Flawed Release Day!

It's here! Today is release day for Flawed, the sensual tale of a princess in dire need of a bit of help and the two shadow elves who fall head over heels for her.

Elves and magic and betrayal and hot, burn-up-the-sheets love - this novella has them all. This is a fantasy for adults, a love story for everyone who ever felt the weight of the world rested in the throw of a d20.

I hope you enjoy the story of Emilia, Rorek, and Jo'el.

Here's a snippet from the opening scene -

Attempting to calm herself from the ugly scene she had fled, she rolled her flushed face against the coolness of the wood. First one side, then the other, before she let the warming surface press against the useless dark rock that rested in her forehead. There was a distant sensation of pressure where the stone met her flesh, an unwanted reminder of her most obvious shortcoming. The stone that should have been a source of great magical power was nothing more than a daily reminder that she was, indeed, as flawed as a princess could be.

A low moan from the room behind her jerked her from her thoughts. Spinning around to find the source, Emilia stared openmouthed in surprise at the scene before her.

Gods alive.

Firelight cast a dim light over a couple near the fireplace. A large male body reclined across the brocade cushions of a finely carved settee, one long leg propped against the back of the small sofa and one braced on the floor. His thighs were spread wide, giving her a clear view of the naked muscled chest that rose from a slender waist. A cream-colored shirt of the finest shadowsilk was unbuttoned across his skin, framing the sculpted muscles and smooth ebony skin in light.

His head was thrown back in abandoned pleasure, allowing shadows to flicker across the planes of his face. A rising flame threw him into light, and then his features were cast again into the shadows. Through the haze of shock she felt a stab of recognition. Rorek Northmark, Lord Magician of Darkknell, the visiting ambassador and blood cousin to King Torek of the Shadow Elf, was sprawled in lusty abandon as she had never seen him before.

I'm giving away a copy of Flawed - this one is open to anyone who comments here or on my blog between now and midnight, July 2nd.

Happy reading!

A Flawed Contest

The hotter it gets outside, the more I want to retreat into my cave. Lock out the world, tuck my legs under me, and type away the hours.

Unfortunately, there is no door on my cave. The real world intrudes often. Usually in the form of a sweetly pleading six year old (six for now - my baby will be seven next week!) or the hubby, who will sprawl on the couch and ask if I'm busy. No dear, never to busy for you.

But they've given me enough quiet time to keep my sanity. That's good enough for me.

I don't have a lot of travel ahead of me this summer. I won't be able to make the trip to DC for the RWA conference in July, and even the family trips to North Carolina and Kentucky that I had considered during the spring never came together. Too many things on my calendar, and not enough free time to string together travel days. A weekend getaway with the kids to Orlando and a short trip up to Alabama looks like it will have to be enough to keep my traveling feet satisfied for this year. But as long as I've got my family, my keyboard, and a book release to look forward to, it's all good to me.
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Flawed releases next week! Only 7 days until my sexy elves are turned loose on the world. I think the warning that comes with this book says it all :

Warning, this title contains the following: explicit sex (including m/m and m/f/m), naughty language, some magical sex along with sexual magic, a desperate princess and the men who love her, elves and spells and betrayal oh my! and enough heat to start small fires. Cold drink recommended.

So I've got a question for you. Do you like contests? How about really, really easy ones? I've got a copy of Flawed to give away, and it doesn't even require jumping through flaming hoops to enter.


Really, they don't get much easier than this. Drop me an email at ember @ embercase . com [remove the spaces] before Midnight EST on June 29th. Put the word Flawed in the title, and I'll enter you into a drawing for an ebook copy of Flawed. One entry per, please.

Killing off Mom

Mother’s Day was this past Sunday - Happy (belated) Mothers Day, to all the moms!

Instead of writing this morning, I started to think about mothers in the books I write. I was chagrined to realize there aren’t any.

In Hunting the Huntress, my first release, the heroine’s mother was not in the book. In my next release, Flawed, coming out June 30th (shameless plug) the mother is dead, and the father has remarried to a pretty horrible woman.

In the Christmas novella I just finished, the heroine is an orphan. Sorry Dad, looks like you got to die this time too. She spent several years in the foster care system, so may have had some decent mother figures, but if she did they didn’t make it onto the page.

My current work in progress? You probably saw this coming – the mother is dead. She died before the first page, and rather painfully. It may have made her death a bit easier to know her daughter tried desperately to save her life.

Even in the first book I ever finished, the wretched space opera I’ve since re-titled Cliche on Planet Nine, the mother was dead.

So what does this all say about me, and my mother? Nothing at all, I hope! My mother is a remarkable woman, who I love very much. I think we have a pretty normal mother-daughter relationship. She has supported me in pretty much everything I’ve ever done. I can’t remember that she has even once tried to tell me to play it safe, even though I know some of my ideas and efforts must have made her clench her teeth as she looked the other way.

And she always, always encouraged me to go for my dreams. Her quiet support gave me the confidence I needed to take chances and try things even when the odds were long for success. Things like writing.

So why have I killed off all the mothers in my books? It wasn’t ever a conscious decision. In three years of writing I never thought about it until this morning. As a writer I look for ways to give my characters hard times to learn from, tragedy to overcome, situations that force them to question everything they know and come out a better, stronger person. I guess maybe it speaks to some dark, hidden corner of my mind that I think losing a mother would be one of the hardest losses to face, and not one I want to even think about in my own real life journey.

So to all the moms I have killed of in writing, I am sorry. I’ll have to find a new source of pain to inflict on my heroines, since I sure don’t want to become predictable. And the next mother I write? I’ll try to make sure she is every bit as wonderful , loving, and alive as my own.

Growing up with Fantasy

I grew up with Fantasy. Even before I read my first romance (thank you Louisville Public Library for not stifling the curiousity of a 12 year old when she first found the clench cover) I had fallen in love with Anne McCaffrey, Piers Anthony and Tolkein.

Anne McCaffrey had the most wonderful dragon stories, and opened a world to me I never knew existed. When I first laid eyes on "The White Dragon", I was a goner. I quickly searched out Dragonsong and Dragonsinger, and went looking for more tales of fantasy.

 

I'm not sure how I got from McCaffrey to Anthony, but when I read Piers Anthony's tales of Xanth they took my breath away. I spent many long hours happily lost in a very non-Mundane world.

Less than a year later I finally moved on to Tolkein. I thought myself more than a little in love with Frodo, and dreamed great dreams of going on his adventures. Before we had Orlando Bloom in pointy ears and tights, Frodo was my hero.

It was pretty soon after that I found those clench covers on the library racks. For a while, my love for fantasy was forgotten, and I moved on to more romantic reading. Through middle school and most of high school, I was very happy with my romance novels and "required" literature reading.

Then one day at Books-A-Million during my junior year of high school, I came across this :

I still remember standing there in the bookstore reading the first two chapters.  Buying it, then racing home and staying up until late into the night reading about Tanis and Sturm, Caramon and Raistlin.  It was love from first sight, and the Dragonlance Chronicles became some of my favorite reads as I left high school and went to college.

I’ve read a lot of good fantasy, and more than a little great fantasy, in the years since.  But these 4 series have been some of my most passionate book loves for many years now.  Even today I can reread them and be amazed by the stories these authors could weave, the worlds they could bring to vibrant, captivating life

Every book we love should leave a bit of itself behind after you close the cover.  So it isn’t surprising that I’ve written my first fantasy.  And if you’ve read my previous Samhain release, you won’t be shocked to find that my fantasy world is a bit more sensual – ok, much much more sensual – than the worlds of the authors I read as a preteen and teen. 

Do you still reread the books that you loved when all books were new to you?  And how did they shape the books you love today?

Look for Flawed, by Ember Case, coming June 30th from Samhain Publishing

Flaws

Flaws.  We all have them. 

David Beckham, oh god of Armani underwear,

 

has a thing for skinny blonds with boy haircuts.  Nora Roberts head hops like a Mexican Jumping Bean (although since I still adore her books, is this a flaw or just her style?)  I fuss at my kids if they bother me when I’m trying to work - and man, will seeing Coraline ever give you a complex about that.

But there are flaws, and then there are Flaws.  The heroine of my new book Flawed – coming this summer from Samhain Publishing  – has some pretty serious ones of the capital Flaw flavor.

She’s a princess and heir to the kingdom; life should be pretty good, wouldn’t you think?  But happenings in her world of Elfish magic and court treachery has her backed into a pretty tight corner.  Her magic?  Nonexistent.  Her birthright?  Seems to have deserted her.  And even David Beckham up there wouldn’t be doing anything for her – she’s got a serious problem when it comes to sex.

I think I’ll take my short temper over her set of problems.

Have you got any flaws you want to admit to?  Or maybe, as gamers are often sarcastically saying, they aren’t really flaws, they’re features! 

Ember Case ~ Come Twitter with me