Heating Up The Holidays, Compliments of Rock*It Reads

Welcome to the Rock*It Reads Heating Up the Holidays Blog Hop. There are 15 stops on the blog tour. The more blogs you visit and comment on, the greater your chances of winning the grand prize, a $75 gift certificate to Barnes & Noble or Amazon, and a huge collection of books from the authors of Rock*It Reads. Smaller prizes will be available at each stop along the way.

Good luck, and have fun!

Winter is coming and for a lot of us, that means cold, gloomy days and long, dark nights. Chilly, damp, blah. Which is why I'm so glad to be helping heat up your holidays with these Rock*It Reads authors' musings on sexy heat. Our little gift to you.

One of the most fun parts of doing self-published works is the chance to be intimately involved in designing the covers. I love how great covers tell a story, it doesn't just show you a picture.

I commissioned a photo shoot from Jenn Le Blanc and her talented crew at Smexy Studio for my upcoming super sexy Irish-set Elizabethan novella, CLAIMING HER (available 2013).

Their first meeting involves the hero taking over her castle and, when she's not happy about it, and attacks him, he kind-of pins her against the wall. Okay, he totally pins her against the wall.



"Her breath was coming too fast, her heart hammering too hard, her hand—the one she’d punched him with—was throbbing as if she’d hit a wall, not a man. Steel before and stone behind, she was, most literally, between a rock and a very hard place.

He was all wild thing, untethered and unafraid. His hair had been shaved close on the sides and grew long in the back and front, so he looked familiar and yet utterly foreign. His face was all cut planes of male fury, hard cheekbones, dark brows above the ice-blue eyes pinned on her. She felt like she was staring at a flame burning inside a shard of ice."



But much as Katarina sees nothing but Irish warlord, there's a lot more to Aodh Mac Con than conquest of castles. There's his conquest of Katarina.

Here's the model, James, getting painted with tattoos:

And here is James after being painted:

Yes. Wow, right?


And here's the final cover for CLAIMING HER, also done by Jenn LeBlanc:

That story occurs in the winter but I'm also working on one that happens in the summer. The hot, hot summer. So, of course, my trek needs to involve hot guys and hot summer. Things like:

And

At which point, of course, they need a way to cool off:

Oh wait, I mean:

Wait, wait. I mean:

Okay, basically, what I'm saying is it's important to have a way to cool off. I just don't know that I've actually offered one here.

Your turn! Leave me a comment and let me know what books you're planning to help keep you warm this winter. Don't forget to include your name and email address!

TWO commentors will win a copy of their choice, either a print copy of any one of my current releases, OR if you want to wait, an e-copy of one of my self-pubbed releases when they become available.

Also? Comments here double your chances of winning the grand RiR prize--check out our blog!

And signing up for my newsletter? Doubles your chances here. ;)



Be sure to stop by the other Rock*It Reads authors' blogs for more fun. Fourteen authors, a slew of sexy pictures, maybe a hot excerpt here and there, and some incredible romance books to check out--you can't beat it!

Leave a comment below to enter for your chance to win!

Don't forget to visit the other authors on the Blog Hop for more chances to win!

Kris Kennedy	Bonnie Vanak	Erin Kellison
Sharon Page	Lila DiPasqua	Elisabeth Naughton
Norah Wilson	Jennifer Lyon	Monica Burns
Vanessa Kelly	Mia Marlowe	Joan Swan
Pamela Clare	Margo Maguire	Rock*It Reads

Deception is a Reviewers' Choice Award Nominee!

Wonderful news this morning.  Deception has been selected by RT Book Reviews (formerly Romantic Times Magazine) as one of the nominees in their 2012 RT Reviewers Choice Awards!
 
It’s been nominated for a K.I.S.S. Award (Knight in Shining Silver), their award for the hottest, sexiest, shining-silver-est hero.   That means Kier, our con man, bad boy hero, has been nominated as a knight in shining armor.   Oh yeah. 

I can't tell you how much this tickles me.  Why?  Because in the book, Keir is an extremely reluctant hero.  His only brush with chivalry was when he lied and cheated his way into jousting tournaments as a youth, where he’d been “good, quite good, to the extent it mattered, which was naught.   Kier knew he could never be good enough.

He never wanted to be."

Which isn’t quite the truth.   Kier wants a lot of things he think he can never have.  He's a con man, an outlaw, a mercenary, and a very dangerous man, and he's honed in like an archer on a single target: venegance.  

Until Sophia shows up.

So for Kier to be nominated for such an award is quite an honor.  Proving redemption is possible.  Even for mercenary con men outlaws with hearts made of stone.

Want to read more?  Here's an excerpt!

Print:
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PDQ: Pushing Them Into It

Note to Self: I am writing a novella.  A super-sexy novella.

Repeat, I am writing a novella.  A super-sexy novella.

This requires The Sexy to get rolling pretty darn quick.  PDQ.  And I'm surprised by how challenging this has been.

I love writing about passion and desire.  From flirtation to consummation, and every permutation in between, I love it all.  My stories pivot on electric sensual tension, which often means denied sensual attraction and the slow build of irresistible forces.

Partly that's because the time period demands restraint, or a solid explanation for exceptions.  Also, my heroes and heroines tend to be, um, let's say "so fiercely at odds that it sometimes involves ropes" and be done with it.

But mostly the restraint is there because it takes time to build the respect / affection / psychological attraction that are essential to truly scorching physical attraction.

And yet, I am committed to a super-sexy novella.  Time is not my friend.

Something's gotta give.

It's the slow build.  :)

So today, I am going to strip away much of the the oh-so-pretty words and the elegant set-ups and push my hero and heroine into It.  Or darn close to It.  PDQ. 

Writing, Writing, Researching, Researching

These days I'm working on 3 different stories, hopping between them.  The first is a medieval, with a Scottish hero!   Oh, the research to come.  :)

The second is a super-hot novella set in Elizabethan Ireland, titled CLAIMING HER.  I was going to title it CLAIMING KATARINA, but that seems like a lot of syllables for a cover.  So "Her" it became. 

The 'her' being Katarina, (you guessed that, didn't you?).  The 'him' is Aodh Mac Con Rardove.  Aodh, son of the Hound of Rardove.

(Readers of The Irish Warrior will recognize the name Rardove, yes?)

This story has been require some (fun) research.  The Elizabethan era was a fascinating mix of the medieval and the more modern.  It always seemed to shine brightly out of the past, an era of great advancements in culture and the arts and sciences, from playhouses to architecture.   The best of both worlds.

But of course, such an overlap also had the worst of both worlds.  

Bull- and bear-baiting were still considered great entertainment.  In fact, bull-baiting was required--required.  You could be fined if you killed a bull without bating it first.  (!!!!)  

Workhouses for the poor were set up by the government, which, while having all sorts of negative connotations nowadays, filled a void in the community.  After the Reformation, the role of the Church in such duties (and of the community as a whole) declined significantly.  

Adventurous, vicious and exploitative explorations into of new worlds were going on aplenty.   Religious intolerance and oppression was everywhere, and like most things that are gripped too tightly, more and more people ran between the cracks like grains of sand, into various denominations and belief systems that disdained one another with vicious glee.   Unless you were an atheist, of course.  Then everyone hated you. Atheism was equivalent to treason.

This isn't to say there weren't gorgeous advances.  John Dee (the Queen's astrologer) invented an early robot.  Pencils, pocket watches, compound microscopes (!!!) and flush toilets were invented.  Mechanical clocks had been around for centuries, but now they were able to chime.  Fine goods were flooding into towns and cities and you could get almost anything your heart desired (if you could afford it.  If there wasn't a plague going on.  Which there often was.)   Spices were more abundant than ever, and fine fabrics were dyed and laced and stitched to perfection.  

All this finery in apparel had a dark side though.  All those layers of material made for some unpleasant odors, much worse than body odor of a man who has been working all day.  Even if he didn't take a full bath at night, he wiped himself down regularly, you better believe it, armpits to groin.  In the Elizabethan era, I think this was less common.  Sweating inside all those layers?  Yum, right?  Covering it all up with perfumes?  Double yum.  And if the hundred people around you are doing the same thing...?  Can't even count the yums.  

But, of course, this was less the case out in Ireland, out beyond The Pale, out where the winds blew against nothing but hills and castle walls, and the nights were endlessly dark, broken only by fires in your hall and high along your rampart walls.  And you knew, you always knew, the wild Irishry were out there, just beyond your crumbling gates.  

And what if one got through . . .?

Katarina of Rardove is about to find out.

You can read an except of Katarina and Aodh Mac Con Rardove's explosive first meeting here: http://kriskennedy.net/183

And Now You!

I'd love to hear your impressions/thoughts/knowledge about the Elizabethan era.  Do you feel an affinity for it?  Do you have other favorite eras?  

Or, if you're indifferent to the era, you can just let me know what you thought of the excerpt.  :)

New Blog!!

 Look, I'm Doing A Blog!

Trying my hand at a very loose blog.  "Loose" as in "It will show up intermittently, when writing stories leaves me time to write blogs."  "Loose" as in "I'll blog about whatever story-ness is on the radar," from research tidbits to what makes a hero to exclusive excerpts to...whatever else.  :)

 So pull up a chair, pop the blog in your RSS feed, and listen to the silence, occasionally interspersed with blogginess.  :)  And  whenever you have something to say, please say it!