterwards to do anything but slump onto the couch. That has been my life, really, for almost two weeks. This is getting harder as the snow plies high, and the temperature drops into dangerously cold levels

The only deviation in this is that I have rejoined the SCA (society for creative anachronism) ��and thus there is, in my breast, the desire to begin creating work of art in jewellery form. But – time ….

 

I haven’t – much to my chagrin and pain – written in over two weeks. This seems like some sort of cheat as my anthology comes out in less than a month. On March, Friday the 13th, a new book with my name on it is birthed into the world. As it is a collection of all my short stories, this is a brand new sort of anxiety I face.

To top off my current life struggle (ignoring that it is my usual bipolar cycle time) I managed to break the tip of my right ring finger. It’s amazing how often that part of the body comes in contact with — with, well, everything!

So in pain, distress, and anoyance I move forward dreaming of a day were the tempurature stays above the freezing mark

Filed under: Book Release, Homesteading, Mental Health, MIscellaneous, Publishing, Writing Tagged: anthology, bipolar, Brain, crazy, cycle, frustration, heat, Jonathan Alvey, Mental Health, paranormal, paranormal private investigator, publish, short story, Urban Fantasy, White Dragon Black Series, wierd thoughts, winter, wood, writing, Xchyler Publishing

Update on the Writing Side of Life

I have managed the last two days to get in decent morning writing sessions. Redemption’s Child progresses and I’ve reach the first real ‘excitement’ scene. I hope that from this point on the tension, and action just keep escalating. This novel promises to be both very entertaining to me to write, and yet challenging as well.

As I see it, the breathing spaces in the story should come further, and further, apart and be shorter, and shorter, each time. A rising pace through out the novel, that – hopefully – had the reader flicking the pages towards the climax with greater enthusiasm and need.

A story can’t be all action, without some pauses, it simply becomes too much – almost boring –��I plan to keep this ��in mind as I go. There is also��an emotional aspect, regarding what my protagonist is going through, as the story progresses, that needs to be shown. This will help both give small breaks in the action while��giving more impact and tension during��the action scenes.

I’m worried about my portrayal of the child that Jonathan is watching over. I don’t have much exposure to children in my life, and thus don’t have real world experience to draw on. I do expect ��that anything which rings too false or contrary, will be brought to my attention by my beta-reader as she does have such experiences to compare to.

For now, as always, I write. I write without judging or worrying. I write the tale as it is shared with me by my Muse – all other aspects will be dealt with when the novel is edited.

Filed under: Writing Tagged: beta reader, characters, children, current work in progress, edits, Jonathan Alvey, muse, novel, paranormal, paranormal private investigator, plot, readers, Redemption's Child, Urban Fantasy, White Dragon Black Series, world building, writing

January 31, 2015 — Toll of Another Bell

 

 

COMING JANUARY 31, 2015

Filed under: Writing

So That Was Yesterday

Our truck has some issues with starting, there are a number of linked reasons this is probably occurring which I’m going to try to attend to come next month (next pay period). The odd part is the majority of the time she won’t start if the trip is based on my wife’s need to go somewhere and will start if it’s because I need to go somewhere.

Wednesday: wife needs to go to appointment – no start.

Thursday: I need to go get chicken food – starts okay.

Friday: wife needs to go to her mother’s place – no start.

Later Friday: I need to go out for ….well we’ll get to that – starts okay.

So this is yesterday –

First I get a good writing session in on the new novel. That makes the day start off great, as I haven’t been able to have my morning writing session in three days, due to that four letter word – life.

but then…

The truck won’t start, meaning I can’t get my wife to her mothers, where she goes every week to clean the house (my mother-in-law is in no shape to be able to do it herself anymore). This is annoying, frustrating, and time taking. After an hour, I have to give up and my wife��reschedules for Saturday (today)

With my wife not going it changes the day. I was going to chop up the few pieces left of the wood giving enough wood to make it until Saturday. Then Saturday, when she would be home, use the chainsaw to cut more wood.

So now, instead, I need to take more time out of Friday��and cut the wood then Saturday, chop it. More time doing what I don’t want to do, and less time for what I had planned, and had been looking forward too – namely writing.

So already this day has gone from good, to not as good. All right, things change – move on, go with the flow, and adapt.

A hole was discovered in my wife’s studio wall – a large enough hole for a small cat to go out of … and obviously a lot of heat as well. I had purchased expansion insulating foam to temporarily deal with the problem but had not used it because I wanted to use the remained of the can in the craw space under the house to block another hole which lead to pipes freezing from strong, cold east winds. (yes the house is falling apart it seems). I figured, as the day wasn’t going in the direction it should, I’d tackle this project and get it off my list.

Filling the hole in her studio goes off without a hitch, if you don’t include having to make sure a kitten doesn’t get himself, or his fierce attack paws, coated in insulating foam. So then I combat crawl under the house. I use the remainder of the foam, and am turning to crawl out, when I notice that there is water trickling off the water pipe.

I discover it is coming from the plastic couple which joins the bit of remaining copper line to the PEX I installed a few years ago. I don’t know if it was leaking before I got down there or if I hit it and caused what was clearly an already weak piece to break. It didn’t matter at that point the outcome was the same – I had to fix it.

Now not only was I not going to get any more writing in today, it seemed as though I wasn’t going to get much wood cutting done (no wood = no heat = more issues than I care to think about including more pipe issues).

I crawled out, turned of the water at the pump house, and searched my plumbing supplies for something to replace the broken bit. As luck would have it, I did. I grabbed the tools to attach the piece and crawled back under the house, where I discovered the piece was 5/8ths and the pipe was 1/2 inch.

So I crawled back out, slightly damper than I had gone in.

Now I needed to go to the closest town and buy a piece. But would the truck start?

She did – almost no problem. So I drove to town and, with the help of the employees, got��the piece I would need to fix the issue. It is a device that slides onto the pipe and then clamps hold – really the only way to attach copper to PEX. Just as I was walking away the man pointed out that the device was reusable. He showed my the $2 and change little piece of plastic designed to slip over the pipe and add in releasing the connector device from the pipe. ��As I didn’t I didn’t plan on needing to take it off (since I was getting it to fix a problem that wasn’t going to go away without the connector) I thanked him for telling me about it, bought the connecting device and drove home.

Once more I crawled under the house. I connected the two pipes pieces with the device I had just bought, and went out and turned on the water. Then, once more, I crawled back under to make sure everything was working. As soon as I got to the entrance point to the crawlspace, I knew something was wrong. I could hear water. What I didn’t know – just what was wrong. So I crawled back under (did I mention this is not easy, a combat crawl dodging pipes and fitting through narrow spaces) and across the much wetter space to get to the joint.

It is spewing water! A three foot geyser��shooting out of the place where the device is attached to the copper pipe.

It was the PEX pipe side that had been the original problem. ~sigh~ (actually I used a whole bunch of four letter words and not one of them was ‘sigh’)

I crawl back out and much wetter this time, turn the water off, then I crawl back under again to try and take off the device so that I can put it back on, assuming I just hadn’t snugged it firm enough agains the copper pipe. (don’t know how that would be possible but it seemed the likely issue)

Remember that little tool?

Yeah – I finally gave up trying all sorts of different techniques to remove the device and, with an aching back, a kinked neck, and wet clothes, and a mood to make Genghis Khan look like a peacenik, crawled back out from under the house.

I grabbed my wallet, phone, keys, and squelched back out to the truck. The truck started with little issue, and I drove, with gnashing teeth and foul words, back to town. I grabbed the tool and the guy suggested I buy a second device, incase I have to cut the pipe and find myself not having enough to connect. I could use the second to insert another short length of pipe, bridging the gap. Sounds like an idea to me, and if I don’t need it, it can go into the plumbing supplies.

I drive home, I empty my pockets, I crawl back under the house. I use the tool – which, although I used in the store on the practice piece with no problem – which doesn’t seem to want to work. Finally I get the pipe out from the device and a piece of the internal mechanism of the device (which goes inside both ends of the pipes and where the water flows) goes popping off into the muddy water. It wasn’t that I had not put it on right – it was that the piece had broke.

I manage to get the device off the other end of the pipe -the PEX side – only to discover the other side of the broken piece is still jammed inside the PEX piping. I curse, I try to pry it out with my teeth, I finally give up. I’m going to have to cut the PEX just below the broken insert. But – do I have enough total length to make the cut and still connect the pipes with one device?

Turns out I have enough with a hair’s length, maybe two, to spare. So I take out the pipe cutting tool, I’ve had in my pocket since the second trip under and cut the PEX. Now the pipe cutting tool, is a circular blade set in a device that can be slowly tightened, you spin the device around the pipe, the blade cuts in and you tighten it and turn, tighten, urn , tighten – and then the pipe is cut. It works great on copper pipe, on PEX, which is bendy and soft… not so much. So the first two attempts are failures and with each one, I have to move where I’m cutting back just a little, but I can’t go too far or the pipe won’t connect. Finally I get a clean cut.

I attach the new connector. I crawl out from under the house, I go tot he pump house, I trun on the water, I crawl back under the house. I don’t hear anything but that doesn’t mean it isn’t leaking so I have to crawl all the way there.

It’s dry, well the pipe and connector everything else, including me, is not.

I crawl out. I go into the house and stripping off the wet clothes tell my wife I’m going to the neighbourhood diner to get myself a burger, should I grab her one to. She says yes. I put on dry clothes and go out to the truck…

which refuses to start.

I come in. pour myself a shot of whiskey, down it, and then spend the next half hour listening to music so I don’t go rampaging about with an axe, destroying everything I lay eyes on.

When I manage to get some control over the worst of my mental state. When I wrestle myself from the brink of a total mental snap. I went back out to the living room and suggested we watch some Doctor Who.

Yesterday was a whisper away from my complete break down, shut down, and melt down.

Today– today I’m feeling the effects or yesterday. Anyone with mental issues knows that there are ripples from the bad days. These ripples from the cause, create more bad days, slowly easing off to whatever ‘level’ is at that time . . . unless something else happens to disturb the control, and then the ripples from the new add to the ripples of the old and create something bigger than either of the originals.

I am afraid I can already see the next cause – it’s right there and created by yesterday’s issues. I simply don’t know if I’m going to have ‘levelled’ before this issues disturbs��my daily life.

All I want is to write – I need to write. It is my therapy, my grounding, my escape. Days like yesterday though make even that hard. I wrote this, but it is a recording of what happened, it isn’t a release of creativity, it isn’t escape. But because of yesterday I don’t – my brain – I am disturbed too much to find that way into my world of fantasy.

All I can do is try to resume some normalcy; grasp at the common and hope it all settles.

Filed under: Homesteading, Mental Health Tagged: antisocial, Bi-polar, Brain, control, cycle, drive, escape, frustration, Mental Health, pipes, plumbing, truck, water, whiskey, wife, wood, writing

Lights Out – Check It Out!

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LIGHTS OUT by Melissa Groeling

Genre: Suspense/Thriller


Page Count: 388

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Synopsis:

Even when the lights are out, he can still see you���

Paul Holten���s profession doesn���t leave much room for doubt or conscience but he���s reaching his breaking point. The nightmares are getting worse, the jobs are getting harder to finish and the volatile relationship with his boss, Aaron, is falling apart. Now faced with the possibility of an impending death sentence, Paul makes the fatal decision to run. Drawn into one hellish situation after another, he���s forced to confront his dark past—and wonder if perhaps dying isn���t the better option.

ADD TO GOODREADS




Purchase Links:

 

Amazon US | Amazon UK | Barnes & Noble | Smashwords







About the Author

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Melissa Groeling graduated from Bloomsburg University with a degree in English. She lives, reads and writes in the Philadelphia region and wherever else life happens to send her. She is a hardcore New York Giants fan and loves chocolate. Lights Out is her second novel to date.

 

Author Links:

 

Facebook | Twitter | Website

 

Giveaway:
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Filed under: Book Release

Creeping In-Thoughts of a Different World

For the last few years my writing life has been firmly planted in the world of Jonathan Alvey. A reality close to this one, but with addition of magic and monsters that a portion of the population knows about. This world is where my brain exists. From novels to short stories, if I’m writing–or even just contemplating possibilities–it is in Alvey world.

This wasn’t always true. Years ago my brain was firmly set in another world. Still urban fantasy, but more along the lines of Charles de Lint than … well, I’ve been told Jim Butcher. I wrote two and a half novels and a number of short stories in this other world. I loved that world, it was fun in it’s own right.

And while I was still dancing with the fairies of that world, a darker, weirder, place got birthed in my brain. A world of the dead, of ash and bone, and – yes – magic. I started a novel based in this world, and had whispers of short stories floating in my mind.

All of this got put aside once I finished that first short story with Jonathan Alvey. With the birth of the White Dragon Black world, all others were laid to a long rest–until recently.

Just over the last couple months, that darker world has stirred. The land of the dead is calling to me and I’m not sure what to do.

Not including ‘Redemption’s Child’, which I have just begun, I still have five more novels set in the WDB to write. I assume there will also be the two, or three, short stories per year as well. I don’t want to leave this world. There is in me a fear that if I step away, I will somehow lose this strong connection, this deep understanding of Alvey, and my ability to channel his world.

And yet…

And yet, I have a strong urge to write a short story set in the that other darker land. I want to feel the ash on the wind and my fingers along the bones.

Do I risk living in one world to taste another again? Do I find out��just how good a writer I am? Do I walk that side alley or keep on this wide street? Do I challenge my brain or remain content in my accomplishments.

I honestly don’t know. My Muse may be the final arbitrator in this internal struggle. Maybe, in the end, I won’t have a choice.

Filed under: Writing Tagged: Ash and Bone, Charles de Lint, current work in progress, Jim Butcher, Jonathan Alvey, muse, novel, paranormal, plot, Redemption's Child, short story, Urban Fantasy, White Dragon Black Series, wierd thoughts, world building, writing

Romance and Intrigue: Bollywood Style!

Romance and Intrigue: Bollywood Style Giveaway
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Something Bollywood Going On Here

Sonali Dev and Susan Kaye Quinn met in a most unusual place: Library Journal’s Top 10 E-Romance List for 2014. Sonali’s A Bollywood Affair and Susan’s Third Daughter both made the list with their Bollywood-themed romances – something that was so cool, it cried out to be celebrated!

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Scroll down to win some great Bollywood-themed prizes!

Contemporary and Steampunk Bollywood Romance



[image error] A Bollywood Affair by Sonali Dev
Mili Rathod hasn?t seen her husband in twenty years?not since she was promised to him at the age of four. Yet marriage has allowed Mili a freedom rarely given to girls in her village. Her grandmother has even allowed her to leave India and study in America for eight months, all to make her the perfect modern wife. Which is exactly what Mili longs to be?if her husband would just come and claim her.

Bollywood?s favorite director, Samir Rathod, has come to Michigan to secure a divorce for his older brother. Persuading a na?ve village girl to sign the papers should be easy for someone with Samir?s tabloid-famous charm. But Mili is neither a fool nor a gold-digger. Open-hearted yet complex, she?s trying to reconcile her independence with cherished traditions. And before he can stop himself, Samir is immersed in Mili?s life?cooking her dal and rotis, escorting her to her roommate?s elaborate Indian wedding, and wondering where his loyalties and happiness lie.

Third Daughter (The Dharian Affairs #1) by Susan Kaye Quinn
[image error] The Third Daughter of the Queen wants to her birthday to arrive so she’ll be free to marry for love, but rumors of a new flying weapon may force her to accept a barbarian prince’s proposal for a peace-brokering marriage. Desperate to marry the charming courtesan she loves, Aniri agrees to the prince’s proposal as a subterfuge in order to spy on him, find the weapon, and hopefully avoid both war and an arranged marriage to a man she does not love.


Third Daughter��is the first book in the Dharian Affairs Trilogy (Third Daughter, Second Daughter, First Daughter). This steampunk-goes-to-Bollywood (Bollypunk!) romance takes place in an east-indian-flavored alternate world filled with skyships, saber duels, and lots of royal intrigue. And, of course, kissing.

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Romance and Intrigue: Bollywood Style

This short Q&A with Sonali and Susan talks about marrying for love and writing romance!

Q: Marrying for love is a modern, and in some ways Western, concept, but arranged marriages have a long and complicated history. How does your novel tackle the subject of arranged marriage?
Sue: Third Daughter is set in a fantasy world, but it?s a blend of cultures in the real one, including being an analog to India (both current day and some of the past). In the Dharian Affairs world, royal marriages have a history of being arranged for political purposes, but the general population of the countries marry for love. This leaves the titular Daughters with varying conflicts between marrying for duty and marrying for love ? some embracing their arranged marriages, some fighting against it. The marriage dynamics of the three daughters in the trilogy (Third Daughter, Second Daughter, First Daughter) drive much of the story ? along with political intrigue and skyships, of course!

Sonali: In India where I grew up arranged marriages are still very much a part of the fabric of the culture. Having said that, one of the most interesting and unique things about Indian society is how diverse it is within itself. While you still have communities and families who will give the marrying person absolutely no say in whom they marry there are those who don’t believe their parents and families have any say when it comes to whom they choose to marry or live with, and then there is the rest of the sizable population who falls somewhere between those two belief systems. In A Bollywood Affair, Mili is from a tiny village from a very orthodox family and it is perfectly natural that her family would arrange her marriage. She would expect that. It wouldn’t even strike a girl from her background that she could choose for herself. The age at which she was married isn’t usual, though, but there is a reason why her grandmother gets her married that young. As for her being in love with her husband, again, the conditioning to be devoted to your husband is so ingrained in the culture that it would be strange if someone like Mili didn’t love someone she believed was her husband.

Q: Whether set in a fantasy world or the modern one, romance is romance! There are many romance tropes ? star-crossed lovers, lovers thrown together by circumstance, enemies turned lovers ? what kind(s) of romance tropes does your novel contain?

Sue: My books are really a blend of romance and adventure, although the first book is a classic ?lovers thrown together by circumstance? as Aniri (the Third Daughter) goes undercover in accepting a marriage proposal from the barbarian prince in the north in order to spy on him and determine if his country truly has the rumored flying machine that would upend the political dynamics in both their countries.

Sonali: Although I didn’t set out to write it that way, several readers have pointed out that A Bollywood Affair is a Worldly Rake and an Ingenue Virgin trope. And now that I think about it, there’s truth to that.

Q: Are you planning on writing more romances in this story-world? If so, tell us about it!
Sue: The Dharian Affairs trilogy is complete, but I?ve enjoyed writing in this east-Indian steampunk fantasy romance world so much, I?ve decided to do a follow-on trilogy from the point of view of a new character?a female tinker who has a grand invention that may change the world, but also is caught between the spy she might love and the spy she can?t resist. Those books likely won?t be written for a year or two, but I will cycle back to writing in this world in the future!

Sonali: The Bollywood Bride comes out next year and it’s the story of a Bollywood star who comes home to Chicago after ten years to escape a scandal in Mumbai and comes face to face with the man she betrayed for stardom. And then there are two more stories I’m working on in the same series. Which isn’t a series in terms of continuity or overlapping characters but because the stories are set in the same world and either the hero or the heroine work in Bollywood.



~*~

WIN BOLLYWOOD PRIZES
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Paperback of Third Daughter (The Dharian Affairs #1)
The Dharian Affairs Trilogy in Ebook
2 Paperback copies of��A Bollywood Affair
Handwoven Pashmina shawl from India
Sticker Henna Tattoos
Indian bangles (bracelets)
(all physical prizes are US ONLY; ebook is INTERNATIONAL)

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Filed under: Book Release Tagged: A Bollywood Affair, Contemporary Romance, novel, publish, Rafflecopter giveaway, readers, Sonali Dev, Steampunk, Steampunk Bollywood, Susan Kaye Quinn, The Dharian Affairs, Third Daughter, Top 10 E-Romance, writer, writing

And Finally – I Can Write!

��I have been having one of those weeks where everything else gets in the way of doing what I want…namely writing.

I last wrote on Tuesday – then life got in the way.

On Wednesday … I – uh .. you know what? ��I don’t even remember what happened Wednesday!

 

 

Thursday I had to go and get food for the live stock, and then when I got back from that, I had to cut wood all afternoon, because my wife was going to be out of the house for most of Friday and I have a firm rule about using chainsaws when I’m alone – I don’t!

So I had to cut a lot of wood so that –

 

 

Friday, I drove my wife to where she was going (so I could have the truck) then spend the afternoon chopping up all the wood I cut the day before into usable pieces, (and throw into truck to drive them a bit closer to the furnace – not much mind you due to this damn snow).

I came in from that, peeled off my sweat soaked clothes, and being chilled, was going to run a bath to soak my poor muscles and warm up (I got hot enough to sweat and outside was cold enough��it just��turned to chilled water)

While I was standing there, in not but my underwear, I heard a strange sound. I walked about the living room trying to isolate it. When I did, I got a sinking feeling in my gut, and suspecting the worse, put on new clothes to find out…. I was right.

The water pipe that runs to the outdoor tap was leaking. Right where the pipe ran into the wall outside, it had clearly cracked.

I pulled up some of the frozen (and thus already damaged) hose and cut it off, as far from the house as I could. I melted the frozen water inside with a propane torch… it wasn’t like I could damage the hose anymore by melting it… and tried to get the water to run out into the yard instead of where it had been, along the wall and under the house. My plan worked…somewhat. The majority of the water now ran into the yard, but some was still running under the house. So the ducks were very happy and started bathing. I, on the other hand, was not.

I knew I had to go under the house, in the crawlspace, and fix the pipe. Not what I wanted to do after already wearing myself out chopping wood. I tried to tell myself I could leave it and do it tomorrow – but even I didn’t buy that.

����So I searched through the plumbing supplies I had on hand and found a tap with a compression fitting end– no soldering required. I gathered the tools needed and, with a sigh of regret, did my best combat crawl imitation and got under the house. The bad pipe was, of course, on the opposite side from the way under the house. The good news was that the entire thing wasn’t flooded. And there are styrofoam sheets under there, which when placed one on top of another, kept me from being totally soaked in the cold water. (it doesn’t freeze because heat from the pipes in the floor radiate down, as well as up, thus – in most cases – keeping the pipes under the house from freezing.)

The job got done with little trouble (a minor miracle there) and I crawled back out. I was sore, tired, and done in – time to put the sheep to bed, feed the fowls, tend��the furnace, and go get my wife.

 

 

This morning, with no leaking pipes (knock on wood), enough wood cut and chopped to last a couple days, and nowhere I had to go, I could could write … which meant -for the first time in four days- I didn’t really feel like it.

But I did it anyways. Damn right I did! Who knows what tomorrow’s going to bring!

Filed under: Writing Tagged: ducks, fowl, furnace, heat, sheep, truck, water, wife, wood, writing

New Novel for Lovers of Killers

Hourglass Heights
Author: Ian David Noakes

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Genre: Erotic, Horror, Thriller

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Word Count: 277 pages

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Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd.



Who is brutally murdering the male residents of the Hourglass Heights apartment complex? At first glance, it would appear that their spouses are the killers, but Detective Marcia Tanaka believes that a serial killer is responsible.

���Through the course of her investigation, Detective Tanaka is pulled into a world of Japanese folklore and the supernatural as she explores the darker side of relationships, sex and psyche. She must learn to defeat her own personal demons before she can defeat one that is far more sinister.

Hourglass Heights combines the mystery and suspense of a supernatural murder investigation with the intense sexual exploration usually found only in erotica.

Purchase Links:
Amazon US | Amazon UK

 

 

 

Excerpt

I glanced over my shoulder on the way to the door, curious whether Wedding-Band Man was still ogling my ass. This time he held the magazine halfway up his face, gawping at me as I left. There was no mistaking what was going through the head of this man: he wanted to fuck me before going home to his wife and family with dinner.

He held my stare as I made my way through the glass door. I turned my back on him and ventured across the parking lot.

I slid into my Honda, laid my pizza on the passenger seat and positioned my steaming coffee cup on the dashboard. I had the keys in the ignition, but something deep and strong inside stopped me from turning it. The steam misted up my windshield, but I could still make out the front of the pizzeria. He was still in there. Longing to fuck me.

I���d eaten two slices of pizza and it had started raining by the time Wedding-Band Man finally walked out. I had no idea why I had waited for him, and I had even less an idea what I was going to do next.

My hand pulled the door handle. That ���something deep and strong��� reared its ugly head again. Why didn���t I resist it? It was becoming clear in my mind what I was going to do next, and although the deep and strong was pushing me forward, something closer to the surface of my consciousness was telling me that it was wrong.

I opened the door and stepped head first into the wet night. I was only a few strides from my car before my white cotton blouse was soaked and see-through, sagging across my breasts and leaving very little to the imagination. I carried on regardless, the rapid raindrops now glancing off my saturated clothing. I stopped when headlights flashed just in front of me. He was staring at me through his windshield.

��About the Author
��

Ian David Noakes is a former projectionist who now loves writing stuff: funny stuff like Partners In Crime; Scary stuff like Hourglass Heights. And even serious stuff like Tables Turned.

As Ian had too much time on his hands with only his wife, five children, screenwriting, novel writing and Mocha drinking trips to Starbucks, he decided to train to become a behavorial therapist too.

Ian started writing his debut novel, Hourglass Heights, during the of summer of 2012 after producers were complimenting his ���dynamic writing style��� year after year, writing that would never be read more than a handful of times in a window-less office.

He completed it a year later, but during the publishing process he completed two novellas (Partners In Crime, Tables Turned), as well as his second novel, The Ancient Lawman.

Hourglass Heights has been nominated for the People���s Book PrizeTM in the U.K., and it is also a contender for the National Book Awards.

Oh, Ian also loved this review: ���Noakes knows his way around words and paints a brilliant, dark world where creatures of the night become all too real.���

–MIKE J. HULTQUIST – Author/Screenwriter (Victim, Squeal: Blood Harvest and Arena – starring Samuel L. Jackson and Kellan Lutz)


Official Facebook Page | Amazon Author Central | Official Website | Blog | Twitter



Join the Hourglass Heights Facebook event to talk with the author, Ian about his novel.
Stay and chat for some chances to win signed paperbacks and some exclusive Hourglass Heights swag on February 1st 2015

Event takes place at Noon US Central and 6pm UK time HERE.



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Filed under: Book Release Tagged: erotica, horror, Hourglass Heights, Ian David Noakes, Thriller