K.Childs

So I get newsletters from instafreebie for romance,  mystery and fantasy novels every few days.  Most of the time the books don’t draw my attention. But I will almost always give any paranormal book a brief look-over because that is definitely ‘my thing.’ I like vampires, shapeshifters, anything supernatural or mythology based. This particular book is an ero romance, tick, with dragon shapeshifters, also tick. It has archaeologists discovering long lost civilizations, also a tick. With three of my boxes ticked, I got my paws on it. Okay, so the thing that was good in this book was the main character; she was a strong, self-assured woman who wasn't afraid of her own sexuality. I sort of forget that the shy naive, chaste virgin is the cliche until I read a story where the main character doesn't have these over-done hang-ups. This is a great idea and done right, done strongly, can really empower ladies. I've always figured this is kind of how m...

Today I am very fortunate to be interviewing M J Drakkon, author of Unwanted Slave, an epic fantasy novel, first of the Breaking Destiny trilogy. Please check it out and keep an eye out for her other work. https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B073TXPNQL Auric: As a writer, what was the defining moment for you when you were writing this novel? Good or bad? MJ: I suppose the easy answer would be to say “the end”, because that’s when it was officially my novel, or “when it released”, which is another hallmark. But for me, the defining moment was relatively unspectacular. I was about 18. I’d finished the very first draft of the very first version. I was gushing over it to my parents, and a friend of theirs insisted I print it out, sign it, and then purchased it from me. The gesture was only small, but he seemed so genuine about it, so excited to have the first copy of what he was sure was going to be a best seller. I still think back on that moment, the first moment I realised tha...

If you’ve seen any of my posts on twitter in which I talk or reference my muse, you may notice that I don’t ascribe to the delicate waif-like nymph who whispers ideas in my ear whilst giggling joyfully and frolicking through the treetops in a whimsical dance. Some people claim their writing muse is a sylph- light as air, creeping in to torment them for a brief wave of feathers and elusive promises before drifting off to the clouds. Others have little digger-gnome muses. These gentle beings pop up out of the ground, bark out an idea, remain fixedly glaring at you for a little while until it has stuck- but inevitably, like a whack-a-mole, dash before you can catch them and shake a solid grounding from their lips. The best muses, I always thought, had to be the naiad-types. You know the ones, you’re in the shower and suddenly the ideas just pour into your head; overfill your body with inspiration, ideas, and drench your creative works from head to toe. These...

Forward! For me, aggressive pitching doesn’t come naturally. I don’t think it does for most authors, what with our sensitivity and skittish natures, we’re used to hiding in houses or backs of coffee shops. Ours is a nature of observation and isolation. Querying and self-promoting throws all that out the window and thrusts us into a hunting mindset. Actual footage of an author closing on an agent I think this is why we struggle so much in this fiercely competitive hunt as a result. Agents are our prey in this analogy and a cunning hunter needs to learn to his craft in order to bring one home for dinner… I mean publishing. A hunter should have sharp teeth and claws (a good manuscript). If your claws have not been sharpened or you haven’t checked your fangs, (edited and prepared your work) you are going to struggle in this hunt. Without further ado, I’m going to share the five golden rules I’ve learned over the last few months of querying. 1.   ...

Right now, I'm avoiding writing my novel.  I have been for a few days for a myriad of reasons- I've been suffering a horrific toothache that I couldn't address because I had no money, I've been depressed with the holiday blues because I had to spend what little money I had on drugs (prescriptions) to stay sane, which has left me in a precarious position for the next two weeks financially. Unwell, unhappy, worried about other things, I've spent the last four days focusing on escaping into something I don't have to build. But now the tooth is gone, and while I'm on a liquid diet, I feel so much better. However, I'm still procrastinating. Sometimes we fall off the 'write every day' bandwagon. Some weeks it's just not the right mood, the right words aren't on the tip of your tongue, the right phase of the celestial alignment. The secret during these times, is that it never will be. Life is a messy affair; you have to carve your own mood...

Cassandra Palmer series by Karen Chance. So my usual preamble about any series review; I dislike the time-travel trope in most media.  It is usually full of plot holes, inconsistencies and often characters making dumb decisions that they justify poorly. I want to like it, but authors use time-travel as a lazy device and leave dozens of plot hooks and conundrums hanging about my head days later. I like Doctor Who, but you can drive buses through the holes in the time-travel episodes’ plot. Essentially, I want to like time-travel, however movies and books with great popularity but ill-conceived finishes have ruined it for me. The stories without plot-holes usually end up as ‘looped time’ bubbles that finish and end with either the whole thing becoming final and never repeatable, or self-contained and ceasing to have meaning. There’s only so many times you can finish a book and think ‘so none of it mattered? No one lived, no one learned anything, nothing chan...

Fangs in the blood It was 2004 and my sister got the sixth or seventh book in a series she was rather fond of. At the time I had been devouring just about anything with vampires in it- I was going through ‘that’ phase so many of us go through and the urban fantasy/paranormal scene was just starting to slowly slide out of the shadows it had been hiding in for years. I’d finished Tanya Huff’s Blood Ties trilogy and was eager for more of this gritty dark and sexy vampire thing that was still a fresh new taste to my reading palate. So my sister said, ‘you might like this’ and slid Guilty Pleasures by Laurel K Hamilton across to me. I was a slow, slow reader in those days; getting through a book took about a week. I gorged myself on Guilty Pleasures in about two days (which was a record for me). I stayed up until dawn the night I read Circus of the Damned (the third book) and I can tell you with total honesty, I have read the first nine novels of the series at least 6...