Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Murder Creek is on Amazon!



Murder Creek is now available on Amazon, and soon to follow on Nook. Below is the blurb for the book.


Consummate assassin, Victor Ramsus Graves, can’t help but wonder if there’s anyone on the planet that isn’t trying to put a bullet through his brainpan.

From the moment he’s mysteriously booted out of prison, bullets and bad guys come at him from every direction, hunting for a piece of his Italian ass like it’s coated in oxycontin. But when he meets his biggest adversary, Ice, he starts thinking about giving her more than a piece of it. She might want to kill him, but if he can get her in the sack before she gets a good shot, he’ll die happy.

Between the punks that have taken over his city in his absence, his uncontrollable ‘Shadow-jumping’ habit that tosses him in random places, and the pseudo-government operation Ice works for molding together hybrid humans, Vic’s life is as screwy as a Japanese game show. By his estimation, he’ll either go down in the name of thug science or get shot to death by the sexiest weapon alive. Either way, he’s going to bring the whole damned city down with him.

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Story Behind The Story



About ten to twelve years ago, I met Random Wicks in an AOL chat room designed for role players. The idea behind the rooms were; you created a character and interacted with other characters by typing out actions (inside double colons, like so -- ::grins:: )and adding dialog (outside of the colons, like so -- ::smiles:: Hi there.).

The play could get a little confusing, as medieval warriors interacted with modern day cowboys, but the improvised stories were so much fun overlooking character differences became the normal.

Random and I originally started a long story line with two contemporary characters. His, was a "family" hitman named Victor, and my character was a technologically savvy assassin. Our made up city was titled Neuhaven with an inner city named Murder Creek.

The world was born.

Over the years, it's changed quite a bit from our original intention, as the publishing industry dictated to us what they liked and didn't like, but in the end, no one but the readers seemed happy. LOL

Instead of make additional changes for a potential contract, we thought we'd move on to another project and set this one aside. But we love it. It's a little violent for a romance, it's a little too romantic for an Urban Fantasy, and no one seems to know where they'd put it on the shelf. We can certainly understand that, since we didn't write the story with a particular genre in mind. We just wrote for fun. The love of the story! But maybe this story wasn't meant for the shelf, maybe--just maybe--it was meant for the virtual library.

Why waste a story (which will have sequels if the response is good) on my PC? It's there, the BETA readers loved it--hey, why not?

So Random and I put together a cover, and tossed it up on Amazon, and in the next few days, it will go on sale. A full-length, action-packed, Urban Fantasy/Paranormal Romance novel for .99 cents.

I hope you'll consider giving it a read. I'll let ya'll know when it's a go!

Thursday, March 3, 2011

Erotic--Genre or Sub Genre


I was talking to a friend the other day about the different sorts of stories we both write. She's an historical romance and a paranormal romance author, while I write Young Adult (under a different name), paranormal romance and erotic. She referred to erotic as a sub genre of romance and at first, I didn't think much about that.

Now, I find myself thinking on it, and I have to say, I don't know if erotic is a sub genre of romance.

True, you can write erotic where the ending is happy and the two--or three or four--main characters are in love and live happily ever after. But you can also write where everyone is just happy for now in the end. You can also write a book that's all about two characters who get together just for pure fun and never see each other again.

However, those are character driven books. You can get other books that are classified as erotic that are how-to manuals for Kama Sutra, Foot Fetish, BDSM among many, many other subjects. These are non-fiction books but sometimes sold under the Erotic label in stores and online while most of the fiction erotic books are found in the romance section.

So where does that leave us? Erotic fiction isn't always romantic. But is it a sub genre of Romance? What do you think?