Free Kindle Book!

Song to Wake to is now FREE on Amazon.com, and has been downloaded over 2000 times! Click on the cover to download your kindle copy now.

Song to Wake to - Available now in full!

 Here it is!
 The complete version of Song to Wake to, 71,500 words.

Sixteen-year-old Maddy Bride starts at a new school in the countryside. She knows she’ll have to deal with sports obsessed rich kids, cliques, and pressure. She doesn’t expect myths from the shadowy past to be taking place around her. Not only are the legends unfinished. They’re starting all over again.

Her new classmate, Eddy Moon, is awkward, and shy, and has lived a life of hardship and loneliness. As his strength and sense of purpose become more and more striking, Maddy comes to believe that he may have a place in the stories. At the same time she realises that the place she wants is by his side.
Closeness to Eddy brings Maddy another shocking realisation. Not only is he a mythic hero returned to life in the countryside, but maybe she too has a place in the legends. Torn between normality and her attraction to the magnificent Eddy Moon, Maddy has to decide who she is, who she is going to be, and whether stories must end the same way twice.

This is the first book in the LEVELS series. The second, 'Rock Anthem' will be released in November 2011 and the third in January 2012.

Pleeeeease buy it, read it, tell your friends to read it, write a review of it on your blog.

Don't Watch This! Anne Hathaway's face and no more...

The book or the film? The book then the film? The film then the book? Which one do you prefer? Or is the question better put 'which one is less bad'?
To me, good books and films don't combine at all well. Books where the characters think a lot, where they feel a lot. These don't make good films. Too much of it gets lost.
Of course, films where characters run around a lot, and squirt blood out of themselves and fall over, these make bad books. Or possibly don't make books at all.
'One day', and here is the quote, is one of the best books I've read about modern relationships among children of the seventies and eighties. (Not actually that modern, these days).
The characterisation is pitch perfect. The dialogue is nailed on. The characters, again, are so realistic that you can imagine them, perfectly, sitting with you and your friends in a pub on a Sunday afternoon.
Dex is possibly less sympathetic than Em, generally, though they both have their moments. But that doesn't matter, they can't both be completely sympathetic, they wouldn't be as completely real as they are.
One of the bestsellers of recent years, I'm sure you know how the novel works. It tells the story of every July 27th for twenty years, in the life of Emma and Dexter. It's about life, and friendship, and growing up. If you're one of the few people who hasn't read it, get a move one. It's brilliant.
But don't see the film. Don't even watch the clip. It'll force the ideas and images of strangers - directors and cameramen onto you, hijacking your chance to invent characters faces and clothes, or the way they move.
To be honest, there are some things you can do nothing about. I knew Anne Hathaway played Em before I read the book. I couldn't help myself, I gave Em Anne Hathway's face.
Fortunately that's not a bad thing. I can live with imagining Anne Hathaway's face while reading a book, but my recommendation is that you leave it at that.
Anne Hathaway's face and no more.

FREE E-book.

Very exciting news. I've just published the first half of my YA novel, Song to Wake to on Smashwords. Check it out, download it in a dozen different formats, tell me what you think.
It's HERE.
Enjoy!
The full thing should be available in a month or so, once this bit has been on Barnes and Noble and Amazon for a while.

Please Help...

Hopefully, probably, in previous visits you'll have done my little 1 minute survey. If not, please, please do it now. There's ONE QUESTION... Do it, and you'll help decide what a book will look like...

Lord of the Rings, Vampires, Whales and the Azores

Vampires, aliens, elves, robots, borrowers, timelords, supermen, werewolves, hobbits, angels. I'll stop there but the list could go on and on. Why do so many books and films hinge on the idea of people meeting, communicating, interacting, and fighting with other, intelligent species?

From the very first fairy stories I read, with wolves and witches, to my obsession with the Lord of the Rings, they seem to have been in more of my books than not. My personal favourites are probably the elves in the Lord of the Rings, and in the wider mythology that Tolkien created. Cross-species romance is incredibly popular at the moment. It doubles the drama of a regular relationship, without limiting the amazing attractiveness of everyone concerned. Mostly the drama is 'I really want my boyfriend to bite me, so I live forever as well.' Tolkien's version was gentler, though. In his stories of elves and men that loved one another, the elves choose mortality, and their family are always stricken. This tragedy was memorably played out by Liv Tyler in the movies. You can see a little bit of it HERE.

It seems like we're desperate for somebody else to talk to. It's almost as if we're bored with people, all the same old problems and abilities. And what problems the other might have... They shine in the sun, they're two feet tall, they're practically slaves. As for their abilities, I think everything, ever, imaginable has been covered.

People who've been reading will know what I'm going to say.

We don't need to make them up. They all ready exist. Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you...



...the cachalot, or sperm whale. Biggest brain in the world, largest carnivore to ever exist, it hunts for giant squid with sonar. It's clicks mean it can see in 3D, in the dark. It explores a black, empty world, far from the surface, where we can't go.
It's quite possible they're incredibly intelligent. We don't really know, we know very little about them. One scientist said sitting in boats and trying to understand whales from what we see is like sitting underwater in a drinking hole and trying to understand elephants from their feet and trunks splashing about. Far from falling in love with them, our main interaction with them has been to slaughter them in gigantic numbers and melt down their fat to oil our watches.
Yet they survive. The best place to see these amazing animals is the Azores, in the Atlantic, off Portugal. I went there, to Horta on Faial island. It's a small harbour town, like something out of Pirates of the Caribean, with the most beautiful view, I think, in the world.

The island of Pico across the straits. I went out in a whale watching boat, saw Sei whales and millions of amazing dolphins, but no cachalots. I was disappointed, but not too much because it means I have to go back. In the meantime, of course, I'll read books about vampires and watch films about the apes that did for mankind. Kinds sorta the same thing. Maybe.

Look up! Is that a Floating Island?

It's been a while since I took part in a blog hop, but I like the question for this one. What book titles stick in your mind?
My answer would have to be The Floating Islands by Rachel Neumeier, though I was probably also affected by the awesome cover...

I came back to it a couple of weeks ago, when an amazing thing happened: Fiction became reality when an artist created an ACTUAL FLOATING ISLAND, which looked completely amazing, and then was released and disappeared, last thought to be somewhere over the Czech Republic....

That's my title story, but there are others on each of the blogs taking part in the Crazy for Books Blog Hop. Please check them out. Also, if you're flying, keep an eye out the window, you never know what you might zoom past... But before you go anywhere... PLEASE CAST YOUR VOTE...