Day 18 – Advent Calendar and Kindle Giveaway
NOTE: 9 AM PST ON DECEMBER 21ST IS THE CUT-OFF TIME FOR ENTERING THE KINDLE CONTEST.
Happy December 18th! The Kindle contest only has a couple of days left. Here's how it works: you nominate a friend/family member/coworker/etc. who you think needs a Kindle (tell us why they need/deserve one!) I'll be collecting entries until 9 am PST on December 21st and then a winner will be chosen and the person nominated and the one who nominated them will both receive a Kindle! You only have to nominate a person once but you can nominate different people on different days if you want to. All you have to do to enter is comment on one of the Advent Calendar posts between now and then. But there are also daily giveaways of cool stuff too! Daily winners will be selected from that day's comments.
Yesterday's winner of an Amazon gift card is Sarah L. Congratulations! To enter today's giveaway, just comment below. Today's goodie is some trivia about some of my books. I call it connections and coincidences. Today's winner will receive a $10 gift certificate to another of my favorite online retailers: Ebay.
Connections and Coincidences
My first retold fairy tale was Midnight Pearls which is the Little Mermaid story. A large, black pearl plays a key role in the story. A few months after the book came out Pirates of the Carribean: the Curse of the Black Pearl hit theaters and my husband and I laughed because outside of Polynesia you never hear about black pearls that often. This past summer we went to see the fourth Pirates movie which actually featured mermaids and it made us smile again.
When signing books at my first Comic-Con I was sitting next to a fellow writer. We got to talking and realized we both had pitched a story to the exact same editor at Simon & Schuster within the past month. Both of us had pitched retellings of Little Red Riding Hood which featured an actual werewolf playing the part of the wolf who was also the love interest for Red. One key difference was mine was set in a fairy tale setting and his was a modern day story. We had never met before and yet we were stunned at some of the similarities between our books.
It was while working on Scarlet Moon that my editor left the company and another one was assigned to me to finish the book. She was also the Charmed editor and she bought Charmed: Pied Piper from me. (Which has the character of Piper suddenly being the Pied Piper of children and deals with the Pied Piper fairy tale.) Because I had written a Charmed Novel I was invited to write an essay for an anthology dealing with the television series. I wrote mine on fairy tale elements in the show.
Of course writing these two things for Charmed was great fun because my parents were fans of the television show and because I had just finished writing the Wicked series with Nancy Holder (which is all about witches). And I'm not done with witches because my new series, Witch Hunt, is coming soon. The first book, The Thirteenth Sacrifice, hits stores April 3rd and deals with a woman who was raised in an evil coven and escaped. She became a Christian and a police officer and now is forced to go back in undercover which threatens her life and challenges her faith. Yeah, Christians and witches, I went there. The book is coming out as a secular book even though it has a strong Christian character as the lead.
Of course, I love doing the unexpected, which is why my Kiss Trilogy, starting with Kiss of Night, is about Christians and vampires. This one is for the Christian market.
Other connections – the Sweet Seasons series and the Psalm 23 Mysteries both take place in the fictional California town of Pine Springs. I have been planning for a couple of years to do a crossover of these two series. A future Psalm 23 Mystery will have characters from Sweet Seasons in it.
We mention the existence of Cursed Ones in the fifth Wicked book, Resurrection. They are vampires. The Cursed Ones are the villains for the Crusade series. The prequel to the series is a short story called Passing which was in an anthology and which is now available by itself as an ebook. The Crusade series has a werewolf as a key character. Wolf Springs Chronicles is all about werewolves. While Wicked is like Romeo and Juliet with witches, Wolf Springs Chronicles is like King Lear with werewolves. Don't look for an overt Shakespeare theme in Crusade, though, since it's patterned more off of events of World War II.
And for the final connection I'm going to mention (though certainly not the last there is), for a guest blog post on the Damned blog tour for the Crusade series, I wrote a ghost story dealing with our werewolf from Crusade and the fairy tale character of Little Red Riding Hood.
