Mid Week Tease - Queen Bitch of the Callowwood Pack - Clarity of Hindsight

Welcome to the Weird, the Wild, & the Wicked for a new year of Mid Week Tease hosted by Sandra Bunino.

Authors: this is a great opportunity to spotlight a few lines or even a paragraph or two from a new release or backlisted title. Readers: you get to sample some delicious snippets! We’ll do our best to tease, titillate and tantalize you into the weekend.

Today I'm offering snippets from Queen Bitch of the Callowwood Pack, a paranormal romantic suspense. Julianna Morris has been chosen as a Luna candidate, the Alpha female hopeful, and Sabrina is helping her understand her Sister self, the wolf half of her. This is Julianna's first controlled shift.

The world had changed significantly. Every detail was sharper. Honeybees buzzed around the few flowers in the clearing wearing sharp jackets of gold and black while the rocks cast knife-edged shadows on individual blades of grass, waving gently in the breeze like green bristly hair. Everything seemed bigger or taller than she remembered. Even Sebrina looked down on her, though her face showed a satisfied smile.

“Very good, my daughter.” Her whisper carried like a normal voice to Julianna’s ears.

Sounds she’d been ignoring, such as the woodpecker pounding on a tree somewhere nearby or the patter of little rodent feet through the under growth, were as clear as if she’d put on headphones. She inhaled deeply and smelled the rodents and flowers and bees and the deer that had passed through this clearing earlier that morning. Sebrina’s scent wove its way into her awareness, a mixture of satisfaction, wolf, and pride. Before Julianna could savor the sights and scents, sharp surprise, sorrow, and regret tainted the air around the Paiute woman, and her smile disappeared.

Quick as lightning, the woman grabbed Julianna’s muzzle and turned her head sharply to the right, staring at her intently. Julianna had never seen herself in her wolf form so she had no idea what Sebrina was looking at, but whatever it was, the woman paled, and her hand shook where it touched Julianna’s muzzle.

Julianna whined uncertainly and thought, “What, Sebrina?”

The woman jerked as if she’d been slapped and stared at Julianna’s eyes with surprise and disbelief.

“It cannot be,” she whispered then, shaking her head in denial without letting Julianna free of her grip. “It cannot be.”

Julianna whined again. “What can’t be? I don’t understand.”

“Great Mother Moon, I never thought…to see…”

Julianna’s Sister didn’t like the scents coming from Sebrina and tucked her tail between her hind legs, trying to back away from the agonized Paiute woman. A whine full of fearful confusion escaped from Julianna’s chest, and she quailed at the loss of confidence in her inner wolf.

You must be your Sister’s leader, her protector. You must lead in your transformation from now on. It will keep you and your Sister safe. Sebrina’s instructions shot through Julianna’s awareness, and she pushed forward, taking the lead from her Sister.

Julianna tugged her head in Sebrina’s hand, pulling her lips back to bare her teeth, but the woman held fast for a few more moments. Sebrina appeared to be lost in whatever showed on Julianna’s face and the sorrow radiating from her overwhelmed her scent. Julianna’s Sister started to panic, and when Julianna growled like an animal cornered at the edge of fight or flight, Sebrina released her, dropping to her knees in the grass.

“I’m sorry, daughter, so sorry!” Sebrina wailed as she flattened her hands in the grass and placed her head between her arms until her forehead touch the ground. “I didn’t understand all those years ago, and I was afraid. Please forgive me.”

Available at Amazon | Bookstrand | Barnes & Noble | Kobo Books

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Snippet Sunday - Cloudburst Ice Magic - All for One, and One for All

Welcome to the Snippet Sunday on the Weird, the Wild, and the Wicked. Thank you so much for visiting. If you choose to comment today, I really appreciate it. The snippets are from my Cloudburst novella, Cloudburst Ice Magic, a paranormal romance sequel to Christmas I.C.E. Magic in the Happy Holidays from the Crescent Moon Lodge Anthology. Cloudburst Ice Magic is out now. You can catch last week's snippet HERE.

In this snippet, Zach made it to Lily and the hikers in time, but now they have to get out of the chute. They're out of time, and being all tied together, if the last person doesn't get out, they'll all be swept away. We're in Zach's POV.

A blast of wind and snow ripped away anything she might have said and Zach turned his attention to getting the humans out of the avalanche chute. They had no time left and while the ridge wasn’t far, it would take a fair amount of effort to reach it before noon. Zach’s Ice Demon abilities remained curtailed by his human guise, but what little leaked through allowed him to make a fairly stable path up the edge of the chute.

He and Lily crested the ridge, and he breathed a sigh of relief. They’d made it.

“I think we did it.”

Lily smiled. “Yeah, we—”

Her words cut off as a deep rumbling started upslope. Lily gasped and hauled on the rope, bringing the next person within sight through the snow.

“Fuck! Help me, Zach, we have to get the others out of there before we’re all swept with the avalanche.”

All for one, and one for all, and not in a good way. ;) There are several great authors on the Weekend Writing Warrior list and in the Snippet Sunday Facebook group. A few of my favorites are Charley Descoteaux, SJ Maylee, Gem Sivad, Goran Zidar, Veronica Scott, and Karla Doyle.

If you're interested in more from Cloudburst Ice Magic, here's the blurb:

Avalanches may bring down more than snow…

Working for the Search and Rescue team at the Cloudburst Resort in Colorado, Lily Sinclair figures she’ll do all the rescuing from now on. When hikers are caught in a spring blizzard, Lily and her partner head into the storm. Cut off from communication and facing deadly conditions, Lily fears she’ll never see her Ice Demon lover before death claims them.

Zach Snow encouraged Lily move to Cloudburst to grow and learn, but missed her every day of their months apart. His plans of moving to Colorado get pushed up when he receives her text explaining her situation, and saying goodbye. He must negotiate with the local Ice Demon clan to work in their territory to rescue Lily and the hikers before the Spring Fling blizzard kills them. But he’s running out of time.

Between the amorous hiker hitting on Zach, Lily’s self-doubts, and an avalanche bearing down on them, Zach and Lily must rediscover the love they first kindled in a Christmas ice cave, and create their own Cloudburst ice magic.

Cloudburst Ice Magic is available at Amazon, All Romance, Barnes&Noble, and Smashwords.

Adaptability

I had a really interesting experience this weekend. I got together with a group of writers and discussed adaptability and change, particularly in regards to the world of publishing and writing.

One of my favorite quotes is: "There's nothing so constant as change." With my background in science, Charles Darwin featured heavily in my education with his book On the Origin of Species. Natural Selection was his main point, but what it really meant was only species that could adapt to changes in environment, whether climate, habitat availability, or food sources, were the ones whose genetic traits would be passed on to the future generations.

What does this have to do with writing and publishing?

In the past, every writer who wanted to become a successful, published author, needed an agent to sell to the big New York publishers and a working phone number.

With the prevalence of computers, the writer had to have a valid email address as well as the phone number. The next change was the importance of a website, showcasing the writer's ability to write and all the contact information: address, phone, email address. Business cards now had weird characters printed on them: @, www, http://, along with the dashes and parentheses for the phone numbers.

Add to that the World Wide Web, and now the writers needed a "blog" - shortened from WebLog, a way to get their voices out to the masses and to publishers/agents (if they didn't have one already). Through all this, though, the writer needed an agent and a publisher, and still had to print out a paper hard copy of her/his manuscript to send to NY.

Then in 2007, things shifted again. Ereaders, specifically the Kindle by Amazon and the Nook by Barnes&Noble, became available to the public and a new form of publishing was born. Epublishing, with epublishers pushing out ebooks cheaply, without the expenses of paper, print runs, and film developing. The traditional publishers said it was a fad; it would never last.

Uh-huh.

In this modern world (well, as modern as we can be - did I sound like George Orwell in 1984?), writers now have more avenues to try when publishing. You can still go the traditional route: agent, publisher, paper print runs, etc. Nothing wrong with that and still lucrative if you can hit them right. But there is also the epublishing way to go, and it can be very lucrative if you get your "brand" going. Several epublishers are out there in all genres:
Cobblestone Press
Ellora's Cave
Evernight Publishing
Carina Press
Avon's Impulse
Sapphire Blue Publishing

These are just a few of them and I've chosen epublishers who often cater to romance writers, but Cobblestone Press, Carina Press, and Sapphire Blue Publishing take all genres. You don't need an agent and a few of these publishers produce POD (Print on Demand) books; hard copies, not just electronic books.

What does this have to do with adaptability? To become a successful author in this ebook age, don't shut yourself off from the possibility of epublishing, whether you get a publisher to take your novel or do it yourself. Ebooks are here to stay and so are epublishers. Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Sony Ereader; these aren't going anywhere and people can carry thousands of books around with them without paying fees to the airlines for extra bags!

As a writer, you need to adapt to the new times. You need a viable email address, a dynamic website showcasing your "brand" and what you want the public to remember about you (even if it's just a blog), Facebook and Twitter accounts to connect with as many fans as possible, and you're on your way. You don't necessarily need an agent, although they are very skilled at seeing pitfalls in publishing contracts, but you do need a "platform" (brand, website, blog, Facebook, Twitter). Find the balance for you between epublishing and traditional publishing. Neither are wrong, but ereaders aren't going away. Even Avon and Harlequin, two big New York publishers, created their epublishing sites (Avon Impulse and Carina Press, respectively) to take advantage of the shift in the publishing industry.

One thing to be aware of: Whether you publish with an epublisher or self-publish, be sure TO HAVE AN EDITOR EDIT YOUR WORK before you throw it out there. You might think your work is awesome; and it is awesome, but only after an editor has gone through it. You want your offering to be the best it can be and no one can edit their own stuff.
 
You also are in charge of promotion of your work and your brand, whether you have a traditional publisher or you're epublishing. But that's another blog post. :) Good luck and happy reading!