Happy Birthday, Aurora!

There are two Aurora's about to celebrate a birthday. One is the adorable granddaughter of my good friend. The other is an imprint of my publisher.  For the first birthday, Aurora is getting stuff: presents, cake.  For the second, Aurora Regency wants to give you stuff.

And so do I!

It's been quite a year. I now have four novels published by Musa/Aurora Regency. Recently my first romantic mystery debuted. Death by Scandal has achieved some fantastic reviews and is a Hera book club choice. On October 14th, my third Mad Hatterly book Civilizing Frances made her bow. 

To celebrate, I'm giving away two books: a copy of Death by Scandal and a copy of Civilizing Frances. How do you win my contest? Simple. You just follow my blog and then leave me a comment below. Make sure you leave an email address so I can contact you if you win. I'll leave this post up all week and just update it with news so be sure and check back. More goodies and fun will follow.

But wait! There's more! For just 9.99 you get the...

Sorry. Carried away for a minute. Actually, there is more. I mentioned that Aurora Regency wants to give you stuff. This isn't just me hopping. This is a blog hop. Click the banner at the bottom of the post to go to the next blog which belongs to the fabulous Kimberly Nee. If you missed the previous blogs, just click the banner at the start and it will take you to the Aurora Regency Blog so you can hop on down the bunny trail.

So here are the official rules from Musa:

TOUR RULES:1) TOUR STARTS: Saturday October 15thTHIS TOUR ENDS: October 22nd, at Midnight (PST)Final Celebration August 22th 7pm -11pm (EST) at Two Lips Reviews Chat.

***Individual Winners from Authors contests will be drawn and posted October 23rd on their individual sites***

1) Prizes at individual Blogs are completely at the discretion of the individual authors and are not in association with Musa Publishing and its prize system.  To enter the Contest on any given blog you must follow their contest rules and objectives.

2) By commenting on any blog on the tour the participant is agreeing to these rules and policies.

3) All prize winners will be chosen randomly using Random Line Picker.

Happy hopping!

*CLICK ME*

Frances has arrived!

Compromising Prudence was one of the very first Aurora Regencies, a sneak peek at the new imprint of of traditional regency romances. It was also a sneak peek into a family of gentlemen scientiest and their ladies. To my delight, readers were as smitten with the Mad Hatterlys as I was and for the official launch of Aurora, they were introduced to bad boy Graham Hatterly as he fell in love with a beautiful botanist while Becoming Mr. Brooking.

At long last, the third Mad Hatterly novel is here. It's little sister Frances' turn. Frances Hatterly is thrilled to finally make her London debut. She means to indulge her passion for fashion and frivolity. But before she can even make her curtsey, she finds herself accidentally compromised by the most arrogant man she has ever met. Desperate to avoid being forced into marriage, she resolves to make herself as obnoxious as possible to drive him away.

The Duke of Ainsley knew he should never have agreed to help launch his friend's uncivilized sister Frances into society. After he is found alone with Frances, he must either marry the brat or find someone else to do so. But what sort of man would be willing to take the hoyden off his hands?

Ainsley must civilize Frances quickly, or risk losing more than his bachelorhood--he just might lose his heart.

To celebrate it's one year anniversary, the Aurora authors will have a week long blog hop with prizes all along the way. Be sure and check back saturday for more fun, frivolity and prizes.

Civilizing Frances, debuting Oct. 14th from Musa Publishing

I'm a book club selection

        Pardon me as I jump up and down for a minute. Okay, that's better. Turns out that I will be the first book club selection for Musa publishing. Wait.

Okay, done. I had to jump around again. That's right, Death by Scandal has been released and is doing well. Check me out. I'm on the Bestseller Ticker. Nifty, huh? Add to that the excitement of being a Hera Book Club selection and you get me jumping around my office. If you click the purty purple icon and sign up for the newsletter (of course it's free) you get a discount on my book.

I'll be doing a book club chat on October the 18th. More details to follow. I just needed to stop jumping long enough to catch my breath and share.

More Musa goodness: If mystery and romance isn't your thing, how about some awesome spec. fiction for Halloween? Treat yourself to a copy of Penumbra.I've been reading mine and it's very good. For all you writers, they pay pro rates. 

If you're a Musa author reading this, give me a shout out in the comments. I'm going to highlight the blogs of other Musa authors starting next week.

Okay, so it's back to jumping for me. As you were.

It lives! It lives!

Musa is alive!  To learn more about the company philosophy and the people behind Musa, check out their blog: http://musapublishing.blogspot.com/.

To shop for awesome books and see what's going on there, check out their website and store. http://www.musapublishing.com/.

To shop for my awesome books, go to my page on their website. http://www.musapublishing.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=14&sort=20a&filter_id=13

Now I'm exausted after staying up all night at the launch party. So, that's all she wrote.

Shiny!

So I did quite a bit of work retooling the blog. New links to my books which are about to be released and a whole new look. Sounds simple but it took me the better part of an hour. There are times I wish I was more tech savvy. I'm only one step above Luddite. I always tell people that if I can make tech work for me, anyone can do it.

Last week I got a tremendous amount of writing done. I was Super Writing Woman complete with tights and cape. I hid from all the social media stuff that needed doing. This week I was all about the business of writing. Bloggity posts and schedules, guest blogging, author loops, facebook, twitter, google+ etc. But actual words of fiction? Not so awesome. There has to be a happy medium; I just don't seem to have found it yet.

Just a week until pre-release. I'm going to celebrate with some special stuff and give away books and all sorts of fun things. Because I can. :D

MIssing You!

Oh, where to start. So when we last left our heroine, she was riding high: new books about to debut, a website being created, plans for the summer. True, she was missing her roof, but the nice men were putting one on for her and it only cost )@#(*$&#* dollars.

Fast forward through some of the bad parts.  After buying her roof, she bought a new air conditioning unit for the house and fixed the A/C in her car. Then she bought a whole new septic system. None of this was fun, easy or cheap. Sadly, no monies were left for the website and those plans were put on hold.  Her computer died a slow and painful death. She even survived two weeks with out the internets! I know! Scary, right? Thus, she spent more monies and bought a shiny new, wicked-fast computer.

  Even the Texas weather conspired against her with a record number of 100+ days (over 70!) and an epic drought. Top that off with frequent scary wildfires and you get the picture. Our heroine did not have a good summer.

Then stuff went bad with her publisher. Really bad. Not to belabor the point, but if you're interested, check out this thread at Absolute Write, the last few pages should do it. Yes, AMP was circling the drain. In fact, it's pretty much dead, but the owner just hasn't acknowledged the death. Lots of authors are still strapped there. Salvation came in the form of Musa Publishing. They bought the Aurora Regency imprint and that means our intrepid heroine's books. Yay! Much rejoicing. The books will be re-released in October.

I haven't been paid my royalties in months. Boo! Hiss! In fact, I haven't made a blessed penny off Death by Scandal in spite of the fact that it has sold well. More boos! But I'm so relieved to be out of that mess, I don't even care.  I'm resurrecting this blog along with my career. I'll be posting more about Musa and the big launch. Gosh it's nice to have something positive to say.

Hope everyone had a fabulous summer.

I don't think we're in Kansas

So this is just a quick post to say I haven't completely blown away here in Tornado Alley. It's been an interesting Spring for sure. I think it's hailed every day this week--three times today.

It hailed on the roofers when they came out to give us an estimate for the damage (caused by wind, not water). It hailed on me while picking up the kids at school.

Hail, hail, go away!