Book Spotlight & Giveway: Domination by Imogen Rose

Author Interview: Icy Passage by Ann Gimpel

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About the Author:

Ann Gimpel is a national bestselling author. A lifelong aficionado of the unusual, she began writing speculative fiction a few years ago. Since then her short fiction has appeared in a number of webzines and anthologies. Her longer books run the gamut from urban fantasy to paranormal romance. Once upon a time, she nurtured clients, now she nurtures dark, gritty fantasy stories that push hard against reality. When she’s not writing, she’s in the backcountry getting down and dirty with her camera. She’s published over 30 books to date, with several more planned for 2016 and beyond. A husband, grown children, grandchildren and wolf hybrids round out her family.

Do you plan everything or just let the story flow?

I do a little of both. Sometimes the story flows, and sometimes I plan it out. Icy Passage went through several iterations before this final version.

Do your characters ever want to take over the story?

Oh hell yes. All the time, and the sad part is I let them. Wimp that I am.

What is your favourite food?

Anything Japanese.

Are you a morning person or a night owl?

Morning person.

Where do you dream of travelling to and why?

I’d love to return to Antarctica. I’ve been there twice now, and I’d really enjoy another trip, but my husband is in full rebellion.

Do distant places feature in your books?

Absolutely. I’ve been fortunate enough to travel a lot and I’ve climbed mountains all over the world. I work distant places into many of my books.

Do you listen to music while writing?

No, it distracts me.

Could you tell us a bit about your latest release?

Antarctica was always a lifelong dream of mine. I know. Weird. Right? A trip fell into my lap in March 2014. We had very little time to prepare, but we managed. The plan was to fly to Ushuaia and board a boat for the Antarctic Continent and South Georgia Island. Along the way, we were supposed to do a mountaineering crossing of South Georgia, complete with ropes and crampons and living in a tent. The last part of March is late in the year for Antarctica--coming into their winter since the seasons are reversed. We had hideous weather, huge waves, hurricane force winds, but I still adored it. In fact, I liked it so much, we spent the month of November 2014 in Antarctica too. A very different trip, and I'm glad we went both times because we saw different things.

A story started percolating on the first voyage. I was working on another book at the time, so I tried very hard not to start on Icy Passage, but I broke down in the Buenos Aires airport on the trip home and wrote the first thousand words. Aside from doing my damnedest to breathe life into the unbelievable pristine beauty and wonder of that part of the world, I brushed up on the hard science I cut my teeth on as an undergraduate in college.

Icy Passage is a special book for me because it blends my knowledge of medicine, my love of the world under a microscope, and my fascination with Antarctica into one package.

What have you learned about writing and publishing since you first started?

Aw geez. I could write books about that. Everything in this business changes fast, but the two things you always need are top flight cover art and a strong editor who isn’t afraid to point out your flaws.

Is there anything you would do differently?

Yes. I wouldn’t stick with small presses for 25 books. I needed them at the front end because I truly knew nothing, but I could’ve branched out on my own after about ten books. Other authors told me I was nuts, but I wouldn’t listen. Now that I’m fully Indie, I’ll never look back.

Who, or what, if anything has influenced your writing?

Urban fantasy writers like Charles deLint, Illona Andrews, Sherrilyn Kenyon. High fantasy authors like Patricia McKillip, Ursula LeGuin, Robert Jordan, Terry Goodkind.

Anything you would say to those just starting out in the craft?

Write every day. Find a good critique group, a place where people will tear the living crap out of your writing. Your job is to be strong enough to recognize which parts need changing and which parts truly are your voice.

What are three words that describe you?

Determined. Courageous. Thick-skinned.

What's your favourite book or who is your favourite writer?

It’s a tough call between Outlander and LOTR.

Blurb of your latest release or coming soon book

The one right before Icy Passage was Heart’s Flame. Here’s its blurb:

Tumble into a world where magic won, but the price was high enough to annihilate almost everything—including love.

Life in a Were bordello is all Keira has ever known. None of the magicians’ guilds wanted her because of her mixed blood, and they didn’t protest when the Weres bound her as an indentured hooker. Mired in the hopelessness of her dreams, she longs for more.

Barrett’s a full-blood magic wielder who operates a magician supply shop in what’s left of Seattle. No one is more surprised than him when the Sidhe leader commands him to extricate Keira from the Weres. He knows her because she loves to while away time in his shop, but she’s always skittered away whenever he got too close. Too bad because she’s twenty shades of gorgeous.

Magic and intrigue throw Keira and Barrett together. Attraction ignites, burning white hot, but Keira has other priorities—like learning to control brand new magic she had no idea she possessed. Besides, Barrett is such a hunk of a man, surely he has lots of women stashed somewhere. He wants her too, has for a long time, but once he spirits her away from the Weres, his job is done. Far better to keep his distance and allow her to seize the destiny she was born for.

Except it’s not what he wants. Her, either. Can they bridge the gap between them before it’s too late?

List of previous books if any

There are a lot of them. My website, http://www.anngimpel.com is a good place to find my books. I also run my own e-commerce site where readers can find my books. Here’s the link to it. https://store7714213.ecwid.com/

Any websites/places readers can find you on the web.

My website is above. Here are some other links:
http://anngimpel.blogspot.com
http://www.amazon.com/author/anngimpel
http://www.facebook.com/anngimpel.author
@AnnGimpel (for Twitter)

Thank you so much for hosting me, and for a very thorough interview! Some of those questions made me dig deep.

You're very welcome :)

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Icy Passage
Ann Gimpel
Dream Shadow Press
110K words
Release Date: 2/29/16
Genre: Supernatural thriller romance

Tumble into the icy danger of Antarctica with a blazing hot romance. Mittens and fan required.

Book Description:

Fresh out of residency, Dr. Kayna Quan opts for a tour in Antarctica. Money is short, so she hires on as medical officer aboard a Russian research vessel headed for McMurdo Station. Primed for almost anything, she plays her paranormal ability close to the vest.

Stationed on remote South Georgia Island for two years, Brynn McMichaels is eager for a change. When cultures of the single-celled organism, archaea, overgrow their bins in his lab and begin shifting into another form, he worries he’s losing his mind and talks with scientists at McMurdo, but they have problems of their own—bad ones. Brynn agrees to help. The weather’s too uncertain to send a plane, so he hitches a ride aboard Kayna’s ship and brings his mutant culture colonies along.

Attraction sparks, urgent, hot and powerful, between Brynn and Kayna, but her disclosure about her magic is a tough nut to crack. It doesn’t help that her dead father is stalking her. Lethal cultures, bizarre illness, and McMurdo’s refusal to let them land force Brynn and Kayna into an uneasy alliance. Will their fragile bond be enough to thwart the powers trying to destroy Earth, and them along with it?


Amazon | BN | iTunes | Kobo | ARe | Google Play


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Author Interview: Michael Alan Peck

1. Do you plan everything or just let the story flow?

In the architect-or-gardener writing model, I’m a hardcore architect. There are many moving pieces, people, monsters, and other characters in the world of The Commons, and things that show up in a very minor fashion early on sometimes turn out playing a major part later on. That’s mostly planned. I have the memory of a sodden tree stump; there’s no way I could keep track of it all without outlining.

What I mean by “mostly,” however, is that I leave some flexibility between the outlining and writing phases. I use a writing-software package called Scrivener, which allows for all sorts of keywording, tagging, and reordering. I move each story event and scene up from the outline and into the manuscript as I write it, and often I’ll change up the order of events or even choose to have a different character tell that part of the story.

I can’t work without knowing what’s probably going to happen next, but I’m not beholden to it, either. That keeps things interesting for me—which, if I’ve done my job, will make the story interesting for the reader, too.

2. Do your characters ever want to take over the story?

Maybe, but that doesn’t happen. While their ideas are welcome, I’m the boss. This isn’t a democracy; it’s a benevolent dictatorship. (And trust me: that’s the only part of my life where I can say that.)

3. What is your favourite food?

I recently found a leather-bound Book of Memories from when I was a kid—one of those write-in deals where you fill in the same questions and categories each school year. When I was in second grade, my favorite food was pickled beets. (I was into specifics, apparently—and was a bit of a strange kid.)

Now I’d have to go with bacon. Crispy bacon. (I’m still into specifics, and I’m a very strange man. Not that there’s anything wrong with liking bacon, mind you.)

4. Are you a morning person or a night owl?

I’m more of a morning person, though not too early in the morning. My brain is lubricated and running relatively smoothly after my morning ride and shower. (I commute by bike.) But it doesn’t really perform until after it’s been fed some caffeine. By that point, you don’t want to be around, forced to listen to me as the ideas flow. Unless you’re my wife. She doesn’t want to listen, either, but she was foolish enough to marry me, and now she must pay.

5. Where do you dream of travelling to and why?

My wife and I have a constant mental list of places we’d like to visit. Our favorite trips involve hiking to exhaustion during the day and then enjoying good food and wine at night—call us soft, but we’re not much for roughing it around the clock—so we tend to go for places where you can combine those things. Accordingly, we’ve in mind places in Spain, France, Italy, and Austria. And for various other reasons, we’d love to go to Iceland and even Antarctica.

6. Do distant places feature in your books?

Thus far, it hasn’t been distant places so much as it’s been places from the imagination and from memory. But that will most likely change in the second book of my initial trilogy, which will see the fantastic elements and places of The Commons crossing over into our world. So that might mean everything from hard-to-reach Buddhist temples showing up in Central Park, or even moon bases appearing in the Chicago Loop.

7. Do you listen to music while writing?

Always. In fact, my writing soundtrack is a rotating array of drone and ambient that includes Stars of the Lid, Kyle Bobby Dunn, William Basinski, Loscil, Brian Eno, Eluvium, and Tim Hecker. In case my self-discipline fails, which is an ever-present danger, I have two mental switches to rely on. When the ambient begins playing and the incense is lit, it’s time to start working. I’m a creature of habit. Routine is everything.

8. Could you tell us a bit about your latest release?

The Journeyman is the first of the initial Commons trilogy. The Commons is a Purgatory-like place where, when everything’s working the way it should, departed souls go on journeys populated with their memories, loved ones, dreams, and nightmares. The way they meet the challenges presented by those journeys determines where they go from there: the next step in the afterlife or even a return to the living world.

However, the Commons has been hijacked by a corporate-raider type who’s using the life energy of the captured souls to power his own ambition. When our three heroes—a New York street kid, an Iraq War veteran, and her special-needs soon—arrive following a horrific accident, they find that their own challenge is to help the good forces operating in The Commons free it from the corporate raider.

I’m currently working on the second book of the three, which will be called The Margins. And I’m planning on writing stand-alone works after the initial trilogy, including short stories, one-shot novels, and more.

9. Who, or what, if anything has influenced your writing?

My influences are a mish-mash of poetry, movies, cartoons, comics, classic and modern fiction, and everything in between. And given that The Commons is a world built on imagination and memory, I’m able to fit in all sorts of references and allusions. In the first book, you’ll find Rudyard Kipling, T.S. Eliot, and a nod to John Boorman’s Excalibur.

If I had to point to one work that’s the heaviest influence, it’d probably be Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. I’ve said before that if the Commons books were a cocktail, it’d be one part Gaiman to one part Bradbury, with a splash of Vonnegut, a William Gibson garnish, and a bit of Stephen King rubbed around the rim.

9. Is there anything you would do differently?

If the current publishing landscape weren’t changing so fast, I’d say I wish I’d gotten started sooner. But that would mean I wouldn’t be operating in a world where self-publishing is a real opportunity—an environment where I can get my work out there while retaining the rights to it. A decade ago, I’d have considered myself lucky to sell my rights to a publisher for the life of the copyright. Now I see that as a bullet dodged.

I was fortunate enough to be named the winner of the Soon to be Famous Illinois Author Contest, which is only open to self-published Illinois writers and is in its second year. As a part of that, I’m doing speaking engagements and appearances at libraries around the state. Again, if I were with a traditional publisher, that contest wouldn’t be open to me. And more of these contests are in the works in other areas of the country. Opportunities abound.

As is often being said these days—Hugh Howey says it all the time—there’s never been a better time to be a writer. It’s very, very exciting.

Blurb of your latest release or coming soon book

Michael Alan Peck won the Illinois Library Association's 2015 Soon to be Famous Illinois Author Contest for his debut novel The Journeyman (The Commons Series, Book 1). The Journeyman is recommended for fans of fantasy and magical realism, both teens and adults.

The Journeyman tells the story of three people who board a bus and – following a horrific accident – must band together as the last hope for the afterlife, known to them as The Commons.

Synopsis:

“Paul Reid died in the snow at seventeen. The day of his death, he told a lie—and for the rest of his life, he wondered if that was what killed him.”

And so begins the battle for the afterlife, known as The Commons. It’s been taken over by a corporate raider who uses the energy of its souls to maintain his brutal control. The result is an imaginary landscape of a broken America—stuck in time and overrun by the heroes, monsters, dreams, and nightmares of the imprisoned dead.

Three people board a bus to nowhere: a New York street kid, an Iraq War veteran, and her five-year-old special-needs son. After a horrific accident, they are the last, best hope for The Commons to free itself. Along for the ride are a shotgun-toting goth girl, a six-foot-six mummy, a mute Shaolin monk with anger-management issues, and the only guide left to lead them.

Three Journeys: separate but joined. One mission: to save forever.

But first they have to save themselves.

Any websites/places readers can find you on the web.

http://michaelalanpeck.com/

Facebook

Twitter

Goodreads

Book Spotlight: We Call Thee by Jerome Brook

We Call Thee
by Jerome Brook
Paranormal/Supernatural

Blurb:

A circle of skyclad women meet on a deserted beach. In the chill of the night they circle a fire, chanting. They call on the power of the Goddess of the Moon. They embrace a man who they honor in their coven. They warm him momentarily with their naked forms. The time is the present.

Morgana leads the coven of Wise Women - with her brother Clay at her side. Clay is a medium who sees the past and hears the voice of those who have passed to the next world. However, Estelle becomes his lover. She comes to displace Morgana and draw Clay away from the dark power of Morgana (and the erotic rites of the Sisterhood).

Estelle visits Pompeii with Clay. There he slips into the past and hears the words of those lost when the city was destroyed. On their return Clay also senses danger for Estelle from the forces of evil.

Pompeii

Pompeii is in a sense a "star gate," an opening to another time and realm. People can experience another reality there. Other "points of power" are Stonehenge, Lourdes, Cahokia and the little known lost Kingdom of Nan.

The author's website is:
http://cityofthemirage.wordpress.com

For more information on this and other books.

Book Review: Salem VI: Rebecca's Rising

Review copy supplied by authors' representative.
Salem VI: Rebecca's Rising
by Jack Heath and John Thompson
Horror/Supernatural
Pressque Publishing, LLC
3.5 Stars

Blurb:

Having stepped off the fast track of primetime network television news, John Andrews has chosen a quieter life as editor of Salem News, a small paper in a quiet New England town. Life is perfect until Andrews’ wife is killed in a tragic accident. After several years of trying to numb the pain with alcohol, Andrews is visited by the spirit of a long dead ancestor who opens a door to a shocking family history. After he experiences a surreal glimpse into the past, Andrews must confront the question of whether he is losing his mind or whether for several hundred years his ancestors have been engaged in a secret battle with a coven that worships Satan. Fueled by the need to understand whether his wife's death was really an accident or something far more sinister, Andrews, along with his beautiful assistant editor, risk everything to discover a truth so horrifying it threatens to destroy everything and everyone he knows and loves.

Review:

I've always been fascinated by the Salem witch trials after seeing The Crucible, so it wasn't hard to agree to review this one. Rather than go down the route of an action-packed conspiracy thriller, Jack Heath and John Thompson have gone the route of a more character-driven story and as such it stands out much more than just another religious/conspiracy thriller. What made a God-fearing Puritan community turn against their own?

John Andrews escaped a fire at his college dorm, due to hearing the voice of a woman in his head urging him to wake up. Andrews didn't know it, but the fire was the first of many attempts on his life. He is descended from Rebecca Nurse, one of the accused witches hanged at Salem, and also from Ann Putman, one of Rebecca's accusers.

There is a portrait of Rebecca Nurse in the house he inherited from his aunt, and as part of the will, he must agree never to part with it or sell it. John has never liked it, he always thought Rebecca looked very disapproving.

Four years after his wife's death, coming up to Halloween there have been a spate of runaways going missing. John keeps hearing a woman's voice in his head again, and it helps him save a baby. He hears screams coming from a shop called "Wicca Wonders", but no one else seems to hear it. Is he going mad or is something much more sinister going on?

The authors have created a sympathetic character in John Andrews and you are rooting for him as the story unfolds. However, what disappointed me was that we as readers know a lot about the who, where and why, long before John and Amy, his editor figure it out. It would have been more suspenseful for the readers to find out who the 'baddies' are at the same time as John and Amy. There was one of them who was a surprise near the end of the book, so that part was good.

Amy and John share some romance, but it fell flat for me, I didn't get any spark between them at all. The story would have worked just as well if they were investigating things as colleagues without the romance. Contrary to popular belief, some women will read books even if there is no romance in it.

I couldn't tell it was written by two different authors, the scenes blended so well. It's fast-paced and engaging with interesting characters and a different, imaginative, take on the Salem Witch trials.

Reviewed by Annette Gisby