Legends of Windemere Heroes (And Queen Trinity) Theme Songs!

So, we have 9 videos for 9 characters and all for your entertainment.  Watch the ones you want or just take a while to get through it if you want.  This is all for fun.  You can give your own suggestions and ideas in the comments if you want to join in the fun.  Now, this is all from my perspective and that includes running into Book 11.  Does that mean I need to do a spoiler warning?

The one from yesterday: Luke Callindor. I kind of hear a song about someone wondering who is going to tell their story of courage and fighting a big fight. Luke’s desire to be a remembered hero and his sacrificial nature seems to fit this song very well. Though the leading an army part is odd . . . or is it?

Nyx gets this one because it just sounds like a brutal fight song.  Looking over the books, our dear channeler has the most amount of bloody, violent fights in the series.  She gives as hard as she gets and god help anyone who doesn’t knock her down for good.  For anyone curious, I stopped counting the brutal fights/events for Nyx when I got to double digits.

Sari gets an instrumental song because I can so see her dancing to this.  There’s a water connection and a happy energy that the character always seems to come back to. An indomitable spirit maybe?

Timoran was a tough one and I’m still not sure about this. As a wise and powerful barbarian, most songs only touch on one part of his persona.  So this one could change easily.

Delvin Cunningham gets this one because . . . well, I don’t think I have to explain it. He’s becoming kind of the Captain America of the group in that he’s the stable, not over the top hero.  The ‘I’m not superhuman’ line rings really true for him. To be fair, Luke and Nyx have had their turns with this song too.

I can’t really explain this one without spoilers.  Poor Dariana.

Aside from Puff the Magic Dragon and a bunch of metal songs, there isn’t much out there for a dragon.  So Fizzle was a tough one and I went with a video game song.  Even though he has a lot of magic and wisdom, the little guy fills in the ‘mascot’ role of the series. So I gave him an upbeat, silly one.  Though Chocobos are pretty badass, especially in FF Tactics.

I really can’t do a theme song list without the one I search for whenever I have a Trinity scene to write.  Especially when she’s interacting with Nyx.  Out of all of the villains, I think our dear Chaos Elf Queen is the best embodiment of a rival.  Maybe it’s that she has the close, respectful feud with Nyx, but she’s definitely a lot of fun to write.

Finally, we have Kira Grasdon.  No explanation needed . . . maybe . . . spoilers? Continue reading →

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New Release: Smother by Lindy Zart

mel's avatarasidefromwriting

USA Today bestselling author Lindy Zart contacted us to let us know about her latest release Smother.
Smother, Lindy Zart

You won’t like me.
I am not the nice girl. I am not your friend.
I don’t care about you, but most of all, I don’t care about me.
Go ahead, hate me.
We all have secrets.
I have them as well—dark, terrible secrets.
The only time I can breathe is when I forget.
I need to be numb. You don’t want to know how.
But as long as I can breathe, the past cannot smother me.

Amazon Buying Links!

$2.99 for the eBook and $9.99 for the paperback.
US: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00XLXA7UQ
UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00XLXA7UQ…
CA: http://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B00XLXA7UQ…
Kobo: https://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/smother-1
iBooks: https://itunes.apple.com/nz/book/smother/id993845129?mt=11
BN: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/smother-lindy-zart/1121904606?ean=2940151502092

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It’s Release Day – Come and join the party!

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Notifying Kindle Customers of Updates (Has Changed)

chrismcmullen's avatarchrismcmullen

Image from ShutterStock Image from ShutterStock

NOTIFYING KINDLE CUSTOMERS OF UPDATES

It happens. After you publish a book, you think of a way to improve it. Or you find a typo. Or you view it on a friend’s device and discover a formatting problem. Or a customer notifies you of an issue. Or a customer suggests something in a review that never occurred to you. Or the content of a nonfiction book becomes out-of-date.

For some reason or another, you need to update your Kindle e-book.

That’s the easy part: Simply visit your bookshelf at KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing), upload a new content file, preview your book carefully on each device, and publish the revision.

Your old book remains available for sale until the new one goes live, usually within 12 to 24 hours in the US. (If you don’t want the original to remain available in the interim period, simply unpublish the…

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Still Alive!

This has been an exhausting week.  Seriously, my head is still spinning and, at the writing of this post, I’m not sure what happened.  Events, appointments, working, cleaning, cooking, and . . . stuff.  I really hate to dive into a list already, but that might be all I can do to show the busy week I had.

  • Kid’s birthday party last Saturday.  Person showed up in Leonardo (TMNT character) and son was not amused.  He’s still going on about being scared as I write this.
  • Kid’s birthday party last Sunday.  Outdoor BBQ and I wore black.  Oops.
  • Went on school field trip to Aquarium with son on Monday.  He was surprised to see me waiting at his school since I beat his bus there.  The excitement was definitely worth the ‘loss’ of a writing day.
  • School district voting on Tuesday.  I walked there and it was raining a bit.
  • Grocery shopping on Tuesday.  Walked there from voting area, which was a further trek than I expected.
  • Returned to son’s school for VIP day.  Son excited to see me sit in a class lesson about lemonade.
  • Started writing Book 11 of Legends of Windemere after making a cheat sheet.  This could have been Monday or the weekend though.
  • Watering the lawn every other day, which includes a point where one of the sprinklers changed settings.  Take a guess who got nailed in the face with water.
  • Mowed the lawn on Wednesday.  Forgot how bad my hay fever gets and spent rest of day gasping for air.
  • Scolded by son for not going back to his school.
  • Epic mess to clean.  This one is being written down for future embarrassment.
  • Took a nap on Thursday and woke up more exhausted than when I started.
  • Keep in mind that I’ve been cooking, cleaning, and kid wrangling every day.
  • Wrote first 3 chapters of Book 11, which is actually 1 shy of what I’d hoped.
  • Friday morning saw me waking up early to figure out what that freaking beeping was.  Basement carbon monoxide sensor needed new batteries.
  • Saturday involves an appointment, laundry, helping sister move stuff out of basement, and wrangling child.
  • There were 2-3 interviews I had to fill out too.
Yahoo Image Search

Yahoo Image Search

Those are the big events and I put in late nights to get through emails, Tweets, and other online things.  My usual ‘back up’ is also away for awhile, so I’m the only one holding down the household.  So if somebody uses the last of something I need for a dinner and I don’t realize until I start cooking then I have to improvise.  I tried my best to keep up with the online stuff, but I don’t think I did very well.  Keep in mind that I was burnt out before all of this.  Next week will hopefully be a little milder.  I do lose the desktop for night work and this screen makes my laptop feel like an iPhone.

In author news, I’m pretty well set for the June 1st release of Ichabod Brooks & the City of Beasts.  For now, I’m doing a post here and maybe I’ll ask later in that day if anybody wants an email of the post to put it up at a later date.  Keep wanting to try a minimal marketing approach, so we’ll see what happens.  I’m going to be writing away when I have time this week. Need to get out of a messy plot hole.  A piece of information never had a chance to come to light, which makes an event seem odd.

Anyway, here the goals and some notes:

  1. Continue writing Book 11.
  2. Prepare Character Theme Song post for tomorrow.  At the time of this writing, I only need a song for Timoran.
  3. Teaser Tuesday possibly delayed. Might have a bunch of anthology promo interviews going up on Monday and Tuesday.  Sorry about that.

  4. Aiming to do a TWUBS Chat next Saturday from 8-11PM EST.  Instructions will be posted that day.

  5. Admit that the Goal Posts are going to be on a weekend day that I feel like using.

Final note: This is the song that made me think of doing tomorrow’s Character Theme Song post.  Anybody want to guess who this is going to connect to? (Yes this will be used in the post too.)

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Imminent Danger Free to Download this Weekend!

Grab a free copy this weekend!

Michelle Proulx's avatarMichelle Proulx - Author

Hey peeps! Just popping in to let you know that Imminent Danger And How to Fly Straight into It is free to download again this weekend. So if you haven’t picked it up yet, now’s your chance!

Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.ca

It’s actually available on all the Amazon sites — so if you’re not American/British/Canadian, hop over to your favorite Amazon site and search the book name. Happy reading!

Unrelated media of the day:

Source: http://imgur.com/gallery/TJb3H0Y

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Runaway Smile is an Award-Winning Finalist in the 2015 International Book Awards

Big congrats to Nicholas!

Nicholas C. Rossis's avatarNicholas C. Rossis

Runaway Smile by fantasy, science fiction and children's books author Nicholas C. Rossis is a Finalist in the 2015 International Book AwardsI got some exciting news yesterday, which I wanted to share with all of you! USA Book News announced the winners and finalists of THE 2015 INTERNATIONAL BOOK AWARDS (IBA) on May 21, 2015.

Over 300 winners and finalists were announced in over 80 categories and awards were presented for titles published in 2013, 2014 and 2015.

Runaway Smile, my children’s book, was an award-winning finalist in the 2015 International Book Awards, in the Children’s Fiction category!

I want to thank my parents, and my wife, Electra, and Dimitris Fousekis, and . Sorry, Electra told me that this is not that kind of post. She promised to listen to my speech as soon as I’m done, though, so I’d better wrap this up and fetch the shampoo bottle (which doubles as award-accepting-ceremony-microphone in our household).

Before I go, a big thank you to all of you who have taken the time…

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Other Roles of Windemere

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There are several paths besides warriors and casters.  Many of them overlap with the two, but there are reasons they are here.  Not only because I didn’t want the other posts to go too long.

Thieves

Hard to give a brief explanation of these people since there is a great variety.  All of them operate outside of the law, but that’s the only similarity.  You have bandits, burglars, guild thieves, independents, blackmailers, pickpockets, and much more.  To say that you can’t trust any thief isn’t always true.  Some of them are quite noble and hold friendship rather dearly.  It really depends on why they’re a thief and what they’re thoughts on other people are.

Assassins

A cross between a thief and a warrior if you think about it.  There’s nothing really different about these guys than what we know of in our world.  Killers for hire with some variety of morals, but all of them fine with taking a life.

Gnomish Inventors

Rather specific, but these are the ones responsible for the bits of technology that appears throughout the world.  In Merchant of Nevra Coil, you get to see their greatest creation, which is a flying city.  Yes, they have invented non-magical flight, but it isn’t catching on very well.  Unlike our world, the skies are much more dangerous thanks to dragons, griffins, and other flying beasts.  Anyway, the inventors are always changing Windemere for both the better and the worse.  Some of them do go on adventures in their youth, so it isn’t uncommon for a gnome to join up with an adventuring party.

Monster Hunters

Introduced in Curse of the Dark Wind, these adventurers are considered the anti-forest trackers.  Even though they can fight and use weapons, Monster Hunters rarely get into fights with other warriors.  In fact, their focus is so much on battling wild creatures that many of them have trouble with civilized opponents. They know how to use the instincts and habits of a creature against them.  Money and reputation are the usual driving forces for these people, but some are out for more personal reasons.  Every member of the Monster Hunting guild has a medallion that starts with a single-headed serpent whose head is pierced with a weapon.  A new head appears on the medallion as the owner goes up in rank, which increases their going rate for certain hunts.  I’m still working on the finer points of these guys, but maybe I’ll get into it if Morgan Jones from the Ichabod series gets enough traction.

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What’s the Most Important Thing We Do in Our Lifetime? #inspiration #love #kindness

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Poetry Lovers: Giveaway!

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