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???

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:

www.goodreads.com/book/show/15745015-fracture

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

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!!!

http://www.dramacrazy.net/korean-drama/faith-episode-1/

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!!!

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!

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:

http://www.bloodsweatandbooks.blogspot.co.uk/

 Sorry couldn’t help bragging a bit!