Free and Discounted Books this Weekend!
ONE WRONG MOVE is FREE this weekend!
All other books, except for Dark Ride, are on sale for 99 cents! Grab the discount while you can! Click the photo to be taken to my Amazon author page!
Coffee Time
I’ve been busy on the blogosphere over at CoffeeTime Romance. You can find the post here:
Also, today is the last day for my Virtual Book Tour with RABT Book Tours. you can win a $5 gift card here: https://sites.google.com/a/myaddictionisreading.com/summer-2018/angela-smith
Dark Ride Release Day
Dark Ride releases today!
Do you know what else releases today? Tailspin, from Sandra Brown. I love Sandra Brown. She’s my favorite author. So I will be celebrating my release by reading hers! I’m super excited and look foreword to this annual event. My husband always knows not to bother me when I’m reading her book, and I ordered the hardcover, hers is one of the only hardcovers I continue to order, and I will be patiently waiting for the mail to deliver my package!
So I’m celebrating my newest release with Sandra Brown. Yay!
But if you haven’t ordered Dark Ride yet, what are you waiting for? In the upcoming weeks, I will be sharing tidbits about the story and the characters, including character sketches. Be sure to subscribe to my newsletter for even more exclusive content!
Also, don’t forget you can continue to celebrate with me long after release day, by winning a Kindle and Gift Card! Be sure to enter the GIVEAWAY.
Character Sketches for Character Development
What a ride it is to create conflicting characters! The hardest part is making sure their goals, motivation, and conflict are enough to see the story to the end.
I’ve always been drawn to characterization and personality profiles, so that’s an intriguing part of writing for me. What do you think? Are you character-driven, or plot-driven?
Hands down, my favorite part of writing is creating the characters. I research who they are, build collages for them, and ask them extensive interviews about subjects that will never get put into the book. I’d like to say I get to know my characters pretty well. I love to explore their personalities and psychological makeup.
However, it’s also one of the hardest parts of writing. Creating a character who isn’t a cliché, a cardboard cutout, who acts and reacts the same on every page but is different than everybody else. Their emotions and writing those emotions offer a huge challenge to many writers, especially when you can’t get out of your own mind. A character is happy and they smile, but that gets very old very fast, and we as readers want to know why they are happy and how they are feeling to show us they are happy, or any myriad of emotions they feel throughout the story. This is where Show Don’t Tell is a huge factor.
Backstory and a character’s background is also important and fun creating, but writers have to be careful not to reveal too much too soon, or even reveal things that aren’t necessary to the story. Does it really matter that Winona prefers green leaf lettuce over romaine?
Each character will act and react differently, even the same character on different days. We all do. But there are personalities intrinsic only to us that writers must carve into their characters to make them shine.
I love to create character sketches to keep front and center when developing my story. Sometimes the characters change, since their backstory is the first thing I create before I know anything else. And they are always telling me secrets. But, as messy as it might seem here’s an idea of what I like to do!
And now for a little bit of fun. I’m picking up another round of Wednesday Relationship Advice. Every hump day, I am going to share a character sketch of individual characters and a piece of their relationship advice.
And since Dark Ride releases Tuesday, our first character sketch will be Zan. So come back Wednesday for more about Zan and his relationship advice!
Release Day Giveaway!
To celebrate the release of Dark Ride, I am giving away an 8GB Kindle Fire 7 and a $10 Amazon Gift Card.
And if you subscribe to my newsletter, there are even more giveaways and freebies coming to you!
Click the picture to be taken to the giveaway, or ENTER HERE.
Release
Happy Valentine’s Day
Valentine’s Day is one of those days that many dread, many love, and many ignore. Me? I’ve been married so long that we try to celebrate each other throughout the year, which is very important, so we don’t generally make a large fuss on Valentine’s Day. But I do love the red, and the hearts and flowers and chocolate! And any excuse for wine and/or champagne!
Copyright : subbotina 123RF
What I love most is the fact Burn on the Western Slope has a Valentine’s Day scene. It was such a fun scene to write, and is still a fun scene for me to read again and again.
Even better, Burn on the Western Slope is available in a 3 book set for 99 cents! Whether you prefer Kindle, Nook, Kobo, or many others, you can find this set on just about any platform. If you prefer print, Burn on the Western Slope is available (not as a set) in print.
Buy links on my page here.
And now for an excerpt! In this scene, we see our hero, Garret, up on stage singing karaoke, and our heroine, Rayma, thinking of … well, you’ll see. We also meet Chayton, the bartender and Garret’s brother, and Naomi, Reagan’s cousin. Those two end up together in the next novel, Fatal Snag.
Copyright: ammentorp / 123RF Stock Photo
Side note: I absolutely LOVED writing Reagan and Naomi! Some of my favorite characters, if a writer could choose.
Enough babbling! Here’s the excerpt:
After downing the Valentine drink, she asked for another, urging the dizziness to hit. The more the merrier tonight. She yearned to get wild with this guy like she’d never been wild before. To hell with the damn consequences. She was tired of worrying about consequences and right now, didn’t see why two bright, responsible people should cause many. Who cared if he was a neighbor? Who cared if she might accidentally run into him after they had sex?
Who cared if he professed only to be friends? Friends slept together all the time.
“How is it?” Chayton asked.
Warm and ready. She stifled a giggle as she turned and handed him the empty cup.
“Wonderful. I need another.”
“That good, huh?”
“I’ll run twice the distance tomorrow on the treadmill,” she said, though she hadn’t gotten on a treadmill once since she’d arrived in Montana. “Hit me with another one.”
“You go girl.” Naomi struck her shoulder against Reagan’s.
“I’m in lust,” Reagan said, staring at Garret. He sang another song, a low, guttural, sad song that wrenched her heart in two.
Damn, he was sexy, and his voice was sexy, and his hair, his eyes, his hands…
A man sat beside her. A man who couldn’t hold a candle to the one she currently lusted after, and she declined a dance. She drank another cocktail and by that time, the room spun.
It felt good. No, it felt great.
After a third song, this one quick and screeching, the crowd roared and asked for more. “It’s someone else’s turn,” Garret said as he dismissed the crowd with a wave.
Chayton already had a Guinness ready for Garret when he arrived.
“That was great,” Naomi told him.
“Thanks.”
“You didn’t tell me you were a singer,” Reagan said, the twitter in her voice hovering between desperation and completion, like she knew she was about to have the most magnificent sex of her life.
“I’m not technically. I like to sing and do it for fun but I’m not a singer.”
“Better than a lot of singers I know.” She swept a finger across his silken cheek, something she’d been dying to do since she first met him. “You could quit your day job, whatever that might be.”
“It’s your turn.” That same guttural voice in which he sang kept her on the brink of losing her composure, or her sanity, or her clothes.
“What?” She plunked a hand over her chest, steadying her pounding heart by planting her heel, which had been propped on the barstool, on the floor. “Oh no, oh no, not me.” If he did have an urge to sleep with her, that would change as soon as he heard her sing.
“Oh come on,” Naomi said. “I’ll do it with you. We’ll sing ‘It’s Raining Men’ or something like that.”
“You want me to make a total fool of myself, don’t you?”
“Yes. Come on.” Naomi pulled her up, and she gave Garret one last lingering look before following her cousin to the stage. Her legs wobbled as she walked up one step, two steps, to the stage.
Her heart pounded in her throat but Naomi, the perfect being she was, broke the tension.
“We’ve never done this before,” Naomi said, shaking her hips, looking cute, and gaining applause. “So don’t be too hard on us.”
They had a blast, and Reagan couldn’t hear how bad she sucked over the loud speakers. Other women joined in the fray, and before long the entire crowd sang.
But she couldn’t take her eyes off Garret, who stood by the bar and watched.
“Okay, okay,” she told Naomi when their second song ended. “I gotta go. I’m gonna see if that hunky man wants to go home with me tonight.”
“What about me?” Naomi asked.
“You’re not invited.”
“But where am I supposed to sleep?”
Reagan’s giggle sounded a tad tipsy, a tad silly, and a whole lot horny. “With Chayton.”
Reagan moseyed down the stage, attempting to appear sexy even after all the drinks she’d consumed. She couldn’t remember anymore. She didn’t care. The drinks provided the courage she normally wouldn’t possess, and she needed the courage to kiss Garret again.
“Water, please,” she said to Chayton.
“You’re not going to get up there and sing?” Naomi asked Chayton.
“Are you kidding? I can’t sing to save my life.”
“You and Garret are brothers. You didn’t inherit the singing gene?”
“Half-brothers. He took after his mother. I took after mine.” His eyes grew shuttered, his voice harsh and remote, as if to say no more questions. He turned away to tend bar. Reagan met Naomi’s gaze and shrugged.
“That’s obviously out of the conversation piece,” Naomi said.
Reagan hadn’t seen Garret since she left the stage and she looked around, eager to find him. A man and woman dressed in red hearts performed a skit. Cupid came along and had the crowd roaring with laughter.
Reagan couldn’t pay attention. Where was Garret?
“How’s everything over here?” Chayton asked as he returned. “More water?”
“Where’s Garret?” Reagan flicked a piece of make-believe lint from her sweater. She didn’t want to appear too interested, but the words gushed out more suddenly than she intended.
“He had to leave,” Chayton said. “He does that sometimes.”