Mar 17 2015

Happy St. Paddy’s Day! Enjoy A Free Read of “Under The Rainbow”

Caren is trying to get her life back together after a devastating diagnosis. When she meets the handsome and mysterious Aengus, she realizes she’s stumbled upon a world of shamrocks and magic in the middle of her harsh reality. He offers her one wish – and she doesn’t waste it on gold.

You can read “Under The Rainbow” for free at Smashwords, formatted for all e-reading devices or for PC, if you prefer. This was one of my favorite short-stories, it really is. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed having them in my head!

“A very well written mysterious short story (book). It was very easy to read/follow from start/finish & never a dull moment.”

“The ending was very beautiful…I kept rooting for them to be together. “

Mar 16 2015

Here’s Your Chance To Buy Eight Nights At Sea For A Song!

And once you read the book, you’ll know how appropriate that is! I’m offering Eight Nights At Sea on a Kindle Countdown Deal beginning at 8am EDT (US) on Wednesday, March 18th!

The book will blaze in at $.99, then hop up to $1.99 before moving back to its normal list price of $2.99. The promo will run through the 24th, so grab it while it’s hot!

Unfortunately, this also means that I have to unpublish the book from Smashwords for a while, as Amazon requires that I make this book a Kindle Select purchase, making it exclusive to Kindle for the next 90 days. I’ll be putting it back up to Smashwords once that deal expires.

So if you want the book for your Nook or other device (or on your PC), get it from Smashwords now – it’s coming down tomorrow.

Here’s a blurb, to give you a taste:

Zephyr Jamieson is a pirate, sailing the seas of a magical realm. He encounters a beauty named Rina, a woman with a body that sets him aflame and a secret that she cannot tell. Rina barters passage aboard Zephyr’s ship for herself and her secretive twin brother with the only thing the pirate captain appears to be interested in. Can eight nights at sea lead to more? Or will her secret tear them apart?

Set your countdown clocks – Eight Nights At Sea goes on sale soon!

Mar 13 2015

FanFic Friday – Today You Get A Taste Of Family Life, Once Upon A Time-style

It’s FanFiction Friday once again, and today I’m going to take a slightly different tack. No smut, but some good, hard dialogue. I pride myself on writing my FanFic characters in authentic voice, and I think this particular argument captures the essence of Hook and Emma beautifully.

In this scene from “Finn’s Tale” (which is part 3 of my Memory Keeper trilogy), young Finn Jones has just stepped through a portal to go and find the woman who holds the key to his destiny, much to the dismay of his mother, Emma, who has decided to voice her opinion to the lad’s father, the one and only Killian Jones.

Continue reading →

Mar 11 2015

Hump Day! I Won’t Make A Dirty Joke – I’ll Just Tease Some Steamy Stuff

In Changeling, the third book of my Seeder Saga, Lizzie is abducted by Indar, a man from the Seeder Corps, and they spend a few weeks in close quarters on his ship, which causes all sorts of mayhem when they find themselves overwhelmingly attracted to each other. Continue reading →

Mar 10 2015

I Wrote All Night To Get To You (Is That All Right?)

I woke up at 1:30 am and I was wide awake. So I looked out the window at the stars and the overly bright moon and I knew I had to write.

Problem is, I had to write the story that’s three stories away from what I’m working on right now. I’m knee deep in Someday In Dublin, working on a non-fiction book under another pen name, and piecing together a novella due out April 1st.

This story shouldn’t be a priority. But the night was dark and magical, the stars were shining, and the fact is, this story is about a girl in the desert who sings stories to the stars. The mood was there and ideas were flickering and I would have been a fool not to take advantage of it.

By the same token, now that story is overtaking my brain because I allowed it to unfurl and now I need to clip its wings and get back to work on Someday In Dublin or it’ll never get done.

This writer thing….very frustrating sometimes.

Back to work.

Mar 9 2015

Fanfiction Tease – These Dreams, Chapter 14: Leftenant Jones

I got so bogged down on Friday with all the other crap I had to do that I forgot to do a Friday Fanfic tease – sorry! So today I’m teasing out part of one of my favorite chapters from my Fanfic “These Dreams.” In “These Dreams,” Killian and Emma are stuck in the dreamscape, moving through their own dreams and the dreams of everyone in Storybrooke. In this chapter, “Leftenant Jones” (Yes, I know it’s spelled “Lieutenant” and pronounced differently, but for the sake of readability, I went with the phonetic spelling), Killian is dreaming himself back to his navy days with his brother, Liam. Emma finds herself dumped on the dock the day Killian is promoted to Leftenant…

Continue reading →

Mar 6 2015

I Need This Medal Today

It’s been a week.

It started with two sick kids, which morphed into me getting really sick and taking care of two sick kids, add in a broken dryer, a foot of snow, and a workload at the dayjob that borders on the psychotic, and you have a perfect storm of shit that gets in a writer’s way.

But I still managed to write somehow. Not as much as I would have liked, but I did it. Go me.

Holy God, do I need a drink.

Anyway, this blog is paying the price today because I am spread too freaking thin. I’ll do better next week, I promise.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Mar 5 2015

Teaser Thursday: How About A Little More Of “Changeling?”

Last week, I discussed parts one and two of my Seeder Saga a little more in-depth, and this week, I want to give you more insight into part three.

One of the pieces of feedback I hear most about books one and two is that each one reads like a stand-alone book, with the exception of their final chapters. I did this by design, though it can be argued that the setup for “Changeling” really takes hold in book two, “Rain In The Moonlight.”

And in “Changeling,” we get all of our questions answered from books one and two:

What happened to the planet that Miri is taken to? Why have the genetic issues occurred?

What was Parmet doing to the ecosystem on Rain’s planet?

Why was Indar so concerned with keeping Lunan’s family from being noticed by the Guild?

And best of all, we travel to Ajan’s home planet, and get to meet some hot-blooded Prims. When in Rome…or on a planet full of people who rely on their escalated primitive instincts…it can be interesting to do as the natives do. Or so Lizzie finds out… Continue reading →

Mar 4 2015

Doing Your Research – Sparingly

I’m three-quarters of the way through “Someday In Dublin,” and of course, I’m doing my research.

That’s the problem, though. Since I haven’t been to some of the places I’m writing about, I want to make sure I’m being as accurate as possible. I’m trolling the internet for tourist videos and traveler recommendations and personal travel blogs. I’m polling various internet friends who actually live in Ireland for their thoughts on certain things, and of course, they’ll be my beta readers when I’m done to make sure I’m not making a mess of any of this.

But there comes a time when you have to say to yourself: “Back away from the internet.” Especially when you’re researching someplace you’d love to go and see.

I can’t tell you how many internet rabbit holes I’ve fallen down, how many hours of writing time I’ve frittered away watching videos and checking out the websites of every national park and quaint little B&B I can find. I spent one entire evening reading pub menus from various watering holes in Dublin!

It’s all great fun, but it’s also not keeping me focused and not helping me toward my goal, which is finishing the damn book, after all. So I’ve learned a trick that helps me, and so far, it’s working.

When I’m writing the story, I keep certain things generic and then when I’m going back and revising, I’ll add in the specifics. I work in MS Word, so I use the highlight feature to mark the place in the manuscript, so I know I need to tweak it later. It looks something like this:

Later, I’ll go back and add in the name of a nearby village, and somewhere a little further down I’ll put in some details about something they saw there to flesh it out. By keeping it generic as I’m writing, I’m staying focused on what they’re doing with each other, how we’re moving the plot forward, what they’re saying and how they’re saying it. And most importantly, I’m not spending an hour on the internet when all I needed was the name of the damn village.

Writer tricks. They’re what’s for dinner.

And now, back to Michael and Amy, and Ireland. Can’t wait to share this one with you all!

Mar 3 2015

Book Tease: Eight Nights At Sea Steams The Sails

Eight Nights At Sea is such a love child for me.

As some of you know, it began as a Fanfic – the only fanfic I ever novelized, as a matter of fact, and it was also my very first foray into Fanfiction.

I’d read plenty of bad fanfic and the occasional good one across the years, but never had the urge to write any myself until one day, a story crept into my head and just wouldn’t leave. It featured a favorite character from a favorite show (Hook from Once Upon A Time, of course), but I was hesitant to try it as a fanfic because I paired him up with a brand new character of my own instead of Emma, his traditional love interest on the show.

I finally decided I had to write the damn story just for me, if no one else, and I opened an account at Fanfiction.net and started posting it as it leaked out of my brain. It was surprisingly well-received, and got a few hundred good reviews, which inspired me onto my next tale, a purely Captain Swan adventure that got me some more traction in the community and led me to keep going in fanfic, which inspired me to write a few novels, and yadda yadda yadda, here I am actually making money on Amazon and Smashwords from my loyal readers that followed me out of Fanfiction and into the worlds I created.

But I’ll always have a soft spot for this book. Always. The story ended up being so much more than I originally intended, and taught me a lesson about endless possibilities in storyline, and how good it is to surprise yourself as an author.

So with all that backdrop, here’s a tease of what you’ll find in Eight Nights At Sea. In this scene, Rina breaks into the rum, and nearly makes a confession that Zeph has been waiting to hear… Continue reading →

Britt DeLaney

Romance Author

Category Uncategorized