Outpost Three is still standing… barely. But the deadliest threat it has ever faced is on its way– a violent force that will annihilate every man, woman, and child. With the Sentries under his control and Grey’s army defeated, Matt is more powerful than ever. Eden is little more than his prisoner, but that line is blurring as her affection for him grows. Now, as the Outpost faces total destruction, Matt must sacrifice the possibility of attaining Eden’s love in the vague hope that her past might hold the key to saving them all. Eden’s journey will begin to unravel the mysteries of her previous life, reveal dangerous new questions, and change not only the future of Outpost Three, but shape the course of history. This eagerly anticipated sequel to Kate Wrath’s E begins an epic quest into the dark, dystopian landscape of Eden’s world.

Breaking News...Sort of...

So, I am very pleased to announce that Blood Calling is going to be hitting the virtual shelves very soon.

You see, I thought about it, and decided that what better time to release a book about vampires than Halloween!

So Blood Calling will be available to purchase on the 31st October 2015!

To help celebrate Chasing Freedom will be on sale at .99c or 99p from the 30th October! So you will be able to buy both books for less than $2.00/£2.00!

For those who are still waiting for the sequel to The Last Knight - it is coming, I promise. Hopefully by the end of the year!

Unfortunately, this year has been a challenging, and busy one, and my writing has suffered for it. Slowly climbing back on top of the ever growing mound of 'things-to-do' however.

Also, look out on Wednesday for the cover reveal of the sequel to one of my favourite books of the year!

Escaping - Just for a little while

So this year so far has been a tough one. There can be no denying that. I still have my moments when I think I'm going to wake up and find out it's all been some really horrible dream.

When I think that yesterday was 7 months since Dad left us so suddenly, it shakes me to the core. How can life have just kept going on as usual for so long when he's not here any longer? But I have to confess that the good moments are slowly starting to outweigh the bad. And the bad moments are often touched by a kind of happiness.

This last week I've been escaping from everything. Myself and the other half took a camping trip up to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (which is quite possibly one of the most beautiful places I've been). We found ourselves in a beautiful campground, miles from anything, with no internet and no phones. It was a kind of heaven.

 

But when he disappeared off to get firewood from a little store down the road I had one of the bad moments. Camping was and still is something I associate with Dad. He loved to camp. He was a Scout leader for many years and there were a number of Scout camps he took us kids along on.

 

So sitting there in that stunning campground, with only really the sounds of the wind in the trees and the river running along the back of our site, I couldn't help but think of Dad. I couldn't help but think that I was in a place he would have loved, doing something he would have loved, and I wouldn't get to tell him about it. I wouldn't get to send him pictures of the tent, and tell him how it ended up being way bigger than we expected and how we managed to put it up backwards. I could picture his reaction, he would have laughed and told me some funny story about some scout camp I could barely remember, or given me some tips for 'next time'.

 

But even though I was sad, and I cried a little, sitting there on my own under the trees, listening to the river, I was also smiling. Smiling as I thought about Dad, and his stories and how happy he would have been that I was out there camping at all.

 

It's getting easier to remember the good things, easier to deal with the sad parts. I know that it's never going to be easy, but it's getting better.

 

But this escape was more than just about Dad, and dealing with everything that goes with it. It was also a nice reminder that I can go without internet and phones if I need to. Something I have to admit I was starting to doubt. Neither of our phones work in the U.S.A, and internet was out of the question, so it was just us, no distractions. And it was heavenly.

 

 

 

Now, don't go thinking that I'm about to dump all my modern technology. I can do without it, and enjoyed being without it, for a while, but it also reminded me how much I rely on it. My family is scattered across the globe, as are my friends, and as much as that is by choice, it also means that the internet is the only thing that connects us. Even if it is just a 'like' on a picture on Facebook, it helps me feel as though my sister, my mother and my brother (along with all the rest) are still a little involved in my life, and me in theirs.

 

So have no fear, Facebook, I am not abandoning you just yet.

 

But escaping from technology, from people, from life itself, just for a little while, is probably the best thing I've done all year.

 

I highly recommend it.

A little something special

So, today is six months since my Dad passed away. It seems almost impossible that it's been that long.

 

I wanted to write a post today in his memory, but  I was struggling to know what to write. To be honest, I feel like I've already said what I can say.

 

Then I was thinking about one of the last conversations I had with my Dad face to face - and it was about The Last Knight. It hadn't been long published and I had been quietly shocked that Dad actually really liked it. Not just 'my daughter wrote it so I have to like it' but honestly, really liked it. According to Mum he read it cover to cover three times or more between it's release and when he passed away.

 

But I digress. In this conversation I asked him who his favourite character was (expecting him to say Lance, or Cara, or Wyn) and he surprised me by saying Percy. Who I have to admit is probably my favourite character too.

 

So just for you Dad, a little Percy scene that I wrote a while back and I never planned on seeing the light of day. It's just a bit of silly fun, but I hope everyone has as much fun reading it as I did writing it.

 

The foil crinkled in his hands as he turned it around. The bright colours on the front made it hard to imagine this was some kind of food. He turned it again and shook it. The contents rattled.

Percy glanced up at Merlin. “Are you sure this is food?”

“Yes, Percival,” Merlin sighed. “It’s food. They just – do things a little differently here.”

The bag popped slightly as he opened it and the smell of some kind of fried goodness rose up out of it. He breathed in. He glanced into the bag and found a pile of thin, crisp bits of what looked like fried potato. But why were they cut so thin? He sighed in disappointment. He wanted meat, and lots of it, slow roasted over an open fire pit, dripping in grease. He wanted vegetables, also swimming in grease, but big chunks of them that he could stab with his knife. Not these strange, thin little bits of nothing.

And he was hungry, damn it. Of course, according to Gwain and Lancelot, he was always hungry. It wasn’t true. He wasn’t hungry when he was sleeping, or fighting. Just – the rest of the time.

The bag was almost too small for his big hand as he reached in for one of the ‘crisps’. It did smell good, he couldn’t deny that.

Lancelot was laughing from across the table. “Just eat it already. It’s not going to change no matter how long you stare at it.”

Percy glowered at him. It was all right for Lancelot. He seemed to have fitted into this new world quite easily, but the whole place still felt strange to Percy. The clothes were stiff and uncomfortable. He missed his armour. He felt naked without his armour. And there was stone everywhere, the forests he loved were gone, swallowed up by cities that seemed impossibly big. As for the people, he found them hard to believe. Why, just a few moments ago he’d seen a man come into the room in front of a woman, and not hold the door open for her. Unfathomable. He’d considered challenging the man for the affront, but he didn’t think Gwain or Lancelot would approve. Besides, the man had looked so small and weak it wouldn’t have been a very fair fight.

He sighed and looked back down at the thin piece of potato in his hand. He wasn’t sure he liked this new world one little bit.

With a final sigh of resignation he shoved the ‘crisp’ into his mouth and crunched down. His eyes widened in surprise as flavour flooded across his tongue, salty and fatty. Damn, that was good!

He demolished the rest of the packet in a matter of seconds and reached for another, then a third.

He only stopped when he heard Lancelot and Gwain laughing at him. He shot them a dirty look. Let them laugh.

Maybe this new world wouldn’t be so bad after all…

24 Years Later

The 2^nd of August. What a strange day. My father ‘celebrated’ the 2^nd of August every year for the last 24. This will be the first year he doesn’t. As he’s no longer here to commemorate it, I suppose it’s down to me.

It always struck me as an odd day to celebrate when I was a child. Why on earth would my father want to celebrate the day? But now I’m older I think I understand. Dad wasn’t celebrating the day, he was celebrating the days, weeks and years that came after it. He was celebrating the fact that he lived through it.

For those in the know, who understand the significance of the date, you can skip this bit. But for those who don’t, allow me to explain.

In July of 1990 the Middle East was in a little bit of turmoil. Saddam Hussein had massed his troops along the Kuwaiti border, threating invasion. It was supposedly about territory, but really, it was about oil. The rest of the world didn’t pay too much attention. It’s sabre rattling, they said. He’ll never actually invade, they said. They were wrong of course.

Also in July 1990, I was on holiday in Cyprus.  We went away most summers. Kuwait could be unbearably hot those last few months of summer, and it is absolutely no fun being a kid and being stuck in the AC. And so my parents would take myself, Ian and Jo away on holiday. Cyprus wasn’t exactly cool, but it was a hell of a lot cooler than Kuwait. Dad could never stay the whole time though. He had a job to get back to. So towards the end of the holiday he would pack up his bag and say goodbye for the next few weeks. We didn’t think too much of it. After all, we’d be back in Kuwait soon enough, and we still had Mum.

Then came the 2^nd of August. It was the same as any other summer day. We played in the pool. We ate copious amounts of ice cream. My older brother and sister teased me. I told Mum on them and got them into trouble. Nothing unusual. But of course, we didn’t have a TV in the holiday home, we never listened to the radio. How could we know anything was wrong?

But in another part of the world, everything was wrong. Dad had woken to a confusing, half asleep phone call from his boss.

“Don’t come to work. Stay inside.”

My father was never a morning person, so I can well imagine him struggling to make sense of it. But of course, he asked the most important question.

“Why?”

And the answer. I have so many regrets since my father passed away, but one of the worst is that I never asked him more about these moments of his life. Like what really passed through his mind the moment he got the reply. Whether he was scared? Whether he thought about us? Or Mum?

The reply? “The Iraqi’s have invaded. They’ve already taken the city.”

Dad was officially in a country at war. And his family were a few thousand miles away, with no idea.

Eventually he got a phone call through. He finally reached Mum at the poolside bar where we used to spend our days. I’ll never forget. How can you? I was seven years old, I didn’t have a clue what was going on, I only knew that something was horribly, horribly wrong.

I could tell you the rest of the story, but this blog post would be the size of a novel. I will write it down one day, I’ve always said I would.

But I can give you the basics. I saw my father at the end of July. The next time I saw him was at the school gates, surrounded by sobbing parents and the media, over 4 months later. With the wildest, shaggiest beard and hair.

He’d been in hiding, living in fear of being caught by the Iraqi soldiers, for most of that, but he had eventually been found and arrested at gunpoint and shipped off to Bagdad to be a part of the human shield. But in between he had helped organise convoys out of the country to get women and children to safety. He had opened his home to other men in hiding like himself, where they hid in the AC ducts every time the soldiers came calling. He had opened his home to others too. He wrote a small ‘newspaper’ that was passed around hand to hand by those in hiding and the resistance.

He was, quite simply, what every girl believes her father to be. A hero. Not the crazy, action hero type. But simply a quiet, brave man, who did what he felt needed to be done.

So this year I’m going to celebrate the 2^nd of August too. Because he survived it. Because he was a brave and wonderful man. Because I got 24 more years with him, when there was a time we didn’t know if we’d ever see him again.

If only I had a Keo.

Miss you every day, Dad. Xxx

 

(A/N – The memories of a 7 year old child are not the most accurate…and you must allow for a little poetic licence)

Juggling...

I’ve decided that I should add a new title to my list of jobs.

Juggler.

It seems that no matter how many balls I have in the air, I always want to add a few more. And once they’re up in the air it’s almost impossible to set them down again.

The reason this has become an issue? Because I realised this morning that I currently have about 7 balls in the air.

Five of them are novels. One is the day job, and the other is my online presence/blogs etc. And none of them can afford to be dropped.

Oh I know what you’re probably thinking. I don’t need to work on five projects at the same time. The problem is that once I start it’s hard to stop – and I almost never have any control over when and how ideas come to me.

Let me give you a run down:

The Forever Queen – The sequel to The Last Knight that I feel like I’ve been working on forever that just seems to be taking longer than I’d like to get done. Clearly cannot drop this one as it’s the next book I really MUST get out.

Being Alpha – Book two of the West Haven series. Again, sequels are killer because (hopefully) you’ve got people waiting for them, and you don’t want to disappoint.

Blood Calling – West Haven Novella. This one is one of my guilty pleasures. It’s not essential that I write this book – it won’t change the rest of the series, but I love writing Maladict’s POV, and I love losing myself in 1800’s London where most of the book is set. I can’t put it down because it’s too much fun!

Untitled – Sci-fi, post-apocalyptic stand-alone novel. An idea that jumped into my head and wouldn’t let go. I’m not working on this full time – but I keep getting little ideas for it that I have to get down before I lose them.

The Perfect Knight – Pendragon series novella – Lance’s POV – basically, like Maladict’s book, this is one that is a guilty pleasure. I’m loving writing Lance’s back story and his first months in modern day before he meets Cara. It’s fun. And…it’s Lance…

So those are the books I’m working on – but add to that the day job (not too many hours, but still) and my online promotion and marketing and you’ve got a lot of balls and not enough hands or eyes to keep track of them all!

I am starting to understand why a lot of writers have Assistants. So if anyone out there fancies being a writer’s PA let me know. I can’t pay you – except perhaps in virtual cookies and early drafts of my books…

But for now I best get back to juggling.

Busy, Busy, Busy

This poor blog has been a little neglected recently I’m afraid. Just one of those things where life gets in the way. But I figure I can probably kill two birds with one stone – I can get a new post up on this blog, and fill you all in on the desperately exciting drama that is my life…or not!

The first, and probably foremost reason for the neglect of this blog is Rock the Book. What is Rock the Book? I hear you ask.

You see not too long ago I started chatting with these two lovely, delightful Indie authors online. They were much like me. Working hard to make themselves known in the Indie world. Struggling to balance writing with promotion and all that goes with it. We began to conceive of ways to spread the word more about Indie authors like ourselves. To show the world that there are great and brilliant Indie books out there. Rock the Book was born! Rock the Book is a blog dedicated to helping out other indie authors and spreading the word about great books we find (and our own of course! We’re not completely altruistic!).

It’s a brilliant blog that we are all really proud of, and we’re pleased that other people have started to join the team.

On the downside, it takes up a lot of time.

The second reason for the neglect of the blog is that last week myself and my other half moved house. We had a lovely little cottage on the tiny island we call home, but if I’m honest it was getting a little old and tired. It needed a lot of work doing to it, and as tenants we weren’t really going to put the time in. Plus on the downside despite being on a little Caribbean island it had no outside space. No porch or deck. We heard on the grapevine about a property that might be up for rent and went to take a look. And fell in love. This picture might help explain why…

My new 'office'!

 

It’s lovely inside too – but the porch is what makes it. Unfortunately moving always takes more time than you expect (though I think we are down to the last box to unpack now) and we encountered a few problems like no internet or phone line (no facebook for a week??? What??!!). Again, small island living meant it took a little while to get that sorted, but we’re now just about there!

All of that did mean however that I had almost no spare time for my blog, the few snatches of internet time I got were used up checking emails…and Facebook I’ll admit. I also had no time to write. I was too busy and surrounded by boxes – not exactly conducive to creativity.

But we’re all settled in now – so life can begin to get back to normal.

Having had a ‘week off’ I am now plunging back into the writing at full tilt, and have now added a fourth book to the list of projects I’m currently working on. But I am now just a few thousand words away from finishing my West Haven Series novella, a few thousand words away from finishing the Pendragon Series Book 2, and well started on Being Alpha the next book in the series after Chasing Freedom.  The fourth book I’m playing with is a sci-fi, post-apocalyptic end of the world type of thing. Fun!

So there is an update on my life. Less excitement and more work than I’d like, but life is good.

Don’t forget to check out Rock the Book – we feature some great books on there and you might find something new to read!