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I accidentally wrote a book.
I started a novella on January 1. It was gonna be a quick & dirty little retelling of Beauty and the Beast, and it was gonna be 25-30K and written in a week, and I was gonna slap a cheapie cover on it and fling it up onto the interwebs in a Surprise Novella Drop!
When, at the end of a week’s writing and 23.5 thousand words, I had only just gotten to the Beast, it was pretty clear that this was not going to be a novella, and that in fact it had gotten entirely out of hand and maybe it would be worth getting my magnificent cover artist, Tara O’Shea (Fringe-Element.net) to do a proper cover.
At the end of TWO weeks, it was 60,000 words long, a proper (if short) novel, and *finished*.
I sent the dreadfully rough draft off to some beta readers last night and by this morning was convinced I had made the worst mistake in the world, giving it to ANYBODY in that format. But then I had email from one of them, who’d made the mistake of checking her email after midnight when she’d gotten home from an event, and stayed up all night reading it. She said, “It is utterly charming and completely engrossing and very difficult to put down,” and that made me feel better. :)
I’m giving it a week to rest while a few other betas have a go at it, and then it’s going to go through the fastest revision process known to me, and then I’m gonna start the year off with a bang:
ROSES IN AMBER drops on or about February 1!
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Teaser: RAVEN HEART
I’m starting a pseudonym to write shapeshifting billionaire paranormal romances under. (Believe it or not, shapeshifting billionaire paranormal romances are a thing. A very popular thing! And SO MUCH FUN to write, OMG!!!)
For early access to the Murphy Lawless novellas, you can subscribe to my Patreon page! I’ll be posting about them when they’re released, but they’ll come straight to your inbox this way.
And for today, a teaser chapter from RAVEN HEART, the first Alaskan Totems paranormal romance by Murphy Lawless! :)
RAVEN HEART: CHAPTER ONE
A surveyor’s mark, hot glowing orange, cut a line across an arm’s length of mountain stone. The paint splashed a few pieces of loose rock, but not enough to wipe it out if Elena knocked them away. Farther down the mountain, where grey stone turned to loose scree, another mark could be overturned entirely, but it wouldn’t make any difference. The surveys were done, and the development rights for the land had been put up for lease.The federal government had given Alaskan natives more of their land back than any other Native American tribes—and that was a problem right there, given their land back—but this whole swath of mountain, traditional Tlingit hunting and gathering territory, still fell under federal lands, all the way out into the bay, and it turned out there was oil in them thar waters.
Elena Peratrovich’s mother, and her mother before her, had been fighting to get the land recognized as Tlingit territory for decades, long before anybody discovered oil, and today, they’d lost for good. No one in the tribe had the money to buy up the resource rights, and that meant the profits from oil and fishing development would benefit…well, someone else. As always.
So Elena had come to the mountain to say goodbye, to look out over the bay and the forests before oil platforms and cruise ships became eyesores on the glacier blue waters. She’d hiked up with the sunset around ten o’clock the evening before, and sat on the mountain through the long dusk and the few, hours of night. The horizon, never truly dark, began to brighten with grey again before three, and by four, soft gold light turned the sky pale behind the mountains. Shafts of brightness threw color on the mountainside, gradually illuminating scraggly brown and green moss, and stretching for the spruce forest that made up the range’s tree line. Farther down the stubborn spruce gave way to leafy trees and fern-filled undergrowth, Alaska’s all-but-unknown rain forests providing trees of massive size, even up to the cedars that had once made up the southeastern tribes’ traditional houses.
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Year of Miracles
Four hundred years ago, master vampire Eliseo Daisani and dragonlord Janx both fell in love with a mortal woman. This is her story.
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No Dominion
After fighting at her side for over a year, Gary Muldoon must leave shaman Joanne Walker to face a battle only he can win…
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Easy Pickings
Joanne Walker & Jane Yellowrock must find and defeat the magic that brought them together–or find themselves EASY PICKINGS!