Monster Mash Book Blitz Countdown Event Day 4

Ashley was born and raised in Oklahoma, where the wind really does sweep down the plains, and horses and carriages aren't used as much as she'd like. When she's not writing (haha, like that EVER happens!), she's probably working out or pretending she's Sherlock Holmes. Her obsession with writing began after reading the Lord of the Rings in the eighth grade. Since then, she's loved everything Fantasy--resulting in an unhealthy obsession with the 'geek' tab on Pinterest, where all things awesome go. 

Author's Favourite things:

Cooking & Working Out - I know, I’m probably in the minority here. BUT, let me just say, while I don't always love either of these things, I do them consistently and they always make me feel AMAZING about myself and about my day. Starting a day with a workout, and eating well throughout the day makes me have a better day, I'm convinced. Some of the things I cook are below!

Delicata Squash Salad

Vegan Shepard's Pie!

Music - I love to write with music, and certain sounds get me into a certain mind set so I can convey the feeling of what I'm writing better (or so I think). Here are some songs I've been listening to recently:

 Purple - I love the color purple. I have purple in my hair, the curtains in my office are purple, I even plan to have purple as a color for my future wedding. 

Connect with the Author here: 

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Cutlass:

Notorious pirate Barren Reed has one thing on his mind: Revenge against the man who killed his father. So kidnapping his enemy's fiancé seems a perfect plan…until he actually does it.

Larkin Lee is more than a pretty face and fiancé to a powerful man. Her fierce personality is enough to make any pirate want to push her overboard.

But when the King of the Orient comes to Barren with a task—to find the Bloodstone, a powerful gem thought only to exist in legend, Barren sees another opportunity to destroy his enemy. Together, Barren, Larkin and a crew of pirates set off to find the stone, only to discover it caused the death of Barren’s own mother and Larkin’s, too. As his strongest allies turn into his greatest enemies, and the life of the girl he kidnapped becomes more important than he ever dreamed, Barren’s quest for revenge becomes a fight to save the Orient.

Flintlock:

Barren Reed hopes to protect the Orient from his tyrant uncle, but his plans to make the King’s life a living hell aren’t supported by the Elders of the pirate community. As it stands, Barren has earned the Elders’ disdain for his carelessness, and they threaten him into exile if he makes one more mistake.

Barren’s not the only one feeling the Elders’ wrath—they don’t trust Larkin either. Worse, Barren can’t comprehend Larkin’s wish to have a relationship with her father, and the secrets she’s forced to keep create a tension that may pull them apart forever.

When the Pirates of Silver Crest begin to die, bullets laced with dark magic are to blame. With more and more of these weapons infiltrating the Underground, discovering who’s behind the dissemination is no easy feat. As fear and tension mount among the people of the Orient, Barren and his crew find themselves in a race against time to stop the spread of dark magic before the world of Mariana spirals into collapse.

Cannon (coming soon!)

The king is dead, the Network is destroyed, and Barren Reed has been exiled by the Elders of Silver Crest. To make matters worse, the black spot--a curse of dark magic--continues to devour him. It’s true purpose is still unknown, but one thing is certain: It will corrupt Barren in the worst way.

With her greatest secret revealed, Larkin Lee flees Maris. Accused of slaying the king, there’s only one place to go--Silver Crest. But Barren isn’t happy to see her, and their reunion leaves more questions unanswered, including whether they have a future together.

As Datherious rises in power, Barren and Larkin must work together to find the fifth Relic to complete the King’s Gold and prevent Datherious from obtaining control over dark magic, but the black spot has other ideas, and the closer they get to finding the final Relic, the more corrupt Barren becomes. Larkin finds herself in a head to head battle with the only man she’s ever loved and the reality is harsh--only one can walk away alive.

~ Amazon ~ Goodreads ~ Amazon UK ~ 

~ Amazon Canada ~ Amazon Australia ~

Photo Shoot:

Want to see some of the wonderful picture from The Cutlass Trilogy photo shoot?

Don't you just love them!

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Monster Mash Book Blitz Countdown Event Day 3

Denise is a Southern girl who has lived in Louisiana all her life, and yes, she has a drawl. She has a wonderful husband and two incredible children, who not only endure her writing moods, but also encourage her to indulge her writing passion. Besides writing romantic suspense, she enjoys traveling, reading, and cooking.

Accounting is a skill she has learned to earn a little money to support her writing habit. She wrote her first story when she was a teen, seventeen handwritten pages on school-ruled paper and an obvious rip-off of the last romance novel she had read. She's been writing off and on ever since, and with more than a few full-length manuscripts already completed, she has no desire to slow down.

Q&A With the Author:

6. Now that we've gotten to know each other, tell me a story. It can be long or short. From your childhood or last week. Funny, sad, or somewhere in between. Just make sure it's yours. What's your story?

One of my favorite things has always been a family vacation. My parents managed to take my sister and me somewhere every year, even if they had to save up their pennies to do so. My husband’s family took family trips as well, so when Larry and I started our own family, we kept up this yearly tradition.

When my sister and I talk about our childhood, we will usually bring up memories from those road trips with our parents, and yes, they were always road trips. I’ve never flown on an airplane with Momma and Daddy. I can’t imagine what air travel with them would have been like. They were…intense travelers. I have this mental image of my father grumbling because he had to pull off his shoes before going through the scanner. He would have made the news as creating an incident with a TSA agent.

One of the things I remember from those long road trips across west Texas headed toward Colorado was the silliness my sister and I would produce when we were bored in the back seat. Eventually, we would start singing something. Daddy would finally get enough of our caterwauling and turn on the radio, something that he didn’t do very often. We’d shut up and smile. It worked every time.

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Content with the direction her life takes…

The temptation to earn a sweet payday and collect enough money to start her own interior design business is too much opportunity for Sophia Cannon to ignore, but working for her new client, Les Wakefield, is like working for a creepy stalker. He seems to be everywhere she goes.

Until trouble walks around the corner and into her life again…

Dylan Hunter almost turns down the Wakefield Manor restoration job until Les Wakefield tells him Sophia is the interior designer hired to oversee furnishing the old plantation house. Sophia has been the ghost in his life since the day she left him, haunting his heart with her memory every day and every night.

Stirring up more than just the spirits of the dead…

Sophia and Dylan fight with each other until a much bigger threat puts both their lives in danger. Discovering that generations of Wakefields have restored the plantation only to disappear months after moving in to the manor house stirs up spirits that would rather remain undisturbed.

Can love survive the long nights at Wakefield Manor with the unmistakable scent of gardenias hanging so heavily in the air?

~ Amazon ~ Goodreads ~ Amazon UK ~ 

~ Amazon Canada ~ Amazon Australia ~

Top Ten List:

Ten of My Favorite Things (Not necessarily in this order)

1.     Snuggling under a blanket on a cold morning

2.     Group hugs with my family

3.     Coffee, anytime and anywhere

4.     Family vacations

5.     Tex-Mex food

6.     Netflix bingeing

7.     A movie that makes me cry

8.     The sweet spot in a story when the book starts writing itself

9.     Mountains, really high mountains

10.  Laughing

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Monster Mash Book Blitz Countdown Event Day 2

Ann lives in Texas with her husband and rescue pets. She taught reading and other subjects for a number of years before leaving to devote more time to her first love—writing. Reading with children was always her favorite part of teaching.

Cool Well Press published her ghostly series for the young at heart, Stevie-girl and the Phantom Pilot, Stevie-girl and The Phantom Student, and Stevie-girl and The Phantom of Crybaby Bridge.

Her adult novels—All For Love, women’s fiction, and the suspense trilogy Stutter Creek, Lilac Lane, and Copper Lake, are all published by 5 Prince Publishing.

Takers, Ann’s foray into speculative fiction, was released earlier this year.

She has won several awards for fiction since her college days and has had short stories and essays published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, The Binnacle, Timeless, an anthology, Seasonal Sweet, and Suspenseful, an anthology, Jitter Press, Fictionterrifica, The Rusty Nail, The Sandstorm, Reflections, an anthology, and Blue Mountain Review.  

Q&A With the Author:

6. Now that we've gotten to know each other, tell me a story. It can be long or short. From your childhood or last week. Funny, sad, or somewhere in between. Just make sure it's yours. What's your story?

              Once upon a time, I went on a date with a firefighter. “I want to show you one of my favorite places,” he said. And then he took the doors off his sparkly green Jeep and drove us to a caliche pit outside town where we raced up and down the hills catching air beneath our axles like crazed fools. When we came upon an abandoned farmhouse at the top of a rise, we dared each other to go inside. Together we climbed in through a broken window illuminated by a pearly moon.

              Dust covered every surface and drifted up in the corners like small, red dunes. We’d barely crossed the large room when we heard the chilling sound of a dog pack barking and baying as if on the hunt. We stopped in our tracks and looked at each other across the dim expanse. Where were they? Were they close? Inside the empty house, it was hard to tell. The sounds bounced from wall to wall.

              Without a word we turned and hightailed it back out the window—snagging my favorite sweater on a nail—and ran to the Jeep just as the dogs materialized out of the gloom. The pack leader appeared to be a Doberman followed closely by some sort of Collie mix. I saw two or three others, but couldn’t make out their breeds. My heart leapt into my throat. I really wished he hadn’t removed the doors. Even inside, I didn’t feel safe.

              He shoved the Jeep in gear and stomped on the gas. The big tires bit into the earth and threw up a huge red rooster tail of dirt. We roared down one hill and halfway up another before we lost traction and began to slide. I thought we were going to tumble backward, end over end, but then he gunned the motor and twisted the wheel and the slide was halted. In seconds we’d made it back to level earth, leaving the barking behind.

              It’s a wonder I ever went out with that fireman again, but thirty-seven years ago, I married him. It’s been an adventure ever since.

Connect with the Author here: 

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Book 1 - Stevie Girl and the Phantom Pilot

When a small planes crashes behind Jase's rural home, strange things begin to happen. But no one believes him. After all, there's no such thing as a ghost, right? Then he sees his pretty, quiet schoolmate, Stevie-girl, about to enter the legendary haunted house, and he knows if anyone can help him solve the mystery, she's the one. 

Book 2 - Stevie Girl and the Phantom Student

Stevie asks Jase to help her find out why the ghost of a girl keeps appearing in her mirror. They think it has something to do with the new student at their school, a boy who has Tourette syndrome. Both the new kid and the new phantom seem to need some kind of help. When the new kid falls prey to the school bullies, Stevie knows they must act. But will they be too late, or will a tragic moment in their school's history be repeated on Halloween night?

Book 3 - Stevie-Girl and the Phantom of Crybaby Bridge

The summer his parents treat them to a camping trip in New Mexico, the two friends can’t wait to visit the legendary Crybaby Bridge. Right away, they hear the crying baby. Is it a phantom, or is someone playing tricks on them?

~ Amazon ~ B&N ~ Kobo ~ 

~ Smashwords ~ iTunes ~ Audible ~

Top Ten List:

10 Fun Facts about Ann Swann

1.      I signed up to go sky diving once but my instructor broke his ankle on a hard landing and I never went back!

2.      I can wiggle my ears

3.      Once I broke down on the L.A. freeway and had to sleep in my car beside the highway.

4.      My high school mascot was a Golden Tornado (go Tors!)

5.      Stevie-girl and the Phantom Pilot is set in a fictional version of my hometown

6.     I lit a science project on fire during an experiment in college. That wasn’t supposed to happen.

7.      One of my earliest jobs was delivering newspapers. One of my later jobs was as a 911 dispatcher.

8.      I also taught upper level elementary school – Reading, of course.

9.     My home is so close to a local high school, I can hear the band practicing every morning. It takes me back to my own band geek/choir nerd days.

10.  I once had a dog named Snakeman and I based one of my favorite characters on him (see the novel Takers: Apocalypse in Eden)

11.  (Looking back over these, I fear I may be suffering from arrested development!)

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