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Friday 28 December 2012

Self Challenge For 2013!!!

I've made a decision. 

Things need to change.

I'm going to cut down on brownies and fluffy pillows, stop taking sugar in my coffee, get up at 6.30am every morning and jog 4 times a week.

Okay, okay: so I have no intention of doing any of those things! 

But I DO need more motivation and I have got a challenge for 2013!

So now I know you're all wondering HOW I intend to motivate myself???

By scaring myself silly!!!

I am going to post this challenge for everyone to see, in the hope that it will pressure me into accomplishing my goal:

In 2013 I will attempt to write the sequels to all three of my series!!!

'Truce'

'The Vow'

'Severance'

That was actually scarier than I thought it was going to be!!!

I'm not sure if I can do this but I'm going to give it a go, if I manage to complete 'Truce' and get half way through 'The Vow' I'll be pleased.

If I manage to complete both 'Truce' AND 'The Vow' I'll be VERY pleased.


But if I manage to complete ALL THREE I'll be ECSTATIC!!!


I'm already 25.000 words into 'Truce' so I'll have a bit of a head start there, but this is a HUGE ask and although I decided to do this some time ago I wasn't going to tell anyone. 


Soooo...


I'll keep you posted on how I'm doing, I predict a LOT of fluffy pillows and brownies in the next 12 months!


Here's to trying new things!!! 


O.O



What is your 2013 challenge???



Thursday 13 December 2012

Cover Reveal: Fracture.

So I have BIG NEWS!!!

The cover for 'Fracture' is finally ready!!!

Yay!

So here it is and I'd love to hear what you think of it!  ;-P


Please take a look at Fracture's goodreads page:




Thursday 18 October 2012

A Splendid Salmagundi!

It’s finally here!!!
A Splendid Salmagundi, a collection of short stories and poems from the writers and readers of the UK Amazon Kindle Forum. I have a short in this book and I’m so excited! I hope that people enjoy it!

Please take a look???

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B009RBQSA4/ref=cm_sw_r_fa_alp_5q8Fqb1PXRM3C

Thursday 30 August 2012

What I'm Watching!!!

I have an addiction.
Don’t worry too much as it isn’t anything dangerous! My addiction is actually quite tame and harmless: I’m addicted to Asian dramas. More specifically South Korean dramas.

Where does this addiction come from???

Well that’s kind of hard to say…mostly I blame YouTube because that is where I had my first taste of K-Drama. I had spent 23 years in ignorance of their existence but one day while watching films on YouTube I somehow stumbled on to ‘He Was Cool’ (I have no idea how this happened, I vaguely remember it being a suggestion on the side bar). After that it was ‘My Girlfriend’s A Spy’, ‘My Little Bride’ and ‘Innocent Steps’ before quickly progressing to the aforementioned K-Dramas (and Japanese Dramas / Taiwanese Dramas).

When I admit to my addiction people always look at me a bit funny and say things like: ‘But surely it’s all subbed, isn’t that just irritating?’

No, it isn’t. It has no effect on my enjoyment at all and to be truthful I don’t even notice that I’m reading rather than listening anymore. It surprised me how quickly my ears started to recognize the different languages so that when I saw a trailer I would know if it was Japanese, Taiwanese or Korean. I was even more surprised when I started to recognize some phrases!!! (Although I’m not sure how useful ‘I love you’ in Japanese, Taiwanese and Korean is going to be!!!)

But we digress…

Now you have to approach K-Dramas in a certain way: they are the television equivalent of candy, do not expect gritty realism in any way, shape or form. Sit back, suspend your disbelief and just enjoy the (admittedly mad) ride you are about to take.

So why do I like K-Drama???

For several reasons: I like that the stories are (mostly) sweet romances, everyone always looks lovely and the characters are nice. The good guys always win, the bad guys always fail and the hero ALWAYS gets the girl.

That’s not to say that I don’t have my issues with them sometimes! Mostly the story centres on a love triangle (or square??? with all three guy liking the same girl), normally both guys will be handsome/kind and generally awesome and yet one of them will suffer a broken heart and see his true love lost forever…not cool, I don’t approve of that at all!!! Also these two guys will normally be best friends at the beginning and fancying the same girl will tear them apart before one of them gives up and then everything is hunky dory again.

But despite that I still watch and wait and hope that the guy I’m rooting for is going to get the girl at the end. Sometimes the love triangle thing doesn’t upset me at all so long as  I like the hero BETTER than the other guy, but this doesn’t always happen and sometimes I end up liking the secondary guy better than the lead (yes ‘Mary Stayed Out All Night’ I’m talking about you!).


The story lines are almost always ridiculous but there is also always something to keep you interested:

A young poor but plucky girl is given a scholarship to a private school that only takes the children of the wealthy elite and catches the eye of the handsomest, wealthiest boy. This boy is the leader of a gang (not that sort of gang!) called F4 made up of the four wealthiest boys in the school who also happen to be the four handsomest boys in the school as well. But come on: it’s the romance between the hero and heroine, the friendship between the 4 boys (okay, okay: AND their good looks!!!) that’s the real reason you’re watching anyway! (Boys Before Flowers)

A poor stunt woman body swaps (think ‘Freaky Friday’) with a rich man. This one was just so funny in places and I really liked the Hero and Heroine, how the guy playing the Hero managed to make me believe that he was actually the Heroine trapped in the wrong body I will never know, but he had me in stitches: I never knew a guy could scream like that!!! (Secret Garden)

A poor girl finds out on her sixteenth birthday that she is betrothed to the future King (yes I know that Korea has no royal family but just go with it!) and must now marry a complete stranger who doesn’t know her, doesn’t like her and is pining for another girl. I wanted to strangle the Hero in the first few episodes but I warmed to him in the end, the romance between the two leads was lovely and I didn’t want it to end!  (Goon, Princess Hours).

Can you see a pattern emerging here???   ;-P

I’ve just finished ‘Can You Hear My Heart’ and I loved it, it had the same poor girl meets rich guy scenario but the Hero was so lovely!  A new favourite! And I’m just starting ‘Faith’ which has Lee Min Ho as the lead (he was also the lead in ‘Boys Before Flowers’). It’s a historical drama, which I like, with a Heroine from the future. At the minute I’m more interested in the secondary romance between the King and the Queen than the Hero and Heroine…are you intrigued??? Then why not check it out!!!





Saturday 4 August 2012

Honey, Honey!!!

It is that time of the year again!
It is the time for stealing liquid gold from a vicious hoard of weaponized and decidedly ungenerous foes. Yes I’m talking about my Dad’s pet bees!!!

Over the years that my Dad has kept bees he has developed an allergy to them, and more importantly, to the honey. He can’t touch the honey anymore and so the uncapping and extracting has been passed on to me, my Mum and my sister.

Now I don’t know how familiar you are with extracting honey but there are a few things that you know are going to happen EVERY time you attempt to process the honey:

1.      The honey will get everywhere, on every surface, in your hair and sticky patches will mysteriously appear on your jeans and tee shirt.

2.      You will eat too much honey. Don’t argue because you just will, the temptation is impossible to ignore and making yourself sick is inevitable. I would actually question the sanity of someone who could finish the extracting process without feeling as though they might cast up their accounts!!! Ladles, spoons, sieves and all manner of other implements will present themselves to you just begging to be licked and you will be powerless to deny them!

3.      At the point when your hands are at their stickiest your nose will start to itch, this phenomena is not limited to honey extraction but is rife throughout life’s more messy moments.

4.      At some point you will forget to close the tap and honey will pour out all over the floor.

5.      All those jars you’ve been saving will have lost their lids, I don't know how this happens it just does.

6.      After you’ve showered and changed you will find a sticky bit you somehow managed to miss.

But despite all of that, the delicious taste of honey on toast every morning until the next season is a more than adequate reward!!!

Monday 30 July 2012

Guest Post: 'The Promise'!


 

So here is a copy of a guest post that went live today! Thank you to Nobonita for having me on her blog and for all her support!

http://perrytheplatypus1102-3daydreamer3.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/an-insight-of-characters-world-guest_30.html

I love historical romance.
 
I remember the first HR I ever read, it was ‘The Convenient Marriage’ by Georgette Heyer and I was hooked! Victorian, Edwardian, Regency, Medieval…I loved them all!!!
 
But what was it that I loved so much about these stories???
Obviously I loved the romance, the adventure but that is true in any book whatever genre. And then it hit me, it’s the same thing that I love about post apocalyptic and futuristic stories: I love seeing the huge difference between the world I’m reading about and my own world and yet still seeing similarities too.
But why Saxon?
I’ll be honest and say that I didn’t know at first what period of history I was going to choose to set The Promise in. I wanted something different and unique, something unusual and after reading up on the Saxons I realised that I had found the perfect setting.
The period in Saxon England after the Romans had left was a very fascinating; King Ine of Wessex, the King that Rafe serves, was Christian and his laws reflected that fact. There were huge tensions between the different Kingdoms making it a writer’s paradise when it came to intrigue.
The time period was also very mindful of women and gave them a great deal of care that was missing from later times, which meant that Adele would have had a lot more say in her marriage and her life in general than women in future time periods when she would have basically been a method of transferring land and money to create an alliance between families. It is also suggested that well born women could be very powerful and well educated, and also that in some cases they could inherit. Which is obviously not what you expect from ‘The Dark Ages’!!!
I have deviated from fact in some place: in the story I state that Whitred of Kent died while Ine was still ruling...that is incorrect as King Ine abdicated to make a pilgrimage to Rome and Whitred didn’t die until the following year.
But it was necessary for the plot of my story.
Also I’ve given Whitred a daughter although I can find no evidence that he had one and filled in the blanks: I know that he had three sons and three wives, but cannot be sure which son(s) belonged to which wife.
 
 
The Promise was originally a standalone book, but by the time I had introduced Finan and Leofric I knew that there was more to this story than I had planned. I wanted to hear more about them and what would happen to them next. I also found myself interested in Daegmund and Anlaf of Gradock despite the fact that I had only planed them to have a small part in the story. Now I’m hoping to give them their own books in the Lady Quill series!

To everyone who has read my book, thank you so much for taking a chance on my story and I really hope you liked it and want to know what happens next.
To anyone thinking about reading my story: go for it!!! Lol!

Friday 20 July 2012

Greetings from Falmouth

I have the flu.
And when I get the flu the germs really go to town.
Now I know you probably think that you get the flu bad but believe me: I get it far, far worse!!!
My sister is to blame for my current illness, she’s the one who brought me in to contact with these foul germs having caught the putrid sickness herself. Now I’m feeling like death warmed over and she is looking disgustingly cheerful. And glamorous. Which kind of adds insult to injury.
I’m visiting Falmouth at the moment and I have a beautiful view over the water at all the boats, the sun is shining and I just wish I wasn’t feeling quite so crummy and could enjoy my surroundings a little better.
As it is I’m curled up with my fluffy pillows and a very large hot toddy feeling very sorry for myself and watching day time T.V….is there ANYTHING more depressing than day time T.V.???
But the thing that is really getting to me is that I can’t taste anything at all!!! ‘Feed a cold’ the saying goes but a cold sucks the fun out of that as well!
As you can see I’m in a really good mood and am putting a brave face on my misery.

On the plus side I had a 5* review on Broken City:
 Sorry couldn’t help bragging a bit!

Friday 13 July 2012

Review For The Promise

Hi everyone!
Here I am again! I've just had a lovely review for The Promise from another Judy!!!

http://justjudysjumbles.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/dd-chant-book-list.html

Thank you Judy!!!

Thursday 12 July 2012

Sorry!!!

Okay so first of all I have to say a great big SORRY for not being around lately! Blogger shut me out and I’ve only just managed to get back in! I know, I know; I told you that I was a complete technophobe but I bet you didn’t realise I was this bad huh???

 Getting locked out of your blog has got to be like getting locked out of your house; no amount of explaining will convince everyone that you haven’t got some SERIOUS issues! I can almost picture you looking at this page and saying: what the heck is wrong with this chick???
Just how long has she been locked out???
No way! That long???
The very thought of being away from your blog that long is giving you cold turkey and your itching to call your therapist and talk the horrible fear that this might happen to you away! Lol!!!

To add to your horror I’ve managed to lock myself out of wattpad too!   :-(

So my big news is that I’ve FINNISHED ‘Fracture’!!!

Yayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!!!

I am soooooooo excited about it and am hoping to bring it out early next year! In the mean time here is the synopsis:

In a world torn apart by war and divided in to three nations Astra struggles to achieve balance. As a child she experienced a horror that caused her life to fracture around her and change everything she’d ever known in an instant. Sixteen years later and Astra has been pressured into a false position by her past taking a stand that enables her to keep her loved ones safe, but the cost is high.
Caught in an intolerable position Astra is loyal to only one thing: the family that loves her. But when a diplomatic mission from the Free Nation arrives for peace talks with the Tula, Astra’s precariously balanced world begins to fracture again.
 

If you want to be alerted when it goes live just click on this link:


In other news I’ve just had a LOVELY review from Judy at Little Hyuts, thank you Judy!!!


So bye for now and see you soon….as long as I don’t manage to be awesome again and lock myself out!!!

Sunday 20 May 2012

Devon Show: The Aftermath!!!

It’s over!

The Devon Show that is, not life or anything dramatic like that!!! I had lodes of fun: I sold a little, talked a lot and now I’m shattered.

It’s the first time I’ve had a stand and so you can imagine how nervous I was, we had lots of interest and I think everyone at the show ground had heard of Buy My Book and our infamous stuffed sheep!

No I’m not even going to TRY and explain that last statement to you!

I was reminded yet again of just how many of us Indies are out there: several came on to the stall for  chat about the difficulties of self publishing. I also had two separate visits from members of the BBC! The first was a producer who specialised in documentaries: she was very interested in the Indie movement and took my details, even asking if it was okay to pass them on!

I’m trying my hardest not to get over excited about it!

All in all it was a success and we are hoping to line up a few more shows this year and see how they go!

In other news ‘The Promise’ is currently 37th in historical fiction on wattpad and 99th in the watty awards!!!

And ‘Broken City’ is 85th in sci-fi!!!

Woot Woot!

Tuesday 17 April 2012

Book Stand At The Devon Show!!!

Okay so BIG news!!!
On the 17th to the 19th of May I will have a book stand at the Devon county show!!!
I am sooooo excited!!! I can hardly wait! Paperback editions of both ‘Broken City’
and ‘The Promise’ will be available!!!
Also available will be children’s books by M. Dawn:
Kurt the Kangaroo
Hipp the Hippopotamus
Emily the Ewe
Also sharing the stand will be ‘The Sooner’ author S.G. Alan.

D.D. Chant   :-D 

Monday 9 April 2012

Horror On The Hard Shoulder!!!

Today I did something I haven’t done in a while……

I broke down.

Don’t get the wrong idea: it was my car that broke down not me! I was an unwilling passenger to the whole thing!

So there we were on the hard shoulder, the engine would still run (somehow I find that insulting, like the car was taunting me!!!) but no gears. Nothing at all.

Not what you want to happen at any time but at 4.00pm on the Thursday before Easter Friday???

OH. DEAR!!!

Fortunately we rang the recovery company just in time and so I did something I hadn’t done in a while: I went for a ride in a tow truck! Which was much better than the ‘hilarious’ suggestions of my friends whom I’d texted my woes to. These suggestions included, but were not restricted to: skiing, biking, swimming or *GASP* walking home!!!

Yes everyone thought it was very funny, which I for one just couldn’t appreciate!

Strangely though while actually inside the tow truck we passed someone else broken down on the hard shoulder.

What did I do???

What do you think I did?!?!?

I laughed, of course!!! :-P

Tuesday 27 March 2012

Fun In The Garden!!!

First of all I think that I should mention the gorgeous weather we’re having. Sunshine is such a rare commodity in England and when those rays pierce the cloudy skies, it’s a big thing that we all love to talk about! Here in Devon we’ve had not just one lovely day but FIVE in a row!!!

My blog post today is directly influenced by the aforementioned weather.

After putting off the pruning of the rose garden for far too long, encouraged by the sunshine (Okay, okay….and even more strongly encouraged by my Nana brandishing a garden hoe!) I found myself some secateurs (or rather my mother did, my search and recover skills being somewhat lacking) and bravely entered the garden.

Now before you get the wrong idea I’d just like to mention that I planted this particular rose garden five years ago with the aid of my sister, Amy. It’s an L shaped garden and before we had the happy idea of filling it with rose bushes, it had a black plastic covering (not put in place by us!) and a few uninteresting bushes.

After taking the plastic covering off and a month or so passing, we became aware of why someone had resorted to putting it down in the first place:

I have never seen a patch of ground sprout so many weeds, most of which were dock with foot long tap roots!!! It has taken us five years to get rid of them!

Anyway, back to today!

I believe I was in the garden armed with secateurs……

My Nana was with me hoeing the weeds around the bushes, and my baby Cousin Jak Jak had also come to watch and was insisting upon wending her way through the thorny bushes.

Nana and I spent the whole time telling her to be careful or she would get scratched…..

Then it happened.

A thorn scratched, a yelp rang out, blood began to ooze and a plaster was sought.

However in was dear little Jak Jak running to fetch the plaster and me with the wounded hand!!!

The moral of this story??? I’m not sure, but I am fully cognisant of its irony!!!

Also for those of you who are green fingered here is a picture of the first rose bud of the year:


Friday 16 March 2012

Joy(?) At The Cinema???

Okay it’s time for something random!!!

Me and my Mum and Sister decided to go to see ‘The Vow’ (weirdly enough this is the name of the 2nd book in my Lady Quill series!!! But I digress!) at the pictures. We decided to go to the earliest showing so that we would have the room to ourselves and armed with a TON of popcorn and a SEA of Coca Cola we took out seats (VIP) and settled down to watch.

Three quarters of an hour later we were still waiting (pretty patiently considering!!!) for the film to start. We had managed to restrain my sister from throwing popcorn at the two other people there to watch the film and sitting just in front of us (she has a short attention span!!!) and had surreptitiously been texting to keep from entering a catatonic state (a problem for me in the afternoon anyway, without adding a dimly lit room to the equation!!!)

Finally the film started......

About ten minutes in and I knew that this wasn’t going to be my kinda film!!!

Which is strange because it had ALL the right elements:

Eye candy?     Check
Pretty heroine?     Check
Romance?       Check
Did I mention eye candy?     CHECK!!!

But still I wanted to stick my head in an oven...I was soooo board!

I think it was because the hero was just sooooooooooooo NICE, he was adorable! He was absolutely lovely to the heroine and I felt so sorry for him.
But what of the heroine, I hear you ask.
That I think was the problem; I just didn’t like her. She gave the hero a hard time, she was pretty selfish and I didn’t feel sorry for her at all....

How is it possible to feel unsympathetic toward a girl who wakes up not remembering the last 5 years of her life? A woman that has forgotten who she is? Who has no memory of the man she is married to?

Well the answer is pretty simple: 

The man she is married to is Channing Tatum!!!

If you woke up one morning not knowing who you were or what you’d spent the last five years of your life doing I think that you’d be reassured once you saw that you’d married Channing Tatum!
Life couldn’t have gone so badly!

In conclusion I guess what I’m saying is that it just wasn’t my thing! Not enough adventure (hard to believe, right?) it needed a few Vikings to come along and liven things up!

Tuesday 6 March 2012

Dear Cristina.

Hi Cristina!
Thank you so much for getting in touch!
Is there anything in particular you are interested in knowing???
I’ll be honest and tell you that I have taken artistic licence with the facts, but I’ve attempted to stay true to the time....know what I mean???

The biggest deviation from fact is that in the story I state that Whitred of Kent died while Ine was still ruling...that is incorrect as King Ine abdicated to make a pilgrimage to Rome and Whitred didn’t die until the following year.
But it was necessary for the plot of my story. 
Also I’ve given Whitred a daughter although I can find no evidence that he had one and filled in the blanks: I know that he had three sons and three wives, but cannot be sure which son(s) belonged to which wife.

The time period is very fascinating, Ine was Christian and his laws reflected that fact. The time period was also very mindful of women and gave them a great deal of respect that was missing from later times (some point to the Norman invasion as the turning point).

It is suggested that well born women could be very powerful and well educated, and also that in some cases they could inherit.  It was also common for people to choose their own spouses rather than enter an arranged marriage and it is suggested that they did not marry so young as it became the custom to after the Norman’s arrived.
Women would also be given a ‘morning gift’ by their husbands, often money or land, and that was hers to do as she wanted with which gave her a certain amount of independence.
Also if they were mistreated Aethelburt’s laws stated that they could leave their husbands, taking their children with them and half of everything he had!!!
And Aethelraed’s law stated that they could not be forced into second marriages, Cnut later added that they could not be forced to become Nun’s either.
There were also laws that stated a wife could not be held responsible of her husband’s criminal activities.


Which is obviously not what you expect from ‘The Dark Ages’!!!?

But the Saxons did keep slaves: it was one of the reasons for war. The capture of booty and slaves was what brought wealth to a kingdom. Or they became slaves for crimes that they had committed.
Another reason for becoming a slave was selling yourself during famine.

If you owned a slave that committed wrongdoing, you were legally responsible for their actions; this might mean the paying of a fine depending on what crime they had committed.
But wills from the time show that it was not uncommon for slaves (along with their children and any children yet unborn) to be freed in the will of their owner.

There are also recorded incidents of men of the church buying slaves in order to set them free.
A master who killed his slave paid a fine to the church.

That got a bit involved, didn’t it!?!?!
I’m not too sure if I’ve answered your questions; if not just drop me a note!!!

DeeDee Chant.


(Also for those of you who I haven’t told yet: The Promise is now available on Amazon and smashwords!!!  Yay!!!)