Saturday, October 15, 2016

Guest Post: Web of Memory Excerpt by Tara Fox Hall

Hello Everyone,


Let's please welcome Tara Fox Hall today to the blog. She is sharing an Except from her book Web of Memory. She is also having a giveaway so make sure you check out the whole post for some tantalizing prizes.

 BLURB:

Sarelle’s return to her loved ones brings a brief measure of solace, even as she mourns all that changed in her absence. Rene’s presence and Sar’s pact with Shaker add as much tension as comfort, as the delicate balance of Sar’s life threatens to collapse under the weight of all she endured as Michael’s prisoner. Determined to reclaim her life, Sar fights back, inadvertently sparking Danial’s memory as an unseen ancient enemy prepares to strike a fatal blow.

EXCERPT:



 

I walked through the front door of Hayden the second week of September, a little over twenty-four hours after being liberated from Michael’s fortress. Two seconds later, V grabbed hold of me around my waist, sobbing. I hugged her, dissolving into tears as Elle and T threw their arms around me too. Their love enveloped me, washing away the horror of the last four months of captivity, making it seem like a bad dream. Even my parents were there to hug me, my mom’s eyes bright with unshed tears.
God, it is good to be home.

* * * *
After showering quickly, I went to Lash’s room where Titus had carried his prone body. He had still not responded to the blood infusions Devlin had given him on our trip home. I lay down near him and slept. By morning, he had still not regained consciousness. I squeezed his hand, wanting to shake him but worried I’d somehow make his condition worse.
“Give it time,” Titus rumbled comfortingly as he entered. “His wounds were mortal, Sar. It’s only with luck we saved his life. He’s got a strong will to life, that snake has.”
“And two small incentives,” Devlin added meaningfully from behind him. “He’ll awaken soon.”
He came over to me. “Love, I’ve made you an appointment with Stephen for two days from now to check on your twins. Titus said Lash should wait that long before moving around. I’m betting he’ll want to go with you.”
“Thank you,” I said gratefully.
 “I must go over some things with Titus,” Devlin said, giving me a quick kiss. “Please, would you remain here with Lash?”
“Don’t worry,” I said, giving him a weary look. “I’ve no plans to go anywhere without a full platoon with me for quite a while.”
I spent the better part of that day at Lash’s bedside, sometimes dozing, sometimes reading. Everyone stayed away, even my kids. Now they were young adults with their own lives; Elle was just starting a new semester, T had a business to run, and even V had her lessons. That was what I told myself, anyway.
But all this solitude gave me too much time to think on all that had happened. The last five years had been filled with so much heartache along with the happiness of becoming a mother and a partner. Maybe if it hadn’t been multiple times with potential deadly consequences, sigh. My latest disaster, becoming Michael’s prisoner for months as he tried to force me to have his child had been terrible. Almost losing Lash had been horrific, both to his degeneration and then when he had taken a sorcerer’s killing blow meant for me. But I was home now and everything would go back to normal. Or what had passed for normal for me for the last few years: being Oathedread, partneredto Devlin, the blond vampire golden-eyed who Ruled the North American Continent, and also his co-Ruling brother Danial, who was the matching shadow of Devlin, albeit with dark hair and dark eyes. The comatose weresnake in front of me, Lash, was part of that Oath, as vampire law called it. I was pregnant with his twins, something that had made the captivity bearable, and all of our failed attempts at escape. We made it, we’re free. Thanks to Shaker...
At once I heard the demon’s voice in my head. You called mistress? he said in my mind in teasing tones.
Michael and his sorcerer, Cyrus, had foiled all our escape attempts. It had only been my agreeing to become Shaker’s Mistressread, his human anchor in the mortal world, to keep him out of Hellthat had let Devlin and his own demon, Titus, find Lash and I in the nick of time. The ramifications of my Hellish pact were sure to cause ripples in my life, something I hadn’t had time to think about until now. But what choice did I have? None.
Mistress, Shaker said again in my mind.
I’m okay, I thought back to him. Just thinking. If the touch of my hands would help you to ponder the benefits of our alliance...
No! I interrupted, blushing. Leave me. As you wish. I breathed a sigh of relief, then told myself not to think about any of it. There would be time enough for that in the days ahead. You dealt with everything you went through so far okay. You can deal with this too, you just have to be strong.


Buy Links:



Author Bio:
Tara Fox Hall's writing credits include nonfiction, erotica, horror, suspense, action-adventure, children's stories, and contemporary and historical paranormal romance. She is the author of the paranormal fantasy Lash series and the paranormal romantic drama Promise Me series. Tara divides her free time unequally between writing novels and short stories, chainsawing firewood, caring for stray animals, sewing cat and dog beds for donation to animal shelters, and target practice. All of her published children's stories to date are free reads on www.childrens-stories.net.


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Google Plus: https://plus.google.com/108597284890507251806/










Saturday, August 27, 2016

Writing from The Hart Chapter 3

I haven't really blogged much this year. Why? Well no real reason and many reasons I guess. My life is mostly boring. The exciting stuff goes on inside my head which is where I like to keep it. I've had my fair share of exciting when I was a teenager and in my mid-twenties. And I'm happy to be leading the boring life. One of the more quiet aspects about my life I don't talk about in public much is I'm a psychic medium, clairvoyant and empath.

This wasn't something I woke up one day and said hey wouldn't it be fun to be. It's not something I can completely turn off or ignore. Tried that and it didn't work out so well. Because of the experiences I've had they have influenced my writing which is one reason I feel so at home writing paranormal. Besides having an interest in vampires and ghosts in general I'm also pagan so that plays into my writing as well. And lately I've been writing about grim reapers. Again personal experience there too which is hard to explain without sounding crazy. But then again when you tell someone that you hear voices in your head that aren't your own  - or your characters'-then you get strange and funny looks.

It's always amusing when in my day job we get talking about past job experiences and of course I always tell them I was a psychic because well hey I still list it on my resume since it helped put me through college. Most find it interesting and ask me about it. Others I'm sure thing it's all - wooo-- and I'm talking out of my ass.

However, yeah, no. The place I used to work at is still in existence. And it was just a little over a year ago that my mentor, friend, old boss, passed away and it really struck home. Alex was one of the most kindhearted people I had met, stern, crazy, and a whole other host of things that made me want to kill him at times and hug him. And of course  he might be gone from the world but the bastard still owes me money. LOL.

I found Alex on the old Compuserve online chat rooms where he was running a psychic development classes. And at that time I was still in high school and dealing with all this crap with home life and well with these crazy ass things going on with the ghosts in the various apartments I lived in, the typical shit from being a teenager, and everything else. We talked for months and he invited me into Boston to interview with him. So my mom and I went cause at this time I was a couple months from graduating high school and Alex had no idea I was so young. He had me do an interview with on the psychics there which constituted of reading her cards. I had no fucking clue what I was doing. Not really. But he hired me that day and I started 3 days after I graduated high school. It helped my college was three blocks away.

Four and a half years later I had to part ways with the Tearoom because it was my time, but in those years I met so many wonderful people who have stayed with me even today. Some have also gone from this world and left a hole in my heart. But life goes on and I see the occasionally in dreams.

How does this all work into my writing besides shaping my plot lines? Well it spawned a series of books called Soul Reaper Series. I came to a point in my life i knew I wanted to write and it takes a lot of energy to birth a book and do readings. So I had to chose reading or writing. The books won out.

In many ways I am happy how things turned out. And I always wonder if I should go back to doing readings, but I'm firmly reminded that writing is my path and while I'll never get rid of my abilities they are more just another side of me.

Check out other chapters in Writing from the Hart

Chapter 1
Chapter 2


Also my Current Releases are:
Reviving The Dragon
Worlds Apart
Death's Revival

I'm always happy to talk about my personal ghost stories and past psychic experiences, but I no longer do readings professionally.

Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Guest Post: L. Andrew Cooper’s TOP 10 HORROR FILMS OF ALL TIME


Let's welcome L. Andrew Cooper to the blog today with this top ten Horror Flicks of all time.



Ranking is subject to change without notice!
10. House by the Cemetery (1981): I’ll be on the Lucio Fulci panel at DragonCon in Atlanta this year! With a monster named Dr. Freudstein in a self-conscious blend of Henry James and slasher movies, what’s not to love about this corny Italian gore movie?

9. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919/1920): The classic German Expressionist silent that many wrongly consider the first horror film, it’s arguably the first great horror film. The set design is still mind-blowing, the performances and storyline still scary. See it with live music (there is no “authentic” score).

8. Hausu (1977): Did you ever notice that mushroom clouds from nuclear bombs look like cotton candy? Have a dance with a skeleton, but be careful, or the piano might eat you. “Genius” does not begin to describe the weirdness of this film.

7. Antichrist (2009): To be honest, I like Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, the follow-up to this one, a bit more, but it’s not as clearly horror. Antichrist is sad and beautiful when it isn’t almost unwatchably violent. Chaos reigns!

6. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984): I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams. Actually, I saw Wes Craven’s teen-slashing classic long before I got to Hamlet. I tell the story of how Freddy cured my nightmares in my first book, Gothic Realities.

5. The Thing (1982): You can love the amazing creature that shifts into the shape of any living being it samples—thanks to awesome makeup and animatronics—and the heart-thumping score by Ennio Morricone. Or maybe love the nihilistic, Lovecraftian storyline and performances by Kurt Russell and Keith David. Or just bow down to John Carpenter genius, and be afraid. 

4. Audition (1999): A genre mind-bender, this one lulls you into liking a middle-aged widower who’s just looking for love the wrong way as he raises his son. Maybe he exploits patriarchal advantage a little. More than a little. And someone notices. In the tradition of Texas Chain Saw Massacre, you’ll think it’s a lot gorier than it is, because this movie will hurt you. Takashi Miike, the director, is a super-genius.

3. Candyman (1992): The score by Philip Glass, the story by Clive Barker, the why-haven’t-you-done-more direction from Bernard Rose… but most important, why does it take British material to craft the most important (and overlooked, considering its brilliance) horror film about race and sexuality in America?

2. Martyrs (2008): So difficult to watch, but so rewarding. Like Audition, you spend half the film thinking you’re getting one thing, and then you get another. Both halves rock the soul. Why don’t more stories aspire to transcendence?

1. Suspiria (1977): This is director Dario Argento’s masterpiece, and he has so many good films that I spent a great deal of trouble writing a book about him. It’s over-the-top gruesome, but it’s over-the-top gorgeous. His inspiration was Disney’s Snow White. As you watch people being ripped apart, you might feel confused by the relationship, but when you think back on the colors, you’ll understand.



About the author:    L. Andrew Cooper scribbles horror: novels Burning the Middle Ground and Descending Lines as well as anthologies of experimental shorts Leaping at Thorns (2014 /2016) and Peritoneum (2016). He also co-edited the anthology Imagination Reimagined (2014). His book Dario Argento (2012) examines the maestro’s movies from the 70s to the present. Cooper’s other works on horror include his non-fiction study Gothic Realities (2010), a co-edited textbook, Monsters (2012), and recent essays that discuss 2012’s Cabin in the Woods (2014) and 2010’s A Serbian Film (2015). His B.A. is from Harvard, Ph.D. from Princeton. Louisville locals might recognize him from his year-long stint as WDRB-TV’s “movie guy.” Find him at amazon.com/author/landrewcooper, facebook.com/landrewcooper, and landrewcooper.com.


Book Synopsis for Peritoneum:  Snaking through history–from the early-1900s cannibal axe-murderer of “Blood and Feathers,” to the monster hunting on the 1943 Pacific front in “Year of the Wolf,” through the files of J. Edgar Hoover for an “Interview with ‘Oscar,'” and into “The Broom Closet Where Everything Dies” for a finale in the year 2050–Peritoneum winds up your guts to assault your brain. Hallucinatory experiences redefine nightmare in “Patrick’s Luck” and “The Eternal Recurrence of Suburban Abortion.” Strange visions of colors and insects spill through the basements of hospitals and houses, especially the basement that provides the title for “TR4B,” which causes visitors to suffer from “Door Poison.” Settings, characters, and details recur not only in these tales but throughout Peritoneum, connecting all its stories in oblique but organic ways. Freud, borrowing from Virgil, promised to unlock dreams not by bending higher powers but by moving infernal regions. Welcome to a vivisection. Come dream with the insides.
Book Synopsis for Leaping at Thorns: Leaping at Thorns arranges eighteen of L. Andrew Cooper’s experimental short horror stories into a triptych of themes–complicity, entrapment, and conspiracy–elements that run throughout the collection. The stories span from the emotionally-centered to the unthinkably horrific; from psychosexual grossness to absurd violence; from dark extremes to brain-and-tongue twister. These standalone stories add important details to the fictional world and grand scheme of Dr. Allen Fincher, who also lurks in the background of Cooper’s novels Burning the Middle Ground and Descending Lines.

Author Links:

Website: landrewcooper.com.

Twitter: @Landrew42

Facebook: facebook.com/landrewcooper

Amazon Author Page: http://www.amazon.com/author/landrewcooper



Tour Schedule and Activities

8/8 MyLifeMyBooksMyEscape Interview

8/8 SpecMusicMuse Guest Post

8/8 Darkling Delights Guest Post

8/8 Beauty in Ruins Guest Post

8/9 Jordan Hirsch Review

8/10 The Seventh Star Interview

8/10 Vampires, Witches, Me Oh My Top Ten List

8/10 The Sinister Scribblings of Sarah E. Glenn Guest Post

8/11 EricJude.com Guest Post

8/12 Reviews Coming at YA Guest Post

8/13 I Smell Sheep Top Ten List

8/13 Bee's Knees Reviews Review

8/14 Sheila's Guests and Reviews Guest Post


Amazon Links for Peritoneum

Print Version

https://www.amazon.com/Peritoneum-L-Andrew-Cooper/dp/1941706746



Kindle Version

https://www.amazon.com/Peritoneum-L-Andrew-Cooper-ebook/dp/B01FKW6AJC



Barnes and Noble Link for Peritoneum

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/peritoneum-l-andrew-cooper/1123778083?ean=9781941706749


Amazon Links for Leaping at Thorns

Print Version

https://www.amazon.com/Leaping-at-Thorns-Andrew-Cooper/dp/1941706738



Kindle Version

https://www.amazon.com/Leaping-at-Thorns-Andrew-Cooper-ebook/dp/B01FL1EQXE



Barnes and Noble Link for Leaping at Thorns
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/leaping-at-thorns-l-andrew-cooper/1120361766?ean=9781941706732