Catherine Stine's IDEA CITY

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Showing posts with label blog hop. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blog hop. Show all posts

Friday, September 7, 2018

Viviana MacKade's Fall Book Fair Hop, Sept 3-7


Viv's Fall Book Fair Hop starts September with a bang!

This amazing Fall Book Fair hop brings me back to my own blog, after a long hiatus to write (I finished two novels and a novella - phew!) and to raise and train my beagle pup to the one-year mark, where he is  more mature and independent. Say hi, Benny.

I hope you enjoy this hop, as it has a genre for just about everyone - contemporary, suspense, historical, paranormal fantasy, young adult and new adult. The link to the entire listing is here, at Viviana MacKade's blog.

Friday is YA and NA day. Heart in a Box, my YA is on Friday's list, Below is the full Friday lineup of great reads!

Victoria Adams
Contemporary romance. First book in Circles Trilogy
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Barb Caffrey
Allen and Elaine are graduate students in Nebraska, and love each other very much. Their life should be idyllic, but Elaine's past includes rape, neglect, and abuse from those who should've loved her—but didn't, because from childhood, Elaine identified as transgender.

When Elaine tells Allen right before Christmas, he doesn't know what to do. He loves Elaine, loves her soul, has heard about transgender people before, but didn't think Elaine was one of them—she looks and acts like anyone else. Now, she wants to become a man and is going to leave.

He prays for divine intervention, and says he'll do anything, just please don't separate him from Elaine...and gets it. Now, he's in Elaine's body. And she's in his. They'll get a second chance at love.


Why? Because once you find your soulmate, the universe will do almost anything to keep you together—even change your faces.
Amazon
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Mara Gan

Duty and prophecy get in the way of everything.

All I ever wanted to do was read my books, play my sports, and help people. Life and prophecy had other things in mind. Helping people is what I do; as an empath and semi-frequent telepath, I can easily sense and understand people's needs and emotions. Sometimes even before they do. Being able to read everyone’s thoughts and feelings all the time can drive me crazy with anxiety, but that moment when I can finally make someone’s life better makes everything worth it.

Unfortunately, I’m also the next in line to rule the galaxy, I’m the only diplomat most planets will listen to, assassins try to kill me on an annoyingly regular basis, and a much-vaunted Prophecy has decreed that I’m going to die. Oh, and someone blew up my home planet. Kind of a lot to deal with, right?

Too bad I just got another problem: a big, irritating, overbearing bodyguard with serious anger management issues. And I think I’m falling for him.
***

Julie Gardner
17-year-old Lily Anderson is ready to wrap herself in a big red bow and give Zach Hewitt the greatest gift in the history of Christmas: Her. But when she pulls a pair of booties from her stocking and learns her forty-year-old mother is pregnant, Lily finds herself adrift, unsure of Zach’s commitment.

Lily hopes Zach will anchor her with promises of love. Unfortunately, his chaotic home-life makes him afraid of those three little words; and Maddie Franklin-in her Amazing Technicolor Dream Thong–makes sure Zach can have her whenever he wants. With the help of her best friend Sarah, Lily plots to secure her place in Zach’s heart. But after a series of awkward rejections, Lily loses faith in her dream boyfriend, in herself, even in Sarah.

That’s when Lily turns to Adam Connolly, a transfer student whose lash-y eyes and comfortable silences make her question who it is she wants and what she needs. But Adam’s support can’t help her the day Lily discovers her parents’ game-changing secret. Faced with the truth, Lily must decide how to deal with her family’s past, take hold of her own future, and accept that there are many names for love. Don’t bother making wishes; what you get is more than enough. 
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Scarlett Kol
A girl looking for a way out.
Being the daughter of New America’s leader, Mercury Masters has everything a girl could want. A glamorous life full of beautiful people, and the power to have anything she wants, except for one thing—to escape. Because Mercury’s perfect life comes with secrets to keep. Dangerous secrets that if made public would destroy her, her family, and her father’s reign. Then she meets Hawk. A boy looking to be a hero.

Hawk, a handsome prep school dropout turned vigilante, has his own family secrets. Deadly secrets that have haunted him since he was fifteen. But instead of fighting the ghosts of his past, Hawk has assembled a group of misfit hackers and thieves to save the future from the corrupt government of New America and the mysterious virus that is killing off its citizens. But trying to do the right thing is tough when the person you really want to save is your enemy’s daughter.

A love that could kill them both. 
Powerful forces keep them apart, but coming together could be the key to saving New America from destruction—even though it may cost both their lives.
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Adam Mann

Two very short stories about a boy meeting a girl, or girls.
The first is at college, where it is not the number of girls but one very special girl who is as inexperienced as the boy. Hopefully she will take the lessons she has learned into her married life.
The second is a young man meeting a series of young ladies, but not always at work, although sometimes work related.
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Brooke Moss
Posey Briggs has a chip on her shoulder the size of Whidbey, the island off of the Washington Coast where she’s stuck with her annoying foster family, and their band of mismatched, screw up kids. The last thing she needs while she rides out these last few months until she’s eighteen and finally free from the system, is to be saddled with some bogus tutoring assignment given by an English teacher with a God complex.

Drew Baxter has the world in the palm of his hands. Best athlete in school, coolest guy on campus, nailing the hottest girl in school whenever he wants. What more could he ask for? Except for his dad to stop making his life a terrorizing game of whose face will get pounded tonight? He’d rather do just about anything other than sitting around listening to the school loser lecture him about Shakespeare every day.

Sometimes the universe has a way of thrusting two people together, even though they’d rather drink poison than sit across a library table from one another. And in this case, the universe knew something Drew and Posey never saw coming: they would become the single most important person in each other’s lives, and save each other from completely unraveling.

Will the explosion, save them or destroy them?
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Connie Smith
Lila and Austin have known each other since she befriended his younger brother when she was a toddler. In fact, since her parents moved from her hometown, Lila's lived with Austin's family. The two are friends, though more of the teasing, taunting breed than the BFF variety.
But all it takes is one moment for everything to change...
For Austin, that moment comes when Lila performs a rumba in the school's auditorium to qualify for the state dance competition, the young woman on stage so far-removed from the little girl in his memories.
For Lila, the moment is a reflected image of Austin preparing for prom, the guy standing in front of his mirror hardly resembling the child that spent so much of his youth pestering her.
Will they find a way to admit to themselves and their families that their feelings are deeper than friendship? And can Lila focus on this building relationship – and deal with her unstable ex – and still win the dance contest?

***
Catherine Stine
Each heartbeat leads Joss closer to a shocking truth that will change everything.

Joss Olstad wins the fight to switch from her private school to a public high to “find her pieces” she lost when the artist father she never knew died. There, Joss struggles with a slutty friend, who flirts with her new love, Will; girls who press her on her embarrassing past, as well as her stoner mother’s lies back at home. Armed only with her handmade heart boxes that hold private messages, Joss’s search for identity leads her to a scary industrial section of Queens, and a shocking family secret that changes everything. This novel has been on Amazon’s top 100 in Teen and Alternative Family for over two years.
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Lisa Voisin
A fallen angel seeking redemption. A demon seeking revenge. The teenage girl caught between them.

Mia Crawford is being hunted. When a horrible creature appears out of thin air and attacks her, she knows Michael Fontaine is involved, though he claims to know nothing about it. Secretive and aloof, Michael evokes feelings in Mia that she doesn't understand. Images of another time and place haunt her. She recognizes them--but not from this lifetime.

In search of the truth, Mia discovers a past life of forbidden love, jealousy and revenge that tore an angel from Heaven and sent her to an early grave. Now that her soul has returned, does she have a chance at loving that angel again? Or will an age-old nemesis destroy them both? Ancient history is only the beginning.

Winner of the Chanticleer Grand Prize for supernatural fiction, The Watcher is the fast-paced, achingly romantic start to The Watcher Saga, a Young Adult urban fantasy series.

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Lee Ann Ward
No nightmares about my dad’s car crashing or my sister’s tiny face vanishing in a window of red. No, not anymore. Now when I sleep I fall into an expanse of frozen wilderness, the other life I’ve lived…

The one I’ve lived with him.

Anna experiences vivid dreams from a past-life she lived in the 1800s with her husband Robert and their children in the wilderness of the Michigan Territory. Much like her own mother grieving the man and child she lost, Anna can’t simply let go of the memories that haunt her.

But when she runs into Robert in this lifetime, a whirlwind of their past lives—and deaths—rocks her modern world to the core. What will she be willing to risk to spend every lifetime with Robert? 

In the twists and turns of “repeating” their lives over and over through time, Anna must sacrifice everything for a glimpse of immortal love.
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Sunday, February 9, 2014

Valentines Hop to Celebrate Crystal Collier's Moonless paperback launch!


Today is the start of Crystal Collier's awesome Moonless Release/Valentine's Blog Hop. Isn't the banner pretty? She's celebrating by doing a huge giveaway of the books above, so make sure to enter the Rafflecopter below. My novella, Model Position is the one on the right. 
Here's a teaser about Moonless:

In the English society of 1768 where women are bred to marry, unattractive Alexia, just sixteen, believes she will end up alone. But on the county doorstep of a neighbor’s estate, she meets a man straight out of her nightmares, one whose blue eyes threaten to consume her whole world—especially when she discovers him standing over her murdered host in the middle of the night.

Her nightmares become reality: a dead baron, red-eyed wraiths, and forbidden love with a man hunted by these creatures. After an attack close to home, Alexia realizes she cannot keep one foot in her old life and one in this new world. To protect her family she must either be sold into a loveless marriage, or escape with her beloved and risk becoming one of the Soulless.


Valentines blog hop question: If you lived in a society where arranged marriages were a la mode, who would you beg your parents to set you up with? Why? 
For me, smart is sexy, and I've had a crush on... wait for it... Niels Bohr for a while. Who the heck is he? He was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist (won it in 1922) known for discovering how quantum theory applies to atoms: that electrons move inside atoms in orbits, and that they can "leap" from one to another orbit. Also, that they travel both as particles and waves at the same time. I know, sci-fi, huh? That's what I LOVE about theoretical physics. Plus, the guy was handsome. So, I totally would've tried to talk my parents into meeting him--we would've had to travel to his native Denmark, and I'd have to have met him before his wife did (hehhe). Want to see a picture? 'Course you do. 
Niels the looker
Niels doing seriously hard math equations










Here's a cool Bohr quote: "When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images."
Who would you have begged your parents to set you up with in an alternate universe?
Find the rest of the hop below, plus the Rafflecopter!


a Rafflecopter giveaway

Saturday, July 13, 2013

Ellie Garratt's Story Collection Launch & the Apocalypse Blog Hop Continues!

I've got two events: the continuation of the apocalypse blog hop and the launch of sci-fi and horror writer, Ellie Garratt's story collection, Taking Time.
For those who hopped over for the apoc-hop, scroll down to the awesome prizes and the Rafflecopter!!!
A blurb about Ellie Garratt's Taking Time:
Science fiction stories of time and space...

The future of humanity must be decided in Next Phase. Winning the Planetary Lottery is not as lucky as it first seems in Schrodinger's Gamble. An apocalypse and its aftermath threaten to tear one couple apart in Daiker's Children. In Life As I Know It a reclusive man finds both his heart and home invaded during an alien harvest. In Taking Time a demon seeking shelter on a distant planet finds himself facing a very different kind of demon, after answering a frontier settlement's plea for help. Stories range from flash fiction to novelette in length.

AmazonAmazon UK, Goodreads, Twitter, Facebook, Ellie's website
About Ellie:
A life-long addiction to reading science fiction and horror meant writing was the logical outlet for Ellie Garratt’s passions. She is a reader, writer, blogger, Trekkie, and would happily die to be an extra in The Walking Dead. Her short stories have been published in anthologies and online. Passing Time: Nine Short Tales of the Strange and Macabre was published in March 2013 and contains nine previously published stories. Taking Time and Other Science Fiction Stories is her second short story collection.

As far as apocalypse goes, one of my favorite writers, Don DeLillo posits in his novel, Point Omega, we have an irrepressible urge to become “dumb as stones”, to unburden ourselves of our consciousness in one great, cataclysmic endgame explosion? What happens after the Omega Point—the rising timeline that rushes to the point of maximum complexity, after which the universe will become unrecognizable due to its enormous changes?

Or is it more an urge to reconstruction and reinvention—to a re-virgined world, fresh and exciting in its newness? Why else would we keep creating these explosive “ends”?

In DeLillo’s Point Omega, his characters who discuss the state of the world, have a very personal omega point after a shocking turn of events.

In Ruby’s Fire, my post-apoc fantasy, the world has already experienced a fiery sort of death, and is in the infant stages of reforming—that perilous place that could tip to metamorphosis or final death.

In Jonathan Maberry’s Rot and Ruin, the world is being overrun by Zombies.

In this blog hop, I'm giving away a copy of each of these books (and more), to the person who leaves the most insightful and creative comment about their take on apocalypse. That and entering the Rafflecopter suggestions. Get your apocalypse on, and after you’re done here, visit other great sites in the apoc-hop.
a Rafflecopter giveaway