Shiloh Walker's Blog, page 18

A day in the life of my spam filter… or some such nonsense.

So did you hear about the *massive* security breach at Facebook?

Like fifty million (FIFTY MILLION) users were affected. I’m on the fence, daily, about deleting my page. I hardly ever use my personal one, but I do use it to keep in touch with my two kids are either completely out of the house or mostly. My author page…well, that’s work related and harder to cut out.

Anyway, I went to see if they’d sent out notifications and checked my spam filter, since a lot of facebook notifications go there.

Nothing from facebook, but I’ll have you know…

I’m worth at least $90 million at this point, thanks to kind strangers from Nigeria and Nambia and several other countries where I know absolutely nobody. As soon as I’m in contact with them, they’ll forward instructions on how to claim my funds.
I also have the biggest penis and some lovely ladies really want me.
Conversely, I need blue pills because my erection is waning
I must immediately contact the FBI, the Surrogate Court of NEW YORK, USA (is that even a thing), the IRS and the CIA (the CIA and surrogate courts are both new)

Oh.  And I owe like a bajillion people who emailed me through my website emails.

Because my spam filter apparently decided to start considering website contacts as *spam*.

Most of my writing today has either been tweets or something along the lines of…

Hi…

I’m so sorry this took so long. (My spam filter ate this).

Thanks for writing.  (I hate my spam filter). 

To address your comment…question….etc…etc…etc… (Did I mention I hate my spam filter?) 

Again, thanks so much for writing.  (Spam sucks.)

Best, Shiloh/JC.

 

…. Ugh. I really do hate spam.

Anyway, if you’ve emailed me and haven’t heard back, you might want to email again. Try shilohwalker at gmail.com (no spaces) instead of the form.

BTW, thanks for all the supportive emails and messages I’ve gotten about the post regarding the Kit series. I very much appreciate it.

The post A day in the life of my spam filter… or some such nonsense. appeared first on Shiloh Walker.

The next Grimm book is out!

LOCKED IN SILENCE
GRIMM’S CIRCLE BOOK 5

Dying is hard enough. Coming back to life is brutal.

Vanya has been hunting and killing demons ever since one of them scarred her face and killed her sister. Correction—since she was forced to kill the demon possessing her sister.

Then some sort of angel offers her a deal she can’t refuse—that if she becomes one of them, she gets to kill even more demons. Tonight, she’s made that choice. The death she smells on the air will be her own—and she welcomes it.

Silence feels a darkness is looming. Change—something he has every reason not to welcome. The deeply hidden memories that robbed him of his past, of his own name, render him unfit to teach anyone the ways of the Grimm. Yet here he is in the dankest sex club in town, waiting to assume his charge—after he stands by and watches her die.

When Vanya awakes, their complicated, dangerous dance begins. And so does something else—a searing need that blisters along their unexpected mental connection. Silence shouldn’t be drawn to his student, but once they touch, he can’t think of a reason to stop. Even though acting out their darkest desires puts them in more danger than they realize.

Warning: This book contains sex-starved demons, lonely angels, demon-angel sandwiches, blood, violence, death and a happy-ever-after. ​

Amazon |iBooks| Kobo| Smashword

Somewhere in that was his human.

Somebody he was to teach. To train.

After, of course, he’d let him or her die.

This wasn’t going to be a fun night.

He broke in through the fourth-floor window.

The punch of their power was stronger here—a lot stronger. It was an arousing, uncomfortable itch that flowed over his skin and stiffened his cock even as it made him wish he had a swimming pool of bleach he could go immerse himself in. That might be enough to clear their noxious power from his pores, but he didn’t think so.

At least he no longer had that overpowering effect where he felt like he had to have sex or die—he was immune to that much, at least. Still, he hated succubae, incubae. Damn parasites. Sexual ticks—worse. And there was never just a couple of them because they didn’t like to travel in small groups—always had to be in large groups. The weaker ones—the drones—siphoned energy from their lovers and they fed their stolen power to their leader.

It was a living, breathing orgy—an unclean one.

As he made his way through the darkness and silence of the top floor, he drew his axe. Absently, he stroked a thumb along the blade—lightly. Wouldn’t do to draw blood. Not this close. They couldn’t hear him unless he made noise, and he wouldn’t. They couldn’t sense him—the Grimm were naturally able to dampen their presence. But drawing blood around a demon—might as well do it in shark-infested waters.

Of course, sharks were a quicker, cleaner way to go.

He extended his senses, focusing. How many…

One. Two—eight. Ten.

He could handle those odds.

And the human—female.

He winced automatically. He’d hoped for a man. He didn’t want to train a woman—didn’t want to stand by and watch a woman die, either.

A soft voice, low and husky, drifted up. It was a nice voice, he thought. And since it didn’t make his eardrums shudder, cringe and long for more Clorox, he already knew whose it belonged to—his human.

“I’ve got a better idea—why don’t you just bite me?”

He snorted and shook his head. Bad words to say to a sex demon—anything that could be taken remotely sexual, they would.

Somebody laughed, and the sound of it made his skin crawl. Worse, the power he felt throb in the air was strong.

The queen—his human was talking to the queen.

Edging to the railing, he peered out of the shadows down to the lower level. It was set up to resemble something like a porn scene. Beds, several of them. A rack that looked part medieval torture device and sex toy—although why a person would willingly go on that, he didn’t know. He’d done his time on the real rack and there wasn’t anything one could say that would get him back on one, no matter the sexual enticement offered.

His sexual tastes might sometimes run to the perverse, but a rack? No. Just…no. Looking at it, even thinking of seeing his human on it was enough to make him want to use one of his larger axes and hack it into splinters.

His human was being backed up, closer and closer to it.

She had a knife in her hand—long, closer to a sword than a knife, but it wasn’t going to do much good against that many of the demonic. The bodies the succubae and incubae possessed became stronger, and even if she could hold her own against a couple…well, ten was too much to ask of any mortal.

Still, there was something about the way she held it that made him think she knew how to use it.

Demons didn’t like pain more than anybody else, and they could be killed—not the way mortals could, but if she dealt a killing blow, their souls would be sucked back to the netherplains. It weakened them, and if they survived, it would take them a good long while to try to cross back over into this world.

Sometimes, they did die. Silence planned to kill the lot of them tonight.

“Come on, precious,” one of them said, giving her a charming, seductive smile. “Put the knife down. You came out here looking for a good time, right?”

She gave him a smile in return. “Well…yes. But my idea of a good time is going to be very different from yours. You see, my idea of a good time is to kill as many of you as I can before I die. I’m already up to two.” She spun the blade and cocked a brow. “Who’s next?”

Despite himself, Silence smiled.

She had guts. More…she knew what was coming. How strange. Odd, that. Perhaps Will had prepared her a bit more than Silence had expected.

One of them lunged for her. She swayed to the side and her knife was a silver flash in the air.

Silence smelled blood in the air. He slid his axe into place and gathered his shadows.

Then he steadied himself. In another few minutes, he’d have to watch her die.

 

The post The next Grimm book is out! appeared first on Shiloh Walker.

Update on the Status of The Kit Colbana Series

I probably should have posted this a couple of months ago. Summer was…hectic.  My oldest, Diva, moved to Colorado for good. My son was accepted into an on-campus high school for the gifted & talented. Basically, this was our last summer together, all five of us and the guy and I tried to do as much together with them as we could.

Plus, I’ve been hoping my brain would kick in. Bear with me, because this isn’t a simple explanation. The tl;dr version…yes, I plan on finishing the Kit series. I just…need time.

Some of you already know that in 2017, I went through a personal loss.

In January 2017, one of my younger brothers was diagnosed with severe depression and bi-polar disorder. He’d been struggling with things for sometime, but at that point, he was on a clear spiral downward.

The next few months were rough and in April, things got really bad. Although I hoped and prayed I wrong, although the guy and I talked and we could both see what was coming, although we tried, although others tried to get him to accept help, nothing worked.

My brother carried a well of pain in him that was just more than he could handle. That pain wasn’t all of him–he could be funny and sweet and a million other things. But he hurt, too.

In May, he took his own life.

As you can probably imagine, it’s had a devastating effect on the entire family, both mentally and physically.

It hit my kids very hard. When they were younger, before things started to dissolve, our two families, my kids and his kids, were very close.  The kids still are-possibly even closer now in some ways. Losing their uncle was the first loss they’d ever experienced and it was brutal. It continues to be hard, creeping up on you when you least expect it.

For me, personally, my own struggles with depression worsened drastically and I made the unwise, but necessary, choice to quash the matter because I was juggling to deal with everything going on with my kids and trying to help my sister-in-law and my niece and nephew.

The depression simply got worse. My writing began to suffer. I do freelance writing now to supplement my income and that is one area where I’m not struggling, but there were weeks that would go by when I couldn’t write for myself if I had to.

I didn’t want to read. I’d spent hours watching movies or just surfing the internet.  That isn’t particularly helpful, because sometimes, it feels like the world is burning down around us.

If you’re lucky enough to have never experienced depression (and I really hope you are), it can be hard to understand how awful and miserable the daily–hourly–struggle is.  People will tell you to cheer up or to go for a walk or to just smile and things will get better.

But when you’re depressed, it can almost be like you’ve been thrown into a bottomless pool and you’re trying to swim to the top and each time you make just a little progress, somebody throws a ten pound weight, a twenty pound weight, a fifty pound weight down at you. You know you’re drowning and you have to get to the surface, but you can’t.  Telling somebody in that situation to smile, or go for a walk or cheer up really isn’t helpful. But you can imagine how often I’ve had people tell me.  (Rolls eyes).

That’s how I’ve felt for more than a year. I was grieving and the depression complicated everything. Or maybe the grief complicated the depression. There have been financial concerns, other stressors that I’m not even going to consider going into detail about and on top of it all, I was having trouble writing, then when things finally got a little better, it all turned into shit again because what I had written wasn’t going anywhere.

I submitted a partial for a romance series, the final book in my Barnes Brothers series, and the publisher passed on it and my agent ending up dropping me because I wasn’t making any new sales. There were a few other things I tried that fizzled out.

There have even been a few days I considered just putting up my laptop and giving up on the writing thing.

But I didn’t. Partly because I have a steady stream of income with my freelance stuff.  My freelance work has kept me going at times, professionally, next to nothing else could.

Then, out of the blue, because of the infamous #COCKYGATE bullshit, for the first time in ages, something really inspired me to want to write again.

And with that came the desire to read again. I’ve glommed on old favorites from Nalini Singh, and a series I’d been holding on, Ilona Andrews’ Hidden Legacy, I pretty much devoured all of them in three days. I devoured A Princess in Theory by Alyssa Cole. I left the house to go see movies… Ant-Man and the Wasp, BlacKKKlansmen, Crazy Rich Asians, Searching.

Now… how does any of this add up to Kit?

I’ve stopped and started her book so many times, I’ve lost count. A few months ago, I realized why I’m having so much trouble with her book–and with some of the suspenses I’ve started only to push aside.

I write a variety of books.  I’ve got my contemporary books like the Barnes Brothers which are lighter, fun and easy. Then I’ve got books like the Ash series, my FBI Psychics…and Kit, that are darker. Kit, especially, puts me in a darker place, I think partly because it’s first person and because she’s been through so much.

Going knowingly into a darker frame of mind when my depression is already spiking is something I try to avoid, but I hadn’t consciously thought about the way writing certain books affects my mood, or anything else until recently. Then it hit me.

I think my subconsciousness kicked into play here and has been protecting me from approaching certain types of stories while the wounds in my mind and on my soul are still so raw.

The next Kit book is going to be a rough one.  I don’t think it will be Night Blade rough, but I know it’s going to be emotional and dark and I need to make sure I’m steady enough to handle it.

I will write that next book. I’m frustrated with myself that it’s taking me so long and I know I’ve disappointed my readers. I hate that and I’m sorry.

I just need a bit more time to get my head in a healthy place before I can do it.

I hope you understand.

The post Update on the Status of The Kit Colbana Series appeared first on Shiloh Walker.

World Suicide Prevention Day

It’s World Suicide Prevention Day.

I don’t want to talk a whole lot about it. To say that days like today hit home would be understating it.

It has been one year, three months and ten days since my brother took his own life.

He had recently been diagnosed as bipolar and he suffered from severe depression. He, like a lot of other people with such mental health issues, had been self medicating with drugs and alcohol, and that only made matters worse.

His mental illness was only part of him. He was funny and goofy and he loved his kids and his wife and his family and he didn’t put up with bullshit. He worked himself to the bone, so hard that he’d already torn his back up and he wasn’t even forty. He’d do work for local churches and never charge a dime.

He could draw like an angel and swear like a devil.

And he was sick. His demons got to be too much for him in the end.

People are going to do a lot of talking about warning signs and what to do if you feel like you’re at the end of your rope.  If you’re in that spot or if somebody you love is in that spot, pay attention.  Reach out if you need help.  Help is  there. Hope is there.  You’re not alone, not matter how much it feels that way.

But on the flipside…there are also people like me.  People who are thinking about those they lost to suicide.  People who saw the signs, who tried to do something.

There were signs with my brother.  He talked about doing it. We knew he was sick.  We tried to get help for him.

And sometimes…it doesn’t work. If you’ve been in that place…be kind to yourself.  I’m still struggling with guilt, with regret, with anger. That struggle will probably continue the rest of my life.  I guess it’s normal.

Below is a list of suicide hotline numbers for various countries, list from International Bipolar Foundation.

Argentina: +5402234930430

Australia: 131114

Austria: 017133374

Belgium: 106

Bosnia & Herzegovina: 080 05 03 05

Botswana: 3911270

Brazil: 212339191

Canada: 5147234000 (Montreal); 18662773553 (outside Montreal)

Croatia: 014833888

Denmark: +4570201201

Egypt: 7621602

Estonia: 3726558088; in Russian 3726555688

Finland: 010 195 202

France: 0145394000

Germany: 08001810771

Holland: 09000767

Hong Kong: +852 2382 0000

Hungary: 116123

India: 8888817666

Ireland: +4408457909090

Italy: 800860022

Japan: +810352869090

Mexico: 5255102550

New Zealand: 0800543354

Norway: +4781533300

Philippines: 028969191

Poland: 5270000

Portugal: 21 854 07 40/8 . 96 898 21 50

Russia: 0078202577577

Spain: 914590050

South Africa: 0514445691

Sweden: 46317112400

Switzerland: 143

United Kingdom: 08457909090

USA: 18002738255

Veterans’ Crisis Line: 1 800 273 8255/ text 838255

 

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The Psychics are on sale…

The FBI Psychics are on sale. At least a couple of them…

Amazon selected The Unwanted & The Innocent to be Kindle Monthly Deals… you can get them for 0.99!!

Check it out!

The Innocent • Amazon | Kobo |iBooks

The Unwanted • Amazon | Kobo |iBooks

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Do you Radish? If so…

There’s a story out there that you probably haven’t read.

I tried an experiment a few years ago, but due to numerous factors…inability to put time into it, miscommunicating on marketing, etc… the experiment didn’t go as planned.

I kept meaning to do something else with it, but just never had the time.  Then I get an invite to a new reading platform called Radish. So I put Thirty Nights With a Dirty Boy up there, then decided I’d tried this one too…under my name.

THE VIRGIN: REVENGE I was seventeen when I met Drake Gallagher. Seventeen, naïve, foolish…and in love. Or so I thought. That summer, and the months that followed, set the course of my life. Ten years later, I’m still struggling to put the pieces of me back to together. It’s time to stop struggling. It’s time to take control…and maybe, it’s time for a little revenge. He doesn’t have time for naïve little virgins? Well, I’m not naïve anymore.

Radish delivers books in short, serial fiction, so it won’t appeal to everybody.  But if you like that sort of thing, you can check it out here.

And yes, I will get out on other platforms as time allows. 

Stay away from my HEA.

Why are there people in the reading/writing world determined to mess with the happy world of romanceland?

We don’t ask for a whole lot.

Okay, well, sometimes we do.

We want decent covers.

We want people to stop it with the, oh… you read those?

We want there to be an end to all heroines who are TSTL.

We want fun stories, sexy stories, silly stories, intriguing stories, good stories, dangerous stories.

We want stories that reflect who we are… nerdy and not, country girl and city chick, skinny, fat, black, white, Asian, Latina, straight, gay, queer.

Oh.  And one other thing.

We want our HEA.  That’s non-negotiable.

Sorry, but these people who try to stomp into the genre and insist that the idea of the HEA is antiquated or out-dated or something that needs to be challenged… guys, you need to just stop.  Go find your own genre.  And be very happy with it.  We wish you well. Seriously.  And hey, we might even read some your books…as long as you don’t go misleading us and calling the book a romance.

But you can’t mess with the romance genre’s specifications.

They exist for a very specific reason.

They are part of the author/reader contract.  That’s just all there is to it.

If you buy a mystery, you are guaranteed a mystery.

If you buy a historical fiction, you’re guaranteed a historical fiction.

If you buy SF or UF, you’re guaranteed a book with either speculative fiction or PNR elements.

If you buy a romance, you’re guaranteed a book with that promised HEA.

If you buy a mystery, you’d feel duped if you got comedic non-fiction look at the modern world of entymology (especially if you hate bugs)

If you buy a historical fiction, you’d feel duped if you got contemporary medical fiction.

If you buy SF or UF, you’d feel duped if you ended up with a story about a farmer trying to make it during the Great Depression.

And if you buy a romance, expecting that promised HEA, you have every right to feel duped if what you get is one of the main characters killed off or the heroine reminiscing about how she hadn’t found Mr. Right this time…but she would next time.  Because Mr. Right was supposed to be in this story…it was a romance!

These are not my definitions.

These are not definitions made up by romance fandoms or book clubs. These are widely accepted industry defintions.

RWA’s defintion:

“An Emotionally Satisfying and Optimistic Ending: In a romance, the lovers who risk and struggle for each other and their relationship are rewarded with emotional justice and unconditional love. “

Found here.

It’s defined at Wikipedia as:

primary focus on the relationship and romantic love between two people and must have an “emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending.”

Writer’s Digest has a download–Essential Elements of Writing a Romance Novel (opens to a download) and…you guessed it.  The HEA is part of it.

This definition summarizes the four crucial basics that make up a

romance novel:

1. a hero and a heroine to fall in love

2. a problem that creates conflict and tension between them and

threatens to keep them apart

3. a developing love that is so special it comes about only once in a

lifetime

4. a resolution in which the problem is solved and the couple is

united

These aren’t conventions or even tropes meant to be challenged, although every few months, somebody will wade into waters of Romancelandia where one thing is universally clear among those who understand the genre.  Plenty of things in romance land aren’t perfect but this is one area where I think we all generally agree.

THE HAPPY-EVER-AFTER IS REQUIRED FOR THE ROMANCE GENRE.

If you don’t have it, you don’t have a romance book.  Selling a book as a romance without the HEA is misleading readers and you’re breaking the author/reader contract.

You can call it rule-breaking, you can call it challenging convention but what you’re doing is misleading the reader and disrespecting the genre, its writers and its readers. And you still don’t have a romance.You don’t get to define what a romance is.

A genre is defined not by one person or even a small group of people.  Genres are categorizations, used to help readers find books to their liking, to help publishers promote books to those readers, for booksellers, to help them recommend books and shelve and order books for their customers.

Genres are long-established devices, and they are useful.

The HEA isn’t a trope, like the older brother’s best friend, or friends to lovers, pregnant amnesia.

The HEA is the very bedrock of the romance book.

Readers pick up the romance book, knowing that at the end of it, the characters they’ve read and come to love might suffer, might go through hell, might laugh or cry or scream or just have fun, but at the end, they will be in love and happy together.

If that’s a problem for some, then romance probably isn’t your ideal genre, and that’s okay.

Litfic has plenty of love stories.  You might fit in just fine there, but you are not going to change the romance industry or the need for the HEA in romance.

The HEA isn’t optional.  We want it. We expect it. We’re entitled to that happy-ever-after.  Maybe not anywhere else, but in the pages of a romance? Yes, we’re entitled and nobody’s opinion will change what is by-and-large accepted as simple fact in romanceland.

The post Stay away from my HEA. appeared first on Shiloh Walker.

On this July 4th, may we all remember…

The post On this July 4th, may we all remember… appeared first on Shiloh Walker.

Not one, but TWO Amazon Monthly Deals… only 0.99!

For those of you out looking for a bargain (and come on…who doesn’t like a bargain?), I’ve got TWO books in Amazon’s Monthly Deals…

The Doubted → https://amzn.to/2IIAR7b 

Tarnished Knight → https://amzn.to/2MGqsv9 

 

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Time to get #cocky… update! The Cocky Cockers is now out!

For all those  following #cockygate, you might be interested!



Our new anthology is now out…

What do you get when you cross cocky heroes and heroines with Cocker Spaniels? Why, Cocky Cockers, of course.

All the stories in this anthology feature a Cocker Spaniel and a happily-ever-after (or happy-for-now) ending. How they get there? Well, that’s all the fun!

Warning: The stories in this anthology run the gamut from G to NC-17 ratings and include examples of nearly every subgenre–including contemporary, historical, paranormal, and steampunk–as well as m/f, m/m, and f/f pairings.

Proceeds from this anthology will first be used to defray any legal costs associated with its publication, and secondarily donated to the Romance Writers of America’s Benevolence Fund.

My short story in the anthology is FOREVER COCKY, the first story in upcoming series, “THE COCHRANS OF COCKER COUNTY.

Amazon

Other buy links will be posted as they come available!

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