Category Archives: Anthology

January 2015 updates

I’ve got a few updates for you all. The first is that you can now pick up the Christmas anthology, A Very Paranormal Holiday, on the major retailers for 99 cents. It includes an all-new story from the Sensor Series with an event that will be referred back to in future books (though it’s not vitally important to the overall storyline).  There are also some other great paranormal stories in the anthology by other authors including Mark Henwick, Connie Suttle, Debra Dunbar, J.T. Bock, and J.C. Mells.  You don’t want to miss it.

You can still get it for free instead if you contact me and are willing to sign up for book release alerts, but the links are below for those who’d prefer to purchase it:

Amazon UShttp://www.amazon.com/Very-Paranormal-Holiday-J-T-Bock-ebook/dp/B00S70U4FG/

Amazon UKhttp://www.amazon.co.uk/Very-Paranormal-Holiday-J-T-Bock-ebook/dp/B00S70U4FG/

Barnes & Noblehttp://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-very-paranormal-holiday-susan-illene/1121029785?ean=2940150294042

iTuneshttps://itunes.apple.com/us/book/a-very-paranormal-holiday/id957361001?mt=11

Kobohttp://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/a-very-paranormal-holiday

 

I’m hard at work with Darkness Shatters and I’m shooting for a February 25th release date.  This novel will be a little different in that it switches to Lucas’ POV occasionally (with him in 3rd person).  There are certain parts of the story that just can’t be told from Melena’s perspective and I believe it makes the overall novel stronger with his viewpoint in it.  Expect the cover reveal for Darkness Shatters around February 1st. I’ll also be posting the first few chapters of the novel in a few weeks so you can get a taste of what the book will be like.

For the audiobook listeners, Darkness Divides will be out next week on the 20th and Darkness Clashes will be out on February 17th.  If you’ve been following along, please do leave a rating/review on Audible.  I’d greatly appreciate it!

Also, about the mailing list sign-ups.  I’ve got one list that is strictly for new book release alerts.  If you requested the Christmas anthology that is the one you signed up for.  The only thing you get with that one is an email on the day a new book comes out with links for where to purchase it.  Some of you have already gotten it in recent weeks with Tempting the Moon and know what I’m talking about.

If you’d also like updates on my publishing news, special giveaways, and early excerpts from future novels you will need to sign up for the newsletter.  All you have to do for that is enter your email address and name to the form on the top right corner of this webpage or click here.

That’s it for now, but feel free to ask questions below if you’ve got any.  Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Tempting the Moon now available!

For those of you who missed it, Tempting the Moon is now out.  Originally published in The Stroke of Midnight anthology in late 2013, it has since been revised (adding almost 2000 words to the story) and re-released on its own.  With the new year here, it’s the perfect time to pick it up!

Journey back to when Melena was still separated from Lucas and struggling to find her way in the supernatural world.  See what started the relationship between Emily and Hunter.  At 12k words this might be one of the shorter installments in the series, but it’s a story that makes every moment count. Below is the summary and retailer links:

 

Tempting the Moon cover

SUMMARY:

It’s New Year’s Eve and Melena Sanders is hoping she can survive the night without any more trouble in her life.  But then her adopted teenage daughter, Emily, confesses to a prank gone wrong.  Now her young werewolf admirer is caught in a trap on a full moon.  Melena’s got to figure out fast how to rescue him without either of them getting bitten in the process.  Of course, nothing ever goes quite how she plans…

 

It is now available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo:

Amazon US
Amazon UK
Amazon Germany
Amazon Australia
Amazon Canada

Barnes & Noble
Kobo
iTunes

Wishing everyone a happy new year!

 

Anthologies new and old…

If you didn’t catch it before, the Christmas anthology is ready!  A Very Paranormal Holiday is currently not available on retailers, but you can get a free copy of it by emailing me or leaving a comment below.  Those who do so will be added to mailing lists of the participating authors so you can receive alerts for their new book releases.

With my 19k short story that is included, Facing the Darkness, you’ll see many familiar characters from the Sensor series.  There are updates on what they’ve been up to since Darkness Clashes, a revelation on Cori’s background (the tattoo artist), a fight scene, and quite a bit of character development as Kerbasi learns an important Christmas lesson.

I’m also going to be re-releasing a New Year’s story later this month.  For those of you who picked up and read The Stroke of Midnight anthology you will probably recall Tempting the Moon.  It’s often referred to as Emily’s werewolf story, though it’s told from Melena’s perspective.  The story was written between Chained by Darkness (book 2.5) and Darkness Divides (book 3).  Maybe we could call it 3.7?  That is while Lucas was still confined in Purgatory so you won’t see him in there, but you will see Micah and a few other familiar characters.

This particular anthology had a 10k word count limit on the stories included.  I still went over by about five hundred words, but it always bothered me that I couldn’t expand on some scenes further due to the limit.  Now that the anthology is being taken off retailers in a couple of days and I’m free to re-release Tempting the Moon on its own I’m fleshing some of those scenes out to make the story even better.  I’ve also had an awesome cover designed for it and written a new summary:

Tempting the Moon cover

 

SUMMARY:  It’s New Year’s Eve and Melena Sanders is hoping she can survive the night without any more trouble in her life.  But then her adopted teenage daughter, Emily, confesses to a prank gone wrong.  Now her young werewolf admirer is caught in a trap on a full moon.  Melena’s got to figure out fast how to rescue him without either of them getting bitten in the process.  Of course, nothing ever goes quite how she plans…

 

For those who didn’t read this story, you missed the turning point in Emily and Hunter’s relationship.  This is your opportunity to find out why Emily later gave him a chance.  Plus see Melena get into more trouble.

As soon as the anthology is available on retailers I’ll post links here and send a message to my release alert subscribers.  Those who have also signed up for the newsletter will be getting the first one at the end of this month with book release information and other publishing news.

Wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

 

 

Update on Christmas anthology

I’ve had several people asking about the Christmas anthology.  For those who don’t know, I’ll be participating with five other urban fantasy authors who are including short stories for the book.  They will range from between 10-20k words each.  You may recognize some of the names as they include Connie Suttle, Mark Henwick, Debra Dunbar, J.C. Mells, and J.T. Bock.  Below is the cover and the summary for my story:

path in the woods in winter“Facing the Darkness”

Kerbasi, a former guardian of Purgatory, has resisted every effort to help him find his humanity.  After forty-five hundred years of tending to his prisoners in the cruelest of ways he feels he’s above the petty concerns of mankind.  But what’s he to do when he’s charged with bringing comfort to a boy sick with cancer during the holiday season?  This is one child who just might break through that impervious wall he’s wrapped around his heart.

 

RELEASE DATE- December 20th, 2014

 

 

The anthology will be free for those who want it.  There’s just one catch.  To receive it you must agree to being added to all participating author’s book release alerts (your email won’t be used in any other way).  If you later find you’re not interested in certain ones you will be able to unsubscribe from future mailings from them.

For those who have already signed up for my book release alerts, I’ll be sending a message out on December 20th letting you know the anthology is available and confirming whether or not you want it after reminding you of the catch.  If you do, you’ll get the ebook file for the anthology right after that.  Whether you’re on my list or not, you are welcome to email me early saying you’d like to get it and that you’re fine with the stipulation.  In that case you’ll get the anthology first thing on the 20th.  Just make sure to let me know what type of ereader you use so I can send you the correct format.

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A short Q&A with further details on the story for those who would like to know more about it:

1)  Which POV will the story be told in?

Kerbasi’s

2)  What other familiar characters will be in there?

Melena (of course), Lucas, Emily, Hunter, Cori, and Kariann

3)  Will there be any action?

There is a brief fight scene.  Maybe two, depending on if you’d count it or not (sorry, no hints on that).

 

Hope everyone in the U.S. had a great Thanksgiving.  Looking forward to sharing this latest installment in the Sensor Series with you!

Update on the New Year’s anthology and some end of the year thoughts

For those who don’t know, The Stroke of Midnight anthology is now available on Smashwords for free in all formats (here’s the link).  Hope you all enjoy the story I included in it, Tempting The Moon.

I would also like to thank all the fans who have been so enthusiastic and supportive.  My first year in publishing has been amazing.  I released Darkness Haunts in January not knowing how things would go, but believing in myself and my novel enough to give it a chance.  Those early months were not easy.  I promoted it in every way I could think of, but after less than three months my husband was looking at me like maybe I should give up.  At the end of March, it had only sold 219 copies total.  He was trying to be supportive, do not get me wrong, but he felt maybe I needed to concentrate my efforts doing something more reliable.

The thing is, I’m stubborn and I don’t give up easily.  I also knew that a very tiny fraction of authors succeed with their first book soon after it publishes.  There are millions of books out there and it takes time to get discovered by readers.  So I buckled down on the next book, Darkness Taunts, and gave up promoting the first novel.  Now that’s where things got weird.

I was doing absolutely no promoting whatsoever and had not for over a month when I noticed sales were starting to climb.  Little by little, but a small spark of hope began to light inside me.  Darkness Haunts had 348 sales in April–more than I’d had in the previous three months combined.  In May, they were more than double that.  You couldn’t call it a bestseller, but I was finally reaching readers even if I had no clue how I’d done it.  People would ask and I couldn’t tell them.  My only guess is that those early readers had started to pass the word around and it had begun to spread.

By the time Darkness Taunts released in July, I had sold 2,000 copies of the first book.  I hit number 1 in dark fantasy with the new one and its daily sales were far more than I’d ever seen before.  It was crazy.  People were emailing me and telling me how much they enjoyed the series.  I had no idea until then.  Honestly, just about no one wrote until I was close to releasing the second book (and had to delay it for a week due to some personal setbacks).  Finally, my husband stopped nagging me and stopped questioning my writing goals.  In fact, now he tells me I need to write faster, lol.

It’s almost the end of the year and only a couple of weeks away until the anniversary of the Darkness Haunts release.  It’s now sold over nine-thousand copies.  If the sales trend doesn’t take a huge plunge it should hit 10k by the end of January.  I would have never believed it when starting out, but I have all my readers to thank for helping spread the word.

I also have one other person to thank who has never been included in my acknowledgments.  My mother.  Okay, I’m going to get teary-eyed while trying to write this, but stick with me.

When I was very young, she read to me a lot.  Later, when I started learning to read she would sit on my bed and help me read books every night.  We had a contest in my first grade class for who could read the most books that year.  At least one parent had to sign off, verifying that we had actually read all the books we listed.  My mother stayed by my side as I read 271 books that year.  She always encouraged me and never made me feel like I was an inconvenience.   In fact, she didn’t even shoo me away when I’d try to read along with her romance novels (that were clearly above my reading level).

In January of 1989 when I was eight years old she was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer.  The tumor in her head was growing and it was inoperable.  All they could do was treat her with chemotherapy to slow it down.  I watched my strong, beautiful mother slowly weaken before my eyes.  She lost her hair and eventually had to use a walker just to get around.  Her skin became sallow and she spent a lot of time in the bathroom hugging the toilet thanks to all the medical treatments.

It didn’t stop her from being a mom, though.  She checked my homework regularly and quizzed me every Thursday night before my weekly spelling tests.  Every day she put a personalized note in my lunch bag and ordered me not to read it until lunch break.  Some days, I admit I didn’t wait that long and snuck a peek early.  As she got worse, we had other relatives come stay with us, such as my granma who I lost earlier this year.

Did a debilitating illness stop my mom from checking my school work or making special breakfasts in the morning?  No, it didn’t.  She made every moment count.  It’s not to say she didn’t have bad days where the chemotherapy wore her down too much to do more than rest in bed, but she honestly tried to be there for her children.

Then one Friday I came home from school and my brother and I were told that we were going on a trip to see my father’s parents who lived two hours away.  We didn’t question it.  I gave my mother a hug and kiss goodbye.  I told her I loved her and would see her Sunday.  She was in a wheel chair by this time and wearing a scarf to cover her mostly bald head, but even now I can still remember that moment.  She smiled and waved goodbye as we left.

Sunday morning I woke up to discover my father sleeping on my grandparents’ couch.  They wouldn’t explain why, but told us to wait for my dad in the bedroom.  I still remember seeing his face when he walked in.  There is a look in a man’s eyes when he has lost the love of his life and it’s not one that can be mistaken for anything else.  I began crying as soon as I saw it.  He took my brother and I in his arms and we mourned together, huddling close and crying.

She’d died during the night and he’d come straight to us, needing to be near his children.  I was told later that she’d fallen into a coma shortly after we left on Friday.  Despite that, she’d been calling my name and my brother’s.  The hospice nurses said they’d never seen someone fight so much to live.  She’d tried so hard not to leave us.  My other relatives had thought it best to spare my brother and I the grief of watching her last hours.  To this day, I disagree, but there’s nothing I can do to change that now.  At least I did get my goodbye, even if I hadn’t realized it was my last one.

At her funeral, I insisted they let me see her body.  I think part of me never would have accepted her death without seeing it for myself.  She was so still in her coffin, but she was peaceful.  The pain she had endured for most of that year was gone.

I honestly believe she is with the angels now and has probably taught them a thing or two.  Over the years, I’ve done some crazy things in my life.  She had to have been watching over me because I’ve survived some things I probably shouldn’t have.  But the point I want to make after telling my story is that she gave me my foundation for reading.  She encouraged me and she inspired me.

Maybe her time in my life was short, but it had a huge impact.  I can never thank my mother enough for all the things she did for me.  For any success I’ve had as a writer, it’s because she planted those early seeds.  For those of you with children, read to them.  Don’t miss your chance to give them that same encouragement my mother gave me.  It’s worth every minute and will give them memories to last a lifetime.

December 10th was the anniversary of her death.  It’s been twenty-four years now since I lost her, but I want this to be the time where I thank her.  She deserves my gratitude more than I can possibly put into words.  Thanks mom.  You will never be forgotten.