Title: The Iron King
Author: Julie Kagawa

We were born of the dreams and fears of mortals, and if we are remembered, even in some small way, we will always exist.

~

"What in Pan's privates is this?" the goblin chief snorted.

So there you have it: one line of magical beauty, and another of, uh, less beauty! (But it sure did make me laugh!)

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme hosted by MizB of Should be Reading. Follow the link for instructions!

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Last week on Teaser Tuesday I had just got GUARDIAN onto Goodreads and added it to a few listopia lists. Thank you to all of you for adding GUARDIAN to you to-read lists, and for voting on the listopia lists! GUARDIAN has reached:

#3 out of 65 in New Series (2012) (It actually got to #1 for a little bit! Thanks, guys!) 

#58 out of 199 in Indie Books - Paranormal Cover Love

#120 out of 270 in Amazing Covers of 2012

Six Sentence Sunday (4)

I always seem to be too late to officially add my name to the linky list for Six Sentence Sunday! Probably because I only ever think of it once it's already Sunday, and names are supposed to be added to the list before Sunday...

Ah, well. No worries!

   I snap the book shut and look up to see Nate standing in the doorway. He pulls the door closed behind him and walks over to the bed. “You know, normal people would use the front door,” he says. 
   “Normal people wouldn’t even be able to see that I’m here,” I tell him. Nate pushes the textbook out of the way and climbs onto the bed. “I guess neither of us is normal then.”






This picture has nothing to do with these six sentences. 
I just picked it 'cos I needed a picture... and it looked 
interesting... and I couldn't think of anything else.

Elana Johnson's Book Covers Get A Makeover!

Elana Johnson's POSSESSION series just got a makeover! What do you guys think? Are you feeling the cover love? I think... pretty, pretty!! I mean, I love the pearly white (autographed!) version I have, but I must say, I've always been a fan of colour, so I'm in favour of the blues (not those kinda blues) :-) I like the new typeface as well. It's very... clean and modern-looking, nothing pretentious or showy about it. 

And the bird in the jar! Awesome! Though if I had to compare the two, I still think the butterfly wins. I mean, it's trapped in an ICE-BLOCK! How freaking cool is that?! (Like, literally, icey-cool...) <--- Sorry, terrible pun. It actually wasn't intentional!

I can't wait to read SURRENDER. POSSESSION finished on an AAAARGH-NO-are-you-SERIOUS-you-can't-do-that-to-your-characters kinda cliffhanger, and I'm super keen to find out what happens next!

Teaser Tuesday (19): Clockwork Prince

 
Title: Clockwork Prince
Author: Cassandra Clare

  "I promise to charm the dickens out of him," said Will, sitting up and readjusting his crushed hat. "I shall charm him with such force that when I am done, he will be left lying limply on the ground, trying to remember his own name."

  "The man's eighty-nine," muttered Jem. "He may well have that problem anyway."


I almost laughed out loud when I read those lines ;-)




Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme hosted by MizB of Should be Reading. Follow the link for instructions!

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GUARDIAN is now on Goodreads! And while I was having fun playing around on the Goodreads site, I added my darling baby to three lists:

Indie Books - Paranormal Cover Love (#108 out of 199)
Amazing Covers of 2012 (#162 out of 255)
New Series 2012 (#12 out of 45)

It would be awesome (read as: pleasepleaseplease!) if you could vote for one (or, you know, all!) of those lists! Especially the New Series 2012 one. Since it's short I have a good chance of actually getting somewhere on it!

I also have a countdown widget now. Pretty cool (and a little scary!) to see the time ticking away until GUARDIAN is officially available to all... If you're interested in adding the countdown widget to your sidebar, copy and past the following purple text into an HTML gadget under the Layout tab on your blog. Thank you!!

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://cdn.widgetserver.com/syndication/subscriber/InsertWidget.js"></script><script type="text/javascript">if (WIDGETBOX) WIDGETBOX.renderWidget('7644e9df-bec2-4159-b829-ff2d7b7d7361');</script>
<noscript>Get the <a href="http://www.widgetbox.com/i/7644e9df-bec2-4159-b829-ff2d7b7d7361">Countdown Creator Pro</a> widget and many other <a href="http://www.widgetbox.com/">great free widgets</a> at <a href="http://www.widgetbox.com">Widgetbox</a>! Not seeing a widget? (<a href="http://support.widgetbox.com/">More info</a>)</noscript>

The Impatient Writer

Does this ever happen to you?

You have this trilogy (or pick any number) planned out, and you're writing number 1, which is cool and interesting and stuff (at least you hope it is), but what you ACTUALLY want to be writing is number 3, because that's where things gets really juicy/heat up, and it has all the awesome scenes that were the first ones that popped into your head and gave you this whole idea, but you CAN'T write that now because 1 comes before 3 (yes, it does. I'm a maths teacher, I know this stuff) and so you need to finish 1 FIRST. And then 2, obviously, so it's seeming like a looooong time until you can get your hands on 3, and will the passion you once felt for 3 still be there when you finally get together?

I'm trying to deal with this at the mo... Just thought I'd share :-)

~ ~ ~

In other radically-more-exciting news...

I got the idea from Colene Murphy to check the search terms that lead to my blog and post about the most ridiculous ones. This week they were mostly boring-ish. The most entertaining one there is:

"how to make your school uniform look hot if your fat" ~ Okay, the your/you're mixup aside (which SUPREMELY ticks me off!!!), I'm thinking it's kinda hard to make a school uniform look hot regardless of what size you are. I mean, come on. It's SCHOOL! And shouldn't you be doing your HOMEWORK instead of Googling stuff like that? <-- sorry, that would be the teacher in me coming out...

To see some far more entertaining search terms (eg. "sweet boobs". Yes. For real.) visit Colene's blog.

Parcel in the Post: Switched & The Iron King

It's the end of my first week back at school and I'm already feeling close to having a nervous breakdown! (picture a headless flapping chicken trying to teach maths to teenagers and organise a book blog tour at the same time) 2012 is going to be an awesome year, but an awesomely PACKED year too. Busybusybusybusybusybusy!!!

Anyway, today I got those things in the post box that make me happy: those little slips of paper that tell me there's a parcel waiting to be collected! So off I went to fetch the two newest additions to my library.

SWITCHED by Amanda Hocking ~ Yeah, okay, I've been meaning to read this for quite some time, but when I saw the beautiful new covers, I knew I had to wait until I could get a paperback version of it!

THE IRON KING by Julie Kagawa ~ Isn't it awesome when you start reading a series and all the books in it are already published?! I've been seeing good things about this series for a while, but now that I'm writing my own faerie stories, I thought it was definitely about time I read these ones!

P.S. Thank you so much to everyone for your awesome cover love for GUARDIAN! Vi can't stop blushing ;-)

Cover Reveal for GUARDIAN, Creepy Hollow #1

[Note: this post may contain an excess of exclamation marks.]

Alrighty. Here it is!!!!

So... What do you think?! You're allowed to be honest ;-) Though if you want to say that you hate it, it might be nicer to keep that to yourself! I -- obviously -- am super excited about it!!

Yes, she's meant to have purple eyes and purple in her hair, which I think is super cool. I once died my hair "blackcurrent" (according to the box) but if I was really brave I'd go real purple, like Vi up there (though hers in natural. Yup, you heard me. Natural).

(Something I've never noticed until recently is that not all computer screens are made equal in terms of colour. Yeah, okay, so maybe that's obvious to some of you, I just never had a reason to think about it before! Anyway, on my one screen she looks awesomely brightly purple, and on my other she looks kinda meh-purple-blue :-( )

~ ~ ~

Summary for GUARDIAN:

1. Receive assignment.

2. Save a life.

3. Sleep.

4. Repeat.

Protecting humans from dangerous magical creatures is all in a day’s work for a faerie training to be a guardian. Seventeen-year-old Violet Fairdale knows this better than anyone—she’s about to become the best guardian the Guild has seen in years. That is, until one of her assignments—a human boy who shouldn’t even be able to see her—follows her into the fae realm. Now she’s broken Guild Law, a crime that could lead to her expulsion.

The last thing Vi wants to do is spend any more time with the boy who got her into this mess, but the Guild requires that she return Nate to his home and make him forget everything he’s discovered of the fae realm. Easy, right? But Nate and Vi are about to land themselves in even bigger trouble—and it’ll take all Vi’s training to get them out alive.

Watch the book trailer for the series.

The Curse of the Kindle

There are so many things that are awesome about the Kindle, and, to be honest, this "curse" I'm thinking of isn't actually a bad thing...

Here it is: It is so easy to buy ebooks that you will keep accumulating more and more, faster than the rate at which you can read, and you'll never get through your "to be read" list!

Yeah, okay, things could be worse. But it just bugs me that there are all these awesome stories waiting there for me and I haven't yet got to reading them!


Currently, this is the list of ebooks chilling on my Kindle that I've either started and not yet finished, or haven't even started yet:

Blood Faerie ~ India Drummond
Crime Stories ~ J.A. Konrath
Descended by Blood ~ Angeline Kace
Destined ~ Jessie Harrell
Hollowland ~ Amanda Hocking
Little Wild Flower ~ Samantha Jillian Bayarr
Megan's Way ~ Melissa Foster
Origin ~ J.A. Konrath
Ravenmarked ~ Amy Rose Davis
Saving Elizabeth ~ Amy Machelle
Shapeshifters Anonymous ~ J.A. Konrath
The Arrival ~ Nicola MacDonald
The Hating Game ~ Talli Roland

Okay, so the list doesn't look that long now that I write it out, but I do NOT read that fast, and I only get to read at the end of the day just before I fall asleep, and I WANT TO READ THEM ALL NOW!

Do you have this problem? Is your "to be read" list of ebooks on your Kindle/ereader like ten times longer than this and you're laughing at me right now?

~ ~ ~

P.S. Come back on Monday to see the cover reveal for GUARDIAN, the first book in the Creepy Hollow series!

And here's the book trailer if you haven't seen that yet.

A Book Trailer for Creepy Hollow!

Yay, yay, yay, a book trailer! Okay, so it doesn't have a whole cast of actors, in fact it's really quite simple (I had limited software, okay). But I like it that way :-)

It's a general trailer for the series as a whole, so it doesn't give any specific story detail. However, if you scroll down, you'll find a blurb for the first story in the series, GUARDIAN.

1. Receive assignment.

2. Save a life.

3. Sleep.

4. Repeat.

Protecting humans from dangerous magical creatures is all in a day’s work for a faerie training to be a guardian. Seventeen-year-old Violet Fairdale knows this better than anyone—she’s about to become the best guardian the Guild has seen in years. That is, until one of her assignments—a human boy who shouldn’t even be able to see her—follows her into the fae realm. Now she’s broken Guild Law, a crime that could lead to her expulsion.

The last thing Vi wants to do is spend any more time with the boy who got her into this mess, but the Guild requires that she return Nate to his home and make him forget everything he’s discovered of the fae realm. Easy, right? But Nate and Vi are about to land themselves in even bigger trouble—and it’ll take all Vi’s training to get them out alive.

Punctuation Help, Please!

Dearest writer bloggers,

I'd love to hear your expert (or not so expert!) opinion on whether I should put a capital letter after a colon, and whether I should put a comma before the word "too".

The Colon
So, it seems as though sometimes you put a capital letter after a colon, and sometimes you don't. The Online Oxford Dictionary has examples that all have small letters after the colon, but Wikipedia seems to think that this is generally the case with British English, whereas with American English, there is more likely to be a capital letter after a colon.
My gut feel is that if there's a whole new sentence coming after the colon, then I should capitalize it, but if it's just a list, or a sentence that wouldn't normally stand on its own, then I shouldn't capitalize.
What do you think of the following sentences?

#1) I hear Tora’s voice in my head: Bend your knees, arch your back, thrust your opponent right off.

#2) Their colors shift rapidly in protest, cycling through an endless palette: lavender—magenta—burgundy—sienna.

#3) And then I notice something else: a solitary figure standing on the other side of the ravine.

The comma before (or not?) the word "too"
I've read several English forums and it seems that, these days, with a comma or without a comma are both correct (though people seem to think that in more formal writing a comma should be used). I searched the word "too" on the Online Oxford Dictionary and found this sentence as two of their examples: is he coming too? and she is a grown woman, and a strong one too. So, no comma there...
I am more inclined not to put a comma before "too", because it feels to me as though it interrupts the flow of a sentence. So what do you think of the following examples? Would you include a comma?

#1) I toss my bow away and dive toward him too, knocking his sleeping form to the floor.

#2) ... and I look down. Nate looks down too. "Actually, I think..."

#3) Yes, they get scared too. Anyway, the really evil ones...

#4) I have to admit I'd like to know the answers to those questions too.

Thank you in advance for your comments!