Friday, November 20, 2009

[Annette McCleave] BOUND BY DARKNESS / Book 2: Soul Gatherer

I am a big fan of Cover Art and have been known to pick up a book based on the cover alone. (Reading is visual, covers are visual - I think they complement each other. And I'm sticking with that story.)

So I was thriled to see that Annette McCleave has posted the cover for her upcoming Soul Gatherer novel, Bound By Darkness. The Cover Gods are smiling, and so am I - love it!

This is the second book of the series following Drawn Into Darkness, which was the 2008 Golden Heart winner for Best Paranormal Romance (under the title Soul Provider).

Cannot wait for BBD which releases in May 2010!

Here's the synopsis from her website:

Soul Gatherer Brian Webster has long lived with the guilt of failing to save his teenage sister. When another girl dies in his arms protecting an ancient coin from a demon, he takes up her cause. The coin is one of the thirty pieces of silver Judas received for selling out the Son of God. United, the coins are a dark relic of immense power, and in the wrong hands, they could destroy civilization.

Lena Sharpe is on her own mission to find the Judas coins. A Soul Gatherer by day and a thief by night, she’s negotiated the most important deal of her life. When a brazen warrior intervenes and kidnaps her to obtain the coins, she repeatedly attempts to escape. But Brian is unrelenting, fearful that the beautiful felon has made a pact with the devil himself. And he’s not entirely wrong.

Bound together by burning desire and a similar darkness in their hearts, Brian and Lena race against time to recover the missing coins. But as the truth behind Lena’s bargain surfaces, Brian is faced with a desperate choice — save the one, or save the many.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

[Alexandra Alter] HOW TO WRITE A GREAT NOVEL

Absolutely fascinating insight into the writing process!

This excellent article - How To Write A Great Novel - by Alexandra Alter which lists the writing habits and practices of some of the most reknowned writers today. And its amazing how much they've shared abot how they do what they do.

Read the entire article here.

Here's the opening of her article:

Richard Powers lounges in bed all day and speaks his novels aloud to a laptop computer with voice-recognition software. Junot Diaz, author of the Pulitzer-prize winning novel "The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," shuts himself in the bathroom and perches on the edge of the tub with his notebook when he's tackling a knotty passage. Hilary Mantel, whose Tudor drama "Wolf Hall" claimed this year's Man Booker Prize, jumps in the shower when she gets stuck. "The number of pages I've got that are water marked, I can't tell you," Ms. Mantel said.

An unusually robust crop of books from some of the biggest names in literature has landed this fall. Kazuo Ishiguro, Orhan Pamuk, Mr. Powers and Nicholson Baker have new books out this fall, along with a host of other prominent authors.

Behind the scenes, many of these writers say they struggle with the daily work of writing, clocking thousands of solitary hours staring at blank pages and computer screens. Most agree on common hurdles: procrastination, writer's block, the terror of failure that looms over a new project and the attention-sucking power of the Internet.

A few authors bristle when asked the inevitable question about how they write. Richard Ford declined to reveal his habits, explaining in an email that "those are the kind of questions I hope no one asks me after readings and lectures." Others revel in spilling minute details, down to their preferred brand of pen (Amitav Ghosh swears by black ink Pelikan pens) or font size (Anne Rice uses 14-point Courier; National Book Award nominee Colum McCann sometimes uses eight-point Times New Roman, forcing himself to squint at the tiny type). Some now offer fans a window into the process, reporting on their progress on blogs and Twitter feeds. On his author Web site, John Irving describes how he begins his novels by writing the last sentence first.
Here is how a range of leading authors describe their approach to writing—a process that can be lonely, tedious, frustrating and exhilarating.


NICHOLSON BAKER
Most days, Nicholson Baker rises at 4 a.m. to write at his home in South Berwick, Maine. Leaving the lights off, he sets his laptop screen to black and the text to gray, so that the darkness is uninterrupted. After a couple of hours of writing in what he calls a dreamlike state, he goes back to bed, then rises at 8:30 to edit his work.

He wrote his first novel, "The Mezzanine," by dictating to a voice recorder during his commute to work. For his recent novel "The Anthologist," a first-person narrative by a frustrated poet who's struggling to write the introduction to a new anthology, he grew out a beard to resemble his character, put on a floppy brown hat, set up a video camera on a tripod and videotaped himself giving poetry lectures. He transcribed about 40 hours worth of tape, and ended up with some 1,000 pages of notes and transcription. Creating the voice of a rambling professor "was something I had to work on a lot in order to get the feeling of being sloppy," said Mr. Baker.


Even then, Mr. Baker decided the first draft was too orderly. So he divided the novel into numbered sections, then went to a random-number generating Web site and arranged the chunks according to the random order it gave him. It was a total mess. He had to return to the original order, although a few random bits worked. "I had to claw myself back to the old way," he said.

Monday, November 2, 2009

[Cynthia Eden] ETERNAL HUNTER / Book 2: Others


Who loves strong heroines and sexy shifters?

Anyone who answered, "Me," should definitely put Eternal Hunter on their 'Must Buy' list for January, 2010.

This is the second novel in Cynthia's 'Others' series following the release of Immortal Danger lst March.

The heroine is a non-human 'Other' who's an Assistant DA with a psychotic killer as a stalker. Our hero is a shape-shifting bounty-hunter trying to keep her safe.
Check out the excerpt here.


If the 4 1/2 -5 star ratings for Book 1 are any indication, Eternal Hunter should be on your list of great books to get in 2010.