Tara Maya's Tales

I'm excited to join five other amazing fantasy authors in a new collection, Faery Worlds . For the rest of the week I'll be featuring the other novels you can find in this ebook full of magic, love and fae. Alexia Purdy's Ever Shade (A Dark Faerie Tale #1) A dark twist on faeries. For Shade, a chance meeting with a powerful Teleen Faery warrior who wields electrical currents and blue fires along his skin, has her joining him on a treacherous mission for the good Seelie Faerie Court across the land of Faerie. Magic and malice abound and nothing is what it appears to be. "A fantastic read, full of magic and greed, love and loss, and stories to unfold. I highly recommend this to all lovers of the magical world of Fae." -- Review for Ever Shade, Anne Nelson, Angel Anne Reviews Prologue ONE LONG PAUSE and the man pondered the choice he had just made. The faery exile, Verenis, watched the woman and her new husband as they laughed and chatted away insi...

I'm excited to join five other amazing fantasy authors in a new collection, Faery Worlds . For the rest of the week I'll be featuring the other novels you can find in this ebook full of magic, love and fae. Jenna Elizabeth Johnson's Faelorehn Meghan has been strange her entire life: her eyes change color and she sees and hears things no one else can. When the visions get worse, she is convinced she has finally gone crazy. That is, until the mysterious Cade shows up with an explanation of his own. "The use of Celtic mythology is refreshing... Ms. Johnson uses her knowledge to weave a beautiful story of love, friendship, and legend. The atmosphere that the author created was eerie and haunting and the creatures were truly disturbing. The ending left me breathless!" - Review for Faelorehn, Krista Loya, Breathe in Books Chapter One: Memories The only reason I knew that I was awake was because of the pale green glow of neon stars staring back at me from...

Legolas Teg the Urban Elf and Snape Damon have an intense confrontation in this fan fic Kindle Worlds story Amazon is rocking the publishing world once again with a brand new kind of publishing: legal fan fic. Okay, there have been licensed novels before... Star Trek novels, Star Wars novels, movie novelizations... but this is far more accessible. It's called Kindle Worlds . Right now, there are only about twelve Worlds available to write in. Some biggies, like Harry Potter and Twilight, are not on the list. A few are television worlds, a few are author's own worlds (such as Wool). However, before you break out dancing and toss your Snape and Legolas slash romance/adventure into the ring, there are a few things you need to know about publishing fan fiction with Amazon. 1. This is not self-publishing, as with KDP. Amazon's self-publishing platform, KDP, allows authors to keep all rights to their own works. Amazon takes a cut of the royalties as a distributo...

I'm excited to join five other amazing fantasy authors in a new collection, Faery Worlds . For the rest of the week I'll be featuring the other novels you can find in this ebook full of magic, love and fae. Anthea Sharp's Feyland: The Dark Realm Faeries. Computer games. When realms collide, a hero from the wrong side of the tracks and the rich girl he's afraid to love must risk everything to defeat the dangerous fey. What if a high-tech computer game was a gateway to the perilous Realm of Faerie... "Feyland: The Dark Realm is pure, delightful fantasy. I thoroughly enjoyed this engaging quest and romance. It blurred the lines between reality and gaming. I highly recommend Feyland to fans of fantasy, video games, quests and romances." - Review for Feyland, Kimba the Caffeinated Book Reviewer PROLOGUE Jennet faced the Dark Queen, her mage staff at the ready. Excitement fizzed through her blood like it was carbonated. This was it. She’d completed...

I'm excited to join five other amazing fantasy authors in a new collection, Faery Worlds . For the rest of the week I'll be featuring the other novels you can find in this ebook full of magic, love and fae. JL Bryan's Fairy Metal Thunder A teenage garage band steals instruments from the fairy world and begins enchanting crowds, but their shortcut to success soon turns them into enemies of the treacherous Queen Mab. "Fairy Metal Thunder has the same feel that the movie Labyrinth has, this wondrous fantasy world that you're desperate to have at least a small part of, even to the point of stealing." -- Review for Fairy Metal Thunder, Bending the Spine Chapter One After school, Jason rode his bicycle across town to Mitch's house for band practice, with his guitar case strapped to his back. His palms coated the handlebars with nervous sweat. He'd spent the whole day ignoring his teachers while he furiously scribbled lines of the new son...

I'm excited to join five other amazing fantasy authors in a new collection, Faery Worlds . For the rest of the week I'll be featuring the other novels you can find in this ebook full of magic, love and fae. Elle Casey's  War of the Fae: Book 1 (The Changelings) Jayne Sparks, a potty-mouthed, rebellious seventeen-year-old, and her best friend, shy and bookish Tony Green, have a typical high school existence – until, along with a group of runaway teens, they are hijacked and sent into a forest where nothing is as it seems. Who will emerge triumphant? And what will they be when they do? "A brilliantly original YA fantasy. This was an extremely fun, exciting, and original book. I couldn't put it down. The pacing and suspense in this book are perfect." -- Review for War of the Fae, Ally Arendt, Word Vagabond book blog Chapter One I can't take much more of this high school nonsense. I feel like I'm not supposed to be here. Where would I be ...

I'm honored to be a part of this new collection of novels about the fae! I hope you'll check it out and discover some new favorite series. A stunning collection of the first books in six fan-favorite series by bestselling, award-winning fantasy authors! Discover the many worlds of Faerie in these novels filled with adventure, love, and – of course – Fae Magic. Amazon       Amazon UK Barnes and Noble   Kobo   Apple   Smashwords Including... The Unfinished Song (Book 1): Initiate by Tara Maya Dindi can't do anything right, maybe because she spends more time dancing with pixies than doing her chores. Her clan hopes to marry her off and settle her down, but she dreams of becoming a Tavaedi, one of the powerful warrior-dancers whose secret magics are revealed only to those who pass a mysterious Test during the Initiation ceremony. The problem? No-one in Dindi's clan has ever passed the Test. Her grandmother died trying. But Dindi ha...

You've heard it before... the difference between an indie book which reads like a trad pubbed book and an indie book which reads like a vanity press heap of toad dung is all in how much effort you invest in doing the details. The biggest priority is to have a good editor. I've found that having a team of Beta Readers as a follow-up is even better. The next most important thing is to have a gorgeous cover which clearly communicates your book's genre and subgenre. Finally, there is the issue of internal formatting. I admit, I gave no thought to this for the first couple of years. I couldn't afford to hire help, and I wasn't able to do it myself. However, as eReaders have proliferated, screen quality has increased, and the tablet market has exploded, internally attractive books--with features like hyperlinked Tables of Contents--have become more important. My formatting is now done by "Tech Guy." (He charges $50 an hour, if you're in need of a ...

You may have noticed that Amazon is Beta Testing a new form of ranking, which ranks the author, rather than the individual book. The logic, I presume, is that individual books may be relatively unimpressive in ranking, but if the author has many of them, the author is still selling well overall. At least, I think that the reasoning. Here's what Amazon has to say about it: What is Amazon Author Rank? Amazon Author Rank is based on sales of all your books relative to the sales of other authors. Amazon Author Rank shows how an author's books sell relative to other authors. Like the Billboard charts, lower numbers are better. An author with the Amazon Author Rank of #1 in Mystery & Thrillers is the bestselling author in Mystery & Thrillers on Amazon. Amazon author rank is updated hourly. What's Included in Amazon Author Rank? It's the same approach we use with the book bestseller list we've had for many years - we look at paid sales of all of an...

How terrible that we have a larger choice of reading material than ever before in human history! The UK market is a year or two behind the US market in the shift to digital reading, though they are the second highest in the world, and UK ebook sales spiked 134% in 2012 to total £216 million . The impact of indie authors can be seen there too. Now, according to Bowker Market Research, an astonishing 20% of all genre sales go to indies: Self-published books accounted for more than 20% of crime, science fiction, romance and humour ebooks sold in the UK in 2012, according to newly released statistics. The figures, from Bowker Market Research, show that while self-published books made up a tiny proportion – 2% – of all books purchased last year, this figure increases dramatically, to 12%, when print books are removed from the equation. When just adult fiction and non-fiction ebooks are looked at, self-publishing's share increases to 14% of the market, and in the crime, scienc...

A guest post by Rayne Hall Several words close together starting with the same sound can either empower your writing or spoil it, so use this technique with thought. Here are some examples of skilfully applied alliterations from famous books: ...the foam-flakes flew over her bulwarks.... (Moby-Dick by Herman Melville) … the baked red ruts of the road.... (The Beaver Road by Dave Duncan) A sliver of soft sunlight pierced a crack in the silk drapes (Panic by Jeff Abbot) … tokens of the mitred, martyred St Thomas (Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin) ….the all-over tan, the tailored teeth... (How to Kill Your Husband and other Handy Household Hints by Kathy Lette) Fires were a common occurrence, leaving more and more buildings blackened and boarded, and discarded drug paraphernalia clogged garbage-filled gutters. ( Two for the Dough by Janet Evanovich) Alliteration is an effective technique for creating impact. If you want to emphasise a sentence, perhaps f...

I have three sons, who are six (almost seven), four (almost five) and three. Their usual conversations involve stories about dinosaurs and potty jokes. Yesterday, however, they startled me. The boys were fighting--hardly unusual--but when I went to break it up,  my middle son turned to me and said, "Mommy, I wish you'd never had [Youngest Son]. You did a bad thing, Mommy! Because now [Oldest Son] loves him and hates me!" I cuddled him and the other two boys crept near to hear what I would say. I was a little angry, I admit, because I knew exactly what had precipitated this outburst. I said to my oldest son, "Do you see how upset your brother is? This is because of the comments you've been making lately, saying one of your brothers is great and the other is a bad guy. That's not nice to either of your brothers. It turns them against each other, and that's not fair to them. Imagine how you would feel if someone else said those things about you....

Quebec is considering fixing book prices , joining nations like France, Sweden, Mexico, Argentina, Japan, South Korea, Germany, Switzerland, Israel, and Belgium. The hearings on fixed prices for new releases are a direct result of lobbying efforts by the One Price for Books campaign, launched on August 22 of last year. Organized by a roundtable of major book industry players and backed by several high-profile writers and artists.... For the past 15 years, the industry has been requesting that lawmakers fix book prices. The excuses given are the usual claptrap: (1) "to prevent operators of big-box stores from cannibalizing small bookstore sales with deep discounts" (2) "to stop the spate of bookstore closings" (3) because the "book industry is fragile" (4) "to protect its bibliodiversity" These are thin disguises for the real motivation of the campaign, which is to stop competition from new formats (digital) and new authors (indies a...

When I was about twelve, I remember having a conversation with my Dad about What I Was Going To Do With My Life. I said, "I'm going to be a writer." After he stopped laughing, he said, "Okay, now be serious. What are you going to do with your life?" He explained that only the most skilled of writers could actually make a living at it, and since I couldn't even spell (still true), obviously, that did not include me. So, if I wanted to make any money, I needed to be "realistic" and pick a more lucrative career. I then retorted, alone with every aspiring artist everywhere and everywhen, "Dad, I don't care about money. I just want to be happy!" :D A lot has changed since then. Dad has come around to my point of view. He decided that after a life-time of towing the line, he only wanted to be happy, so he changed gender and is now a woman, and also finally published his secret fantasy novel . Oh, the irony. But meanwhile, ...

Rumor has it that Barnes and Noble is planning to give up direct production of the Nook. Microsoft might take it over, or a breakaway child-company. The firesale on Nooks seems to lend credence to this rumor. The upside though is that you can get Nooks at incredible prices right now Wouldn't that make a great Father's Day Present for dad or hubby? Hehehe. My husband got his three days ago, a little early! (He is the nook fanatic, and I'm the kindle girl.) I also bought him Daddy's Little Princess ... sequel to the equally poignant yet side-splittingly hilarious Vader and Son .

--> S ulphurygen by * Shue13 In yesterday’s post , I discussed the pre-existent ideas about the future that a sf author should be aware of when world-building. In fact, if you think of these as a series of scales or levers, just answering these questions can toss up an interesting setting for a SF story. Questions: 1. Will artificial intelligence ever expand, change, or overtake human intelligence? 2. How might we travel Faster Than Light? 3. What would be the biggest challenges to establish colonies on other worlds? 4. Has life evolved more than once? Do aliens exist? If so, how might they interact with humanity? 5. How will genetic engineering change what it means to be human? 6. What social, political, and military changes will emerge in response to new technology and new discoveries? I’m going to talk about the decisions I made while building the STRAT universe, and explain them. 1. Artificial Intelligence STRAT is a story about artificial ...

Nickelay Lamm predicts we will have huge, lemur-like eyes in the far future.  Presumably this will be driven by sexual selection from millennia of watching Anime. I added the zebra stripes. Because, really, who doesn't love zebras? 5 Things To Remember About SF   1. Science Fiction can be about the past, the present, or the future. Short cut answers to the question, ‘what is sf?’ reach for topics typical to the genre: “SF is about the future,” or “SF is about space travel,” or “SF is about aliens.” Of course, SF doesn’t have to involve space travel or aliens, nor does it have to be set in the future. In fact, there is a whole sub-genre of SF that is set in the past: Alternate History. (One of my favorite sub-genres, in fact!) But whether it takes place in the past, the present, or the future, all science fiction deals with the question of how things change . In a SF story, the author is proposing a thesis about change: “If this happens, then that w...