Monday 29 August 2011

10 Things You Didn't Know About Me

And if you want to find out, click on over to Smart Girls Love Sci-Fi and find out.  AND, if you leave a comment or ask another question, you might be lucky enough to win a PDF copy of THE MASTER KEY.

Good luck!

Sunday 28 August 2011

Six Sentence Sunday - August 28

Here it is again, another Six Sentence Sunday!  Again, a short snippet from the newly released The Master Key.

Here we have Simon contemplating a certain Governor of the space station.


“Give a person a little authority and it goes straight to their head,” Simon muttered to himself. “Even if they’ve been doing it for the last fifteen years.”
Personally, Simon thought Mwenye needed to leave the space station more often, maybe get a little fresh air—find a woman, or man, to divert his frustrations—whatever tickled his fancy.


If you want to know a little bit more about The Master Key, click up to my Books tab above.

Thanks again to everyone who drops by to read these tasty snippets and leaving wonderful comments.

For anyone interested in participating, click to Six Sentence Sunday, and follow the rules. You can also check out the six sentence reads from the other participants.
Tweet about it too, use the #sixsunday hashtag.

Cheers!

Sunday 21 August 2011

Six Sentence Sunday - August 21

Another Six Sentence Sunday - wow, time flies quickly!  Here is another short snippet from the newly released The Master Key.


We were escorted straight to the observation deck and given an impressive view of the Scrap Yard. Between us, floating like an aerodynamic dick, a stocky yet luxuriously sleek gunship—a sci-fi fanatics wet dream. Riddled with mounted guns seen and unseen; at this very moment their guns were aimed at us, and the Scrap Yard. From the looks of it, we were in stalemate.

(Josie's point of view of a space station.)

If you want to know a little bit more about The Master Key, click up to my Books tab above.

Thanks again to everyone who drops by to read these tasty snippets and leaving wonderful comments.

For anyone interested in participating, click to Six Sentence Sunday, and follow the rules. You can also check out the six sentence reads from the other participants.
Tweet about it too, use the #sixsunday hashtag.

Cheers!

Wednesday 17 August 2011

Scratching My Head...

...For ideas, of course.  Marketing ideas that will make you primed and pumped to read my books.  It would also be nice if you bought them as well.  But, that's splitting hairs, and I'd be happy if you simply read them for the sake of enjoyment.

That being said, I'm still up the figurative creek with my lack of motivating marketing ideas.  It's a dire dilemma we writers fall into, sapping valuable writing time and plugging it into marketing schemes.  I consulted my brother on this just this morning.  While Dear Bro is a scientific genius, every so often, he manages to deliver a brain spark that will work in the real world.  His idea: a drawing competition.  The prize...well, my book, of course.  (Me thinks the printed version once its ready for distribution).

So now I'm thinking up exciting ways to push this idea, fine tuning it so that it won't get out of hand, and everyone will have a chance to enter...no matter the drawing skills.  Dear Bro suggested that the competition should focus on the elements that make up the books (well, duhhh) like its characters, the world, etc.  But all in all, it's an excellent idea and in the coming weeks, I will inform the world at large in due course.

Of course, I'm open to all ideas, so if any of my Dear Readers have any fabulous ideas, please feel free to drop me a line.  Up for grabs are ebooks in PDF format (they are limited amount available, of course), printed books (when they become available).  Trinkets like bookmarks (signed) and postcards will also be included as an extra because I'm a nice person.

Eventually, I'll sign up for Amazon gift vouchers (cuz everyone loves their Kindles) and they are growing quite popular - the gift vouchers.  Speaking of Kindles, and signing up, I just did for Kindlegraphs.  Eh, you say?  Electronic autographs.  Come on, people, we live in the techno age!  You can click on over here if you want a techno-graph from me - I know, sad joke...as I said, I'm afflicted with head scratchings right now.

(At the moment, only The Master Key is up, and due to...technical difficulties - haha - The Lancaster Rule won't appear until later).

Right, back to the grind.
Cheers!

Sunday 14 August 2011

Six Sentence Sunday - August 14

I took a short break from participating in Six Sentence Sunday as I had to deal with various things, but I'm back now.  Here is another short snippet from the newly released The Master Key.

 
She ate with the aloof and regal air expected of a woman in her current standing—she’d been practising—and the gruff, single-mindedness of a combat soldier.
“You’ve a healthy appetite,” James commented, enthralled.
“So I’ve been told. I missed my dinner,” she replied pointedly, glaring back. “I was hungry.”


My heroine Josie keeps getting herself into trouble.  And what's she doing with this James dude?

If you want to know a little bit more about The Master Key, click up to my Books tab above.

Thanks again to everyone who drops by to read these tasty snippets and leaving wonderful comments.

For anyone interested in participating, click to Six Sentence Sunday, and follow the rules. You can also check out the six sentence reads from the other participants.
Tweet about it too, use the #sixsunday hashtag.

Cheers!

Monday 8 August 2011

Sucker for Punishment

Yep, you read right.  I'm going full-speed ahead and lining myself up for some brutal punishment.  I have no one to blame but myself.

I've decided to query agents again...

And funny how after a couple years of not hacking out submission queries, you tend to forget a few things.  I can't even look through my saved files to take notes since the computer crashed dramatically a year ago and wiped that out.  But then, considering I wasn't able to attract an agent then, maybe that's a good thing.

For the last couple of hours, I've spent this glorious Monday morning (said with sarcasm...who loves Mondays anyway?) typing and retyping a passable submission query and trying to "get it right."  Jeez, talk about the pressure of trying to sound business-like AND catchy.  Maybe I should take lessons in narrating movie trailers.  Maybe I should just forget about it completely and stick to my publishers.  But I can't shake the feeling that there's more out there for me.  Hence, the predicament of punishment.

So, I pretty much slapped together a moderately pleasing query letter (which I'll probably pick at some more) and sent off my very first submission query in two years.  What a heady experience, I swear my heart was thudding somewhere close to my throat as my finger hovered over the SEND button.  Then I remembered I forgot to add the word count and smacked myself in the head.  See, the punishment begins.  Sigh...

On that note, Happy Monday.

Cheers!

Wednesday 3 August 2011

And, Yet Another Interview!

When it rains, it pours!  The same can be said for interviews (does that sound cheeky?)  But it's true.  Yet another interview has gone live within days of the last interview.  Residential Aliens interviewed me (ages ago) and asked some interesting questions, for both me as an Artist, as well as a Writer.  They also wanted to see some of the "doodles" I've done recently.  You can check out the interview HERE.

PS: Glad to be back from my holidays!  And now, time to dive into work.

Monday 1 August 2011

Another Interview and Fabulous Review

So, my holiday has ended.  Two weeks of blissful oblivion - just what I needed.  Now, I'm ready and rearing to get back into things.

To kick things off, I was recently interviewed by a fellow Champagne Books writer, Julie Eberhart Painter.  Find out my real name, as Julie "grilled" me with intrusive questions.  Click on over to Champagne Books Blog to find out more.

Earlier, The Master Key was reviewed by Laura Hogg from Travel The Ages.  She had some generous words to describe her thoughts on the book.  Thank you Laura!  Check it out HERE!!