The Keeper: A Brilliant Darkness Story is available now on Amazon for 99 cents, and it will be up on Barnes and Noble very shortly. This 45-page companion story to The Scourge offers a look at Fennel and the Lofty treetops through Peree’s eyes. If you enjoy it, please consider leaving a review on the site where you purchased it and on Goodreads.
Thanks so much for your support of my writing!
Today’s a good day for a cover reveal of THE KEEPER, my 45-page companion story to THE SCOURGE. I’m waiting for the final formatted ebook file to return from the delightful Jason Anderson of Polgarus Studio and then THE KEEPER will be available to purchase on Amazon’s Kindle store and Barnes and Noble’s Nook store. I will post the links when it is ready!
In the meantime, feast your eyes on Robin Ludwig’s amazing cover and read the blurb. I hope you will read and enjoy the story, including the SNEAK PEAK of Chapter One of Book 2 that is included! Book 2 coming in July …
Peree knows what he’s doing as the new Keeper of the Water Bearer, Fennel.
He knows Fennel’s Sightless. He knows that means the Scourge can’t hurt her while she gathers fresh water for her people. He knows how to wield his bow and arrow to take out the revolting flesh-eaters when they swarm around her. He’ll motivate her, distract her, do anything he can to keep her working. And most important, he’ll make sure his people get every drop of their share of the water she collects. Peree knows his duty is to his people and his people alone, and not to the Water Bearer.
What he doesn’t know is that he’s falling in love with her.
I’m very happy to say that THE SCOURGE was chosen to be a finalist in the YA category for the 2013 Next Generation Indie Book Award. It was so exciting to receive the notification email! Here’s a link to the list, if you’re curious to see what other books won. Support those indies!
My writing buddy Katie French, author of The Breeders series that I heartily recommended a while back, is launching a new book on Monday! It’s a sci-fi paranormal romance called Eyes Ever to the Sky, and I can’t wait to read it. She’s here today to talk about whether paranormal romance as a genre is dead, or if it’s merely undead, always ready to transform from sparkly vampire to something new and fresh. But first, here’s more about Eyes Ever to the Sky:
When Hugh wakes up in a smoldering crater–no memory, no clothes–a single thought echoes in his head…trust no one. Frightened and alone, with no memory of who he is, he stumbles upon a grisly murder scene and is shot by police. He wakes, only to find he can heal himself. He has superpowers and he’s going to need them.
Desperate and bleeding, Hugh stumbles upon fifteen-year-old Cece, who’s got enough troubles of her own. Between caring for her bipolar, out-of-work mother and trying not to get evicted from her run-down trailer, Cece may be the only person struggling as much as Hugh. Drawn to Hugh, Cece finds herself falling for him. But when the real killer–a man-hunting beast–chooses another victim, Hugh and Cece realize they must unlock the clues to their past if they have any chance at a future.
Is Paranormal Romance Dead?
by Katie French
I don’t know about you, but if I read one more story about a sexy but aloof vampire/werewolf/merman/garden gnome I might drive the stake straight into my own heart. To say that paranormal romance has been done is like saying that Lady Gaga’s outfits are different: the understatement of the century. As a reviewer for the indie book review site, Underground Book Reviews, I get inundated with requests to review paranormal books. The tropes have been beaten to death with sexy, yet tortured super beings and the innocent damsels who love them. Readers are fed up with it. I’ll wage a coffin full of money that if you pitched a vampire paranormal romance to an agent right now, they’d laugh you out the door.
And yet, there’s some reason why Stephenie Meyer can now buy an African country from writing four books.
I’ll be the first to go on record to say that I LOVED the Twilight books when they first came out. I read the first book before anyone was talking about it (I think that puts me in some elite nerd group where the perks are atomic wedgies, but I digress). That book rocked my world. There was something so…addicting about being loved by a creature strong enough to crush you. To be special enough to attract the attention of a super human, now that was sexy. No amount of sour grapes on the part of reviewers can take away what those books did for fantasy writers and reader everywhere.
So, where does that leave us? With stories that are derivative, characters that are more cardboard than a cereal box and plots completely overdone. Do we kill this genre and bury it with a sparkling tomb stone? “Here Lies Vampire Love Stories. RIP.” Like its undead characters, would it rise, moaning, clawing for scraps of life?
Science fiction and romance are my two favorite genres, so I refuse to believe their pairing has been killed. No matter how many peanut butter and jelly sandwiches people eat, they still come back for more because the pairing is just so good. So it should be with paranormal romance. The genre doesn’t have to die, but it must be refashioned, reborn. And, that is exactly what I attempted to do with Eyes Ever to the Sky, my new YA sci fi romance. Did I go far enough from the derivative? Did I hug close enough to the tropes that matter? Only my readers may judge. I will tell you that not a single scene is set inside a high school and not a single character sparkles. That has to count for something.
My conclusion. Paranormal romance is not dead. Derivative stories and fan fic may be on its last straggling breath, but like any genre, authors can remake, reshape and reform. That’s the beauty of story–it can always be made new.
Katie French is the author of The Breeders, a Young Adult dystopian adventure, and Nessa: A Breeders Story, a prequel novelette both available on Amazon. Her sci fi romance, Eyes Ever to the Sky, released May 13th.You can find her on her website, or like her on Facebook or Twitter.
My good friend and former neighbor Ryan Goldberg did something very cool recently: created an app. We chatted about it several months ago, and the next thing I knew it had taken root. I’ve never known anyone else that has done this, and it’s been fascinating to hear how Ryan, a New Jersey physician by day, came up with the concept and then worked with a developer to feed and water the idea through from creation to launch.
The app is called enroot, and Ryan describes it as a “collective consciousness project.” Here’s more:
enroot encourages a different kind of sharing compared to the traditional self-advertising of social media. Sharing that goes a bit deeper into who we are and what it is like living the human experience; an anonymous anti-social network not looking to make friends, but to share understanding.
Being somewhat social media phobic until I decided to publish a book and had to get comfortable with it, the idea of an anonymous anti-social network was intriguing to me!
Here’s how the app works:
enroot starts with asking users to anonymously sign in. No identifying information is collected. The next step is providing some information about yourself–gender, age range, religious background, political leaning, etc. The app is broken down into three main screens: Listen, Tell, and Watch. The Tell screen is the posting screen. Any sort of post is welcomed. As a user posts their message they are asked to identify an emotional state to go along with the message. This emotion is represented by a color that goes along with the message to the Listen screen, the screen where anonymous messages are read. The emotion color is also dropped as a pin on a map in the Watch screen that is geolocated to the users area. The Watch map was designed to be able to develop an emotion map to get a sense of how an area is feeling. In time, with enough users, the map would become an ever-changing, almost living creation of users contributing to enroot. What is completely unique to enroot is the ability to filter posts by the demographic information entered by the users. Users can filter posts by using one or all of the demographic categories asked at login. Messages can be heard to notify the writer that their sentiment was understood. The Tell screen keeps a diary of Told messages that also keeps track of how many times a message was heard.
I’ve been playing around with enroot, and it’s kind of addictive. One of my favorite aspects is the map Ryan describes that shows the color-coded emotions of people as they post their Tells. As users are added the map could eventually show the collective moods of wide swathes of the world. Imagine how a country might look after their national team won the World Cup, or on a more somber side, after a tragedy. Very cool idea, no?
I asked Ryan to tell me more about how he came up with the concept:
My inspiration for enroot grew out of the hopeful ideal that as individuals we all have the same basic hopes and fears. We all experience the same reality; it is our interpretation of events that shapes it into our own. I wanted to develop a platform that would allow for the anonymous sharing of an individual’s daily reality. How they see the world and interact within it.
Life is made up of large and small moments. There are several outlets available, both in traditional media and mobile social media, that allow us to share these moments. Most of these outlets encourage a self-advertisement type of sharing—pictures of a vacation, job promotions, weekend adventures—which satisfies a lot of our desire to let others into our lives. Would we be willing to share these unplanned, more personal, and intimate times as we experience and feel them? Not all of these times are attractive or self promotional—they are our inner thoughts and dialogue—but they are common experiences which, over time, help define what it is like to live today.
enroot definitely has a psychological underpinning to it that I love. The anonymity of the app seems to allow people to feel free to share the negative emotions that are often carefully edited on platforms like Facebook or Twitter. I’ve been touched by the users I’ve seen on enroot struggling with sadness, loneliness, and disappointment. Of course there are also funny, angry, and mundane posts—they really run the gamut.
New users are needed to help enroot reach its potential! Please give it a try if it sounds like something you’d, er, dig. I’ll meet up with you there . . . anonymously, of course.
**enroot is free in the Apple App Store. It’s compatible with several versions of the iPhone, iPod, and iPad and requires iOS 5.0 or later. Here’s a link to it: http://www.sharesomethingdifferent.com/
Susan Kaye Quinn’s first three installments of the Debt Collector serial are now available for purchase as a bundle! This future-noir series is fascinating – check out the cool-as-vodka/rocks cover art, and the excerpt below. Be sure to enter to win Susan’s Grand Prize Giveaway of a Kindle pre-loaded with all three episodes by clicking right here: a Rafflecopter giveaway
Excerpt from Delirium (Debt Collector 1) by Susan Kaye Quinn:
My jackboots are new, the latest ultra-light material out of Hong Kong’s synthetics district, and they make a strange squeaking sound against the hospital floor. It’s the kind of sound that might gather snickers or a raised eyebrow, but no one looks at me, at least not on purpose. I stroll past the ICU desk, taking my time, breathing in the antiseptic smell that masks the odor of death held back by machines and drugs and round-the-clock care. The nurses duck their heads and study their charts, ignoring me. As if catching my eye might mean I’m coming to collect their debt, rather than Mr. Henry’s in Room 301.
The floor is so highly polished that I see the reflection of my trenchcoat running ahead of me, black as a midnight grave, a spook that lives on the surface of the oft-scrubbed tiles. It reaches the door to 301 before me and disappears in the dim, flickering light coming from the room. The spook has gone back where he belongs, into the dark recesses of my soul, assuming I still have one. If I was a betting man, I would say the odds of having a soul keep getting longer with every transfer I do. The older debt collectors, the ones who are still alive, don’t have anything shining out of their dull-glass eyes, even when they’re hyped up on a transfer. There’s no telling what my eyes look like.
I stopped looking in the mirror a long time ago.
Mr. Henry’s hooked up in all the usual places—tubes in his arms and monitor patches hovering over his temples and the blue-veined skin of his chest. His knobbed knees and shriveled legs stick out the end of the blanket. I don’t know if he’s tossed the blanket aside or the nurses just forgot to cover him up again after his sponge bath or whatever they do to prepare patients for a debt transfer. Goosebumps raise the hair on what’s left of his legs into a small forest of gray fur. I tug the thin, white-weave blanket over his exposed legs, and Mr. Henry opens his eyes.
They’re pale green and watery—washed out and used up like the rest of him.
“You’ve come for me,” he says.
EPISODES 1-3 (Delirium, Agony, Ecstasy) of the Debt Collector serial. Contains mature content and themes. For young-adult-appropriate thrills, see Susan’s bestselling Mindjack series.
What’s your life worth on the open market?
A debt collector can tell you precisely.
Lirium plays the part of the grim reaper well, with his dark trenchcoat, jackboots, and the black marks on his soul that every debt collector carries. He’s just in it for his cut, the ten percent of the life energy he collects before he transfers it on to the high potentials, the people who will make the world a better place with their brains, their work, and their lives. That hit of life energy, a bottle of vodka, and a visit from one of Madam Anastazja’s sex workers keep him alive, stable, and mostly sane… until he collects again. But when his recovery ritual is disrupted by a sex worker who isn’t what she seems, he has to choose between doing an illegal hit for a girl whose story has more holes than his soul or facing the bottle alone–a dark pit he’s not sure he’ll be able to climb out of again.
The first three episodes of the Debt Collector serial are collectively the length of a short novel, or 152 pages. These are the first three of nine episodes in the first season of The Debt Collector serial. This dark and gritty future-noir is about a world where your life-worth is tabulated on the open market and going into debt risks a lot more than your credit rating. Episode 4, Broken, releases 4/17/13. For more about the Debt Collector serial, see DebtCollectorSeries.com
AUTHOR BIO
Susan Kaye Quinn grew up in California, where she wrote snippets of stories and passed them to her friends during class. Her teachers pretended not to notice and only confiscated her stories a couple times.
Susan left writing behind to pursue a bunch of engineering degrees, but she was drawn back to writing by an irresistible urge to share her stories with her niece, her kids, and all the wonderful friends she’s met along the way.
She doesn’t have to sneak her notes anymore, which is too bad.
Susan writes from the Chicago suburbs with her three boys, two cats, and one husband. Which, it turns out, is exactly as a much as she can handle.