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Launch Day: RAVEN HEART!
I’m completely delighted to announce that my so-fun-to-write little billionaire shapeshifter novella RAVEN HEART launches into the big brave world today!
RAVEN HEART on Amazon!
RAVEN HEART on Barnes & Noble (Nook)!
RAVEN HEART on iTunes!
RAVEN HEART on Kobo!
A curvy woman determined to protect her town, a raven shifter protector with secrets to keep, and a beast out for his own profit add up to an action-packed romance!
Curvy political activist Elena Peratrovitch has only one passion: keeping her small Alaskan town of Shkalnik free of business developments that would ruin its remote beauty. But when the government puts neighboring land up for lease, Elena must face down the billionaires who come to invest in the territory. She thinks nothing can change her opposition to developing Shkalnik…
…until gorgeous, sensual Richard Yale arrives on the scene. He’s like no man Elena has ever met–and not just because he’s richer than Midas. Richard’s life as a shapeshifter and a protector of the Tlingit people must remain a secret–until the price of keeping secrets could be the life of the woman he falls in love with at first sight.
Caught between passion and politics, Richard and Elena must fight to find common ground, and to keep Shkalnik out of the hands of those who would truly do it harm…
Here’s a bit of information you’ll only find on this page: Shkalnik is taken from the Tlingit word shkalneek, which means ‘story’. So Shkalnik is my Alaskan billionaire shifters story town. It took me like five days to come up with that name and I’m so happy with it. :)
I’m planning to write at least four Alaskan Totem novellas, and when I’ve got them all done I’ll be doing a print edition because I think that would be way fun. :) In an ideal world that’ll be around this time next year because I’d like to release Murphy Lawless novellas quarterly. :)
Murphy Lawless has a Facebook page, a Twitter account (which will be more useful when I find a client that lets me manage more than one freaking Twitter account at once), and will soon have a website as soon as I get hosting for it. Oh, and a mailing list!
I hope you enjoy reading RAVEN HEART as much as I enjoyed writing it!
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Throwback Thursday: Well-Loved Books
A hash tag popped up on Twitter yesterday, #WellLovedBooks, and I immediately went and took pictures of several of mine. I thought they’d make a kind of nice different Throwback Thursday post idea, too, so I present to you a handful of my well-loved books. :)
My 8th birthday prsent: ANNE OF GREEN GABLES, which I read to pieces. <3
I love these books so very much. It is so mind-bogglingly cool to me that I can now count Lawrence Watt-Evans among my friends.
I want to re-read these, as they’re some of the very few books that I loved well enough as a teen to hold on to for all these years and through all the moves. Apparently she’s re-released them as e-books!
I may be the only person who’s actually read all five of these. A lot of people over on Twitter had read one or two, but it took a really long time for all of them to come out, and I was unusually determined about them. I want to re-read these, too.
My dog-eared, sweat-stained, beloved BLUE SWORD and HERO AND THE CROWN. I have them in hardcover now, but I’ll never let these two go. Someday I hope to get Robin McKinley to sign them.
My equally beloved SECRET COUNTRY trilogy, which I’ve read more times than I can possibly count. I’d replace these in hardback, too, if I could, because I live in fear of the day they fall apart. And I will get them signed somedaay, dammit!
And my pièce de résistance, the copy of DRAGONSONG I inherited from a cousin, read to bits, brought to Ireland from Alaska in 1993, got signed by the Dragonlady, at Dragonhold, and subsequently retired with honors. ♥
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Ten years!
My authors’ copies of STONE’S THROE have arrived! As is now traditional, they are being displayed by a particularly handsome model.
The particularly handsome model then wished to take pictures of ME with the book. :)
And the end result of all of this is the Ten Year Shelf: the complete (full-length) works, 2005-2015: 24 books representing in the area of 2.5 million words!
Holy beans. :)
ytd wordcount: 46,100
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Green Tea Cupcakes
So yesterday was the 200th birthday of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Irish author of such gothic classics as UNCLE SILAS and CARMILLA. Swan River Press, a small Irish press specializing in gothic horror and half-forgotten Irish authors, has done a rather splendid celebration of Le Fanu, including
– a track at last weekend’s Eurocon
– a walk through Dublin with Le Fanu’s life & career as the path
– a lecture last night by Le Fanu expert Jim Rockhill
– and the release of DREAMS OF SHADOW & SMOKE: Stories for JS Le Fanu, a collection of short stories written in homage to Le Fanu’s work
…all of which comes to me because one of Le Fanu’s most famous stories is Green Tea, and my friend Brian (proprietor of Swan River Press) asked me if I could make green tea cupcakes for the lecture last night.
So I did. :) I’d never made them before and they turned out very nicely, and Brian asked me to document the making of them, so there’s a bunch of pictures behind the cut. :)
ETA: Oh, recipes, on request: I used this green tea cake recipe (substituting buttermilk for the yogurt, because it’s what I had (plain yogurt, buttermilk & sour cream are all 1:1 exchangeable in baking)) & this green tea buttercream frosting recipe. :)
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TBR shelf doom
I’m afraid the TBR shelf has gotten totally out of control again, and I have two SFF conventions coming up. This cannot bode well. But it’s not my fault! We went to America, where there are thousands of different titles you can’t find here! I found Barbara
HamblyHamilton’s Abigail Adams murder mystery series! I got Michelle Sagara’s CAST IN FLAME (which is my new favourite of the series, OMG, the action! OMG, the end!)! I got new Jack Campbell books (I love them. they do exactly what they say on the tin)! I got a new Lawrence Watt-Evans book, and then I learned he’ll be at Shamrokon so I can get him to SIGN it (and more importantly, also my 25 year old beat up copies of the Misenchanted books!!!!)! I got Carol Berg’s new book (which has a glowing cover quote from some CE Murphy person)! I got–I got a whole bunch of cosy mysteries (in the name of research, NOT THAT I’M STARTING A COSY MYSTERY SERIES DARN IT) and I took pictures of literally dozens more because I couldn’t possibly buy them all or remember their titles but I might want to later! :)
Also, ever so slightly in my defence, Mom gave me several of her already-read mystery novels so those have been added to the stack too, even though I didn’t technically buy them myself. :)
Next year I really *am* going to have to limit myself to reading only books by people I know personally, just as a way to get through the backlist. The question then becomes whether people I’ve interacted with on Twitter count…
