My First Time...

Today, I’ll be attending the Wisconsin RWA conference. This is my first event, and it’s with a mixture of excitement and trepidation that I’m going. Oh, and did I mention this will be my first book signing for Until Darkness Comes and my first agent pitch? Lots of firsts, and I guess that’s okay, someone’s gotta be the newbie, right? I’m not sure what to expect but maybe it’s better that way.

I look at where I am, where I was, and where I still need to go on my literary journey of success, and I’m reminded that we’re all at different places in our lives, and in our careers. I guess the most important thing is to enjoy the ride. J

I've been slaving over my Bonded in Exile pitch. I think in the last 2 days I've rewritten it at least twenty times. I decided to post it today, and would love your feedback. Here goes:

Bonded in Exile is a 143,000 word paranormal romance, about an exiled angel who accidentally becomes bloodbonded to his enemy, a female Nephilim. Silas must decide if saving her is worth risking his eternal life, because Emily is either his road to salvation, or the catalyst to unleashing hell on earth.

Emily has no idea what, or who, she really is and discovers her entire life had been nothing but a lie.

Silas wants nothing more then to go home to his world, and has been exiled to earth with his legion, hunting the wicked Nephilim for centuries. One is left, and she holds the power to send them home.

But not all the angels want go back, dissension is brewing, and a mutiny is inevitable. Silas has no choice but to bring the Nephilim under his protection to prevent her from falling into enemy hands. He struggles against his growing attraction to Emily that's getting stronger by the day. Emily's heart starts to soften toward the angel who makes her feel alive in ways she never imagined. She wants to help Silas and stop the evil threatening to take over the world, but in doing so, she'll be required to make the ultimate sacrifice and give up the angel who's captured her heart.

Have a great day! Wish me luck!!

Melynda Price

Is There Life After Marketing?

Available in eBook or Paperback on Amazon

Until Darkness Comes, my debut novel, released last week, and I’m quickly discovering that writing the book was the easy part. Wow…so much to do in so little time. Blog touring and marketing can seem like a full-time job in itself. I remember a time when I had countless hours to write, and I now find the thing I love, my passion, is taking a back seat to other demands. I guess like with all things, it boils down to balance, and with time comes efficiency.

I find it interesting when I talk to other authors, they all seem to have their “favorite part.” For some it’s the writing, some it’s the editing, and others, it’s the marketing. I’d love to hear from you and find out what do you love most about being an author? J

I have been blessed by the support of my editor, publishing company and fellow authors, who have all taken the time to invest in me and support the launch of Until Darkness Comes. Thank you, everyone, for your support!

Have a great week!

Melynda Price



Celebrating the Release of Until Darkness Comes

                                                 Available April 1, 2012 from 5 Prince Publishing

A guardian angel… A forbidden love… Eternal consequences… 

    Olivia Norton was born with a gift—a gift heaven has sworn to protect, and hell is bound to destroy. Her perfect world is turned upside-down when two handsome strangers, Max and Liam, step into her life. Olivia soon discovers that her ‘Mr. Perfect’ is actually a perfect nightmare.

    The rules of engagement have changed and Liam, Olivia’s guardian angel, is forced to cross dimensional borders, or risk losing the woman he’s sworn to protect. Suddenly, thrust into a world unlike anything he’s never known, Liam isn’t prepared to come face to face with the young woman whose life he holds in his hands.

    But nothing is as it seems, and secrets abound that will ultimately force him to choose between two impossibilities. Max will stop at nothing to finish what he’s started, and Olivia is soon plunged into a battle between good and evil. Her very life hangs in the balance as two forces fight to win her heart.

I'm pleased to announce the upcoming release of my novel, Until Darkness Comes. This is the first book in my four-part Redemption series, and was written to appeal to readers that enjoy series such as Twilight, Hush, Hush, and Wicked Lovely. An excerpt is available on my website.

Thanks for stopping by :)

Melynda Price

Swift Inspiration

You’ll often hear about music inspiring the writer. Stephanie Meyers wrote Twilight with the help of a steady stream of musical tracks that accompanied not only her books, but the movies too.

My teen daughter is the same way, musically shuffling her way through mountains of daily homework with the help of her ipod. I tried it myself, but found I’m just not hard-wired that way. My music is silence, and through it I hear my muse best. All else is simply a distraction for me. But I do so admire those artists who can absorb every note and give back to the world something equally artistic in return.

Taylor Swift, a gifted young singer who writes her own music, recently accomplished the reverse. She was asked to write a song for the upcoming movie, Hunger Games, so she voraciously read the novel in only a few short days. Swift grew inspired by Collins’ words, much in the same way that Meyers’ literary efforts were inspired through song, and the result has produced a new single of exquisite ethereal quality never achieved by Swift before. Safe & Sound sounds nothing like Swift’s previous tunes, and that’s what I love best about it. She nails the paranormal vibe like she was born in a graveyard and her video mirrors her song perfectly too.

In a recent interview Swift said she sat on the gravesite of a couple who lived and died in 1853 and began thinking, “What were their lives like?”

I’m not Swift’s mom, and yet I feel proud of the way her career is evolving. To give yourself over to the muse and bravely create something out of your comfort zone is an act of courage to be admired. Kudos to Swift on her eerie new song. Hope the movie will live up to its soundtrack.

What's Hot and What's Not

                    

I read a book a while ago by Donald Mass called "Writing The Breakout Novel". It was a great book with fantastic information, but he said something in it that surprised and really stuck with me. He said, (not verbatim) that it isn't marketing that makes a book a bestseller, it's word of mouth. I've often pondered this statement and, in a way, I can see how he's right. It appears certain books have won the lottery of popularity and become what seems like an overnight sensation. Are they good books? Absolutely. The best books I've ever read? No. For every hot, best seller, I can think of 4 others that are just as good but never got the notoriety they deserved. So what makes these books such a success?

Take the Twilight phenomenon. The book was published by a small publishing company and it was Stephanie Meyer's first book she'd ever written. She had a literary agent who sold her book to Little Brown.

Compare that book to the Shack. This book was also swept up in the fantastic read spot light. Millions of copies sold and this book was originally self-published.

Compare that to the newest and hottest read, everyone I know is toting a copy (my two kids each have their own so they wouldn't have to share), The Hunger Games. This book was published by a larger company, Scholastic Press.

Each of these books are vastly different than the other, from genre to publishing company. In fact, the only thing similar about them is the that they're over-whelmingly popular.

So what does this tell me? Two things: First, write a great book. Second, getting your novel swept up in the gotta-read-it frenzy is part luck, and just like Donald Mass says, word of mouth. So I guess there's hope for us all :)

I'd love to hear your thoughts on what it takes to write a national bestseller.

Have a great Saturday!

Melynda Price

New Beginning for a New Year

Well, Christmas has finally come and gone. The presents were opened, the feasts enjoyed. And now a the world prepares to usher out one year and welcome in a brand spankin' new one.

With this comes the idea of new beginnings. Folks resolve to make changes and start new projects to celebrate the start of a new year. Typically I don't make New Year's Resolutions at all, but this year I've been forced to consider a drastic new path for my YA writing career.

You see, Sapphire Blue Publishing, the publisher of my YA Hell House series, decided rather suddenly to close its doors December 1st. The news came as a shock to all of the authors, especially those of us who'd been with the company since it began in 2008 (like me). The company wasn't in any kind of peril, but there were just things outside of the scope of control of the authors that led to the closure.

I, myself, was devastated. I felt like the proverbial rug had been yanked out from under me. However, the publisher was speedy in returning the writes to us authors for our works, and even threw in the rights to the wonderful cover art as a way to sort of take the sting out of what was happening.

Which left me with a predicament. Do I begin the entire query process again, or should I take the leap into the world of self-publishing? I mean, I had completely edited stories and cover art at my fingertips, so why not?

That being said, I took the plunge and decided I was going to take control of the situation, and put my beloved stories back out there myself. After a crash course in formatting and cover art editing, the first book in the Hell House series, Holiday Hell House, is back up on Amazon and All Romance eBooks. It's definitely more work, and in no way means I'm through with querying publishers, but I am proud to have taken charge of my path and excited to see what new things lie ahead in this new year. Hopefully, I'll be able to get the next two books back up and available soon, and move on with writing even more stories starring this great cast of characters.

Until then, you can purchase Holiday Hell House with a sneak new preview of Fairy Fury at Amazon and All Romance eBooks published by...ME!

And it's only 99 cents!



Have a fabulous New Year!

It Only Takes One Yes!

                    

"It only takes one yes." This is the advice a fellow writer and good friend of mine told me once, and she's right. It does only take one "yes" to make your dreams come true. But its finding that "yes" that's the challenge sometimes. I enjoy hearing stories from other authors sharing how they got their big break, but as much as I enjoy hearing of their success, I just as much enjoy hearing about their failures. No, I'm not cruel and sadistic, although misery does love company, but I believe there is a lot to be learned in those rejections.

Rejection teaches us patience, and perseverance, while developing growth and character. It's easy to quit, easy to give up, but it takes strength and courage to repeatedly put yourself out there, hoping to catch that one "yes". You pray that your work will find its way into the right hands, of the right literary agent or publisher, who's in the right mood, at the right time.

It's taken me almost a year to find the right home for my novel, Until Darkness Comes, tentatively scheduled for release March 21, 2012. To the published, I'd love to hear your experiences breaking into the literary world. To the unpublished, I'd just like to remind you to never give up. It only takes one "yes" :)

Have a great week!

Melynda Price

One Horrific Summer...

So, I've always been a big fan of books. I can't even remember NOT knowing how to read. I wore out my library card, and always had more books than would fit on the shelf in my room.

But 25 years ago, there were only so many young adult books available. Judy Blume, Nancy Drew, Sweet Valley High - these are what I read the most of because that's what girls my age were supposed to be reading. And there's nothing wrong with those books, it's just that, well, I craved...MORE.

Every summer I would spend a few weeks at my aunt and uncle's house. They were book lovers as well, and truthfully, passed that passion on to me through many a trip to the library or out of the way bookstore. They had loads of books at their house, so one summer, I decided I was going to read some grown-up books.

What did I pick to start with? Salem's Lot by Stephen King. Probably not the best choice for a 12 year old, but I was determined and could not be swayed.

The book scared the crap out of me.

I was mesmerized, and read it all in one day. I read until my eyeballs felt like they would pop out of my head and every noise that house made was a vampire about to get me. I was frightened and exhilarated, and...couldn't wait to read the next one.

Thus began my love affair with horror and the paranormal. I became obsessed, and that summer I also read Cujo, Carrie, Christine, and Firestarter. The world of horror and the paranormal opened up and swallowed me whole. Something about finding fear in the everyday or that there's more to this life than we know totally appealed to 12 year old me and made my imagination take flight.

That's when I really started writing my own stories, filling notebook after notebook, all the while devouring books like a person starved. I specifically became obsessed with vampires, and to this day have one bookcase in my house devoted entirely to vampire fiction.

I owe that "horrific" summer the credit for steering me onto this path of a writer, showing me so much more than I could ever have imagined. Books are and always will be what sustains me. And I pray they continue to inspire and entertain generations to come.

Who knows? Maybe even one of my stories will spark a light in another 12 year old...

All I can do is hope!

Happy Reading!

What's So Great About Paranormal?

This is my first blog for Fabulously Young ePubs. My name is Melynda Price, and I am a lover of paranormal romance. It’s all I read; it’s all I write. Why paranormal? Because the possibilities are endless. It’s an amazing experience to dive into a world where the unseen is seen. The unreal suddenly becomes reality, and the rules and laws that bind us to this world no longer hold true.

The challenge in writing paranormal is finding the balance between “Wow” and “Oh, come on!” A good paranormal book will open the readers’ minds to a whole new world, and when it’s finished, they’ll sit back and think “What if…”

In a time when paranormal is so hot, it’s a challenge to write a story that sets your work, as an author, apart from the others. You’ve got your core group of YA paranormal bad-boys: The Vampires, Werewolves, Fey, and Fallen Angels. Putting a twist on these characters that hasn’t already been done can be quite a task. But again, that’s the beauty of paranormal—if you can dream it, they can do it.  

Unbelievably believable—that is what I strive for in my writing, and that is what I think Until Darkness Comes has to offer its readers. It’s a culmination of fiction with inflections of Biblical history  that weaves a tale of deception, temptation and romance.

I’m currently editing Shades of Darkness, the second book in my four-part Redemption series. Until Darkness Comes is currently under contract with Noble Romance.

A little about myself, I live in Northern Minnesota with my husband of seventeen years and two children, ages 16 and 10. With fall suddenly upon us, and winter quickly bearing down, I find myself looking forward to many snow-filled days where I can escape into a world where the impossible suddenly becomes possible and an amazing adventure is only a few keystrokes away.

Thanks for reading. I hope you have a fabulous Saturday!

Melynda Price 

Julie Particka Gets Comfy

Hi all! I'm Julie Particka, author of the Paranormal Response Team series (Book 1--Pretty Souls is available now from Decadent Publishing). I also write adult fiction under another name, but I talk about that a lot as is, so I'm going to stick with being this me while I'm here. Hope that's okay.

Honestly I hate introductory posts. I'd much rather just settle into a new place and get comfy. So I'm going to pretend it's just you and me hanging out.

You: Tell me about yourself.

Me: I'm the youngest of six kids and the only one that was planned. No, seriously. My five siblings were born in a six-year span, and then my parents waited seven years to have me. I look at it this way, they're Polish and Catholic. It took them five times to figure out what they were doing and at that point, the church kept telling them not to stop.

Anyway, basically I was raised in an environment with five moms (fortunately my brother never took on the mantle of playing dad)...which messes with a kid's head a bit. (That whole "it takes a village" thing? Yeah, I don't buy it.) Anyway, I tended to spend a lot of time with books to escape the everyday, and in the process fell in love with the...non-everyday. Sci-fi, fantasy, talking animals...I ate it all up (at different times).

After years of trying to be all serious and Plan B about my future, plan A (writing) started to crop up more and more. Then I ended up a stay-at-home mom and decided I was taking the opportunity to give Plan A a chance.

You: LOL that's awesome. So tell me about Pretty Souls and the Paranormal Response Team.

The PRT came into being in a rather bass-ackwards way. My husband and I were watching a show called The Middleman (never heard of it? Don't worry, not many have. Hence why it was canceled.) and it had the tagline "Saving the world so you don't have to". Which also happens to be the tagline for a series of books by a woman who used to be in my writing group. We started talking about how taglines get re-used and blah, blah, blah. And, somewhere in this conversation, I changed the tagline to "Saving the world before breakfast". (Yeah, I think I might have been hungry at the time.) Anyway, I liked it so much I wrote it down and pinned it to my handy-dandy little board.

I was working on a different project at the time, but the tagline kept staring at me. Little by little pieces started to fall into place. First, I knew it had to be about teenagers. Somehow, the "before breakfast" thing just screamed "before school" to me. Then I had this image of a group arguing about naming their little "super group" (which is basically the naming scene that made it into the book). And then two of my nieces came into play.

We were at a family party, and I was watching them and thought to myself "They could be sisters, but they aren't." It was a total lightbulb moment. So I have two foster sisters and I knew there was going to be a supernatural element somehow. Generally, werewolves and vampires are shown as enemies in fiction, and I loved the idea of going against that stereotype. That's where the PRT came from. It's envisioned as a 5 book series (I'm hoping to submit book 2 this fall).

Pretty Souls is the first book, and really anything I tell you is going to be what is in the trailer. So just to make things pretty, go ahead and check this out.

If you hate trailers, the book deals with my two heroines--Elle and Cass--tracking down a demon spawn who is ripping the souls from people in their town. Along the way they have to deal with school, tutors, bullies, and boy troubles. It's available from Decadent Publishing as well as Amazon and a bunch of other places. I hope you'll check it out!

Friday News: Cassandra Reviews CRUSHED SUGAR!

Crushed Sugar at Book & Movie Dimension