a Rafflecopter giveaway
Showing posts with label Kindle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kindle. Show all posts
Thursday, May 19, 2016
Monday, August 10, 2015
In Praise of eBooks - Guest Post by @CarolABrowne #indieauthor
In
Praise of eBooks
Guest Post by Carol A. Browne
As a voracious book reader, I have lived my
life believing in the superiority of the printed book; then my beta-reader
kindly gave me her Kindle. Once I had figured out how to use it (three weeks
well spent), my perspective underwent a sea change.
When I bought my first eBook and saw it
download to my Kindle, it was a magical moment. I was also delighted to
discover the device doubles as a flash drive.
There’s something amazing about travelling
around with an entire library of books at your disposal and in these days of
multi-tasking, being able to read, eat and drink at the same time in total
comfort is most welcome. To someone like me on a low income, the availability
of cheap or free eBooks is a blessing too.
From an eco-friendly point of view, no trees
are cut down to make eBooks. Digital publishing also allows more authors to put
their work before the reading public, often publishing great work that
traditional publishers have rejected because they aren’t commercial enough.
I once assumed the device itself would be a
distraction but, if you’re an avid bookworm, the body of an e-reader is no more
of an intrusion than the body of a paperback; no more of a hindrance to your
enjoyment than a screen is when you are watching a good movie.
Many will disagree. A teenage friend of
mine prefers printed books because he likes the act of turning the pages. For
me, the Kindle’s page-turning function is quicker and easier. Plus, you can say
good-bye to the exasperation of having your bookmark fall out and not being
able to remember where you were up to.
Meanwhile, another friend of mine is
changing her opinion about eBooks. While moving to a smaller house, she
regretted her vast collection of paperbacks that would have to be accommodated
in less space—and then discovered many of them were mouldy and infested with
mites. Yuk. She’ll be buying her first Kindle soon!
There is still a place for printed books in
my home. I have about a dozen I will always cherish, but these books belong to
an exclusive club. It’s unlikely I’ll be adding new members.
Unless they’re written by me, of course.
Tuesday, May 26, 2015
#FallinLove with Fairytales Word Search Hop #Kindle #giveaway @DecadentBFT
Welcome to the Fall in Love with Fairytales blog tour!
If you would like to win an enormous grand prize consisting of a Kindle, gift certificates, and author swag, visit each day’s post(s) and follow Rafflecopter instructions for prize entries. For more information, please visit the Fall in Love with Fairytales main page.
My favorite school assignment ever was modernizing and retelling a fairy tale, so when Decadent put out the call for a retelling of a Grimm’s Fairy Tale, my hand immediately shot in the air. But then I got my fairy tale assignment, and my excitement wilted. The Three Army Surgeons. Huh? I’d never heard of it.
Not only was it obscure, it was also a little gruesome and definitely not a romance. Basically, there are three guys who cut out their eye, hand and heart. They put them on a tray and give them to an innkeeper, intending to put them back in their bodies the next day. Instead, the parts are taken, so a soldier replaces them with the eye of a cat, the hand of a thief and the heart of a pig. The new parts then make the guys act like a cat, a thief and a pig. The guys discover they’ve been tricked and return to confront the innkeeper who gives them some money to pacify them. (You can read the full original story here.)
My charge was to turn this story into a romance. Um, yeah. I couldn’t even figure out who the hero and heroine would be.
So I started with what I did know. Although I enjoy a good ménage romance, I don’t write them, so having the body-part-plucking guys as heroes was out. Same for paranormal stories, which meant I needed a way for these people to walk around with missing parts that would be believable in a contemporary setting without magic or special powers.
This framework led me to have the men run a prosthetics company, but I was still stumped on the romance angle. The only woman in the original story stood around wringing her hands while others found a solution. Then she ran away and never returned when things went bad. I needed an active heroine, someone with a purpose, someone a reader would want to root for.
After dumping the sexist assumption that a solider automatically had to be a man, I made the soldier’s character my heroine. I named her “Armina,” which means soldier. In case that was too subtle, her uncles (the guys with the missing body parts) affectionately refer to her as “Soldier.”
The other person who played a critical role in the story conflict is the innkeeper. He would fit nicely as the hero. After playing with words for a bit, I dubbed him Ian Keer. Now I needed to make him into hero material, and I needed to create a romance (and conflict) between the innkeeper and the soldier. This wasn’t part of the original fairy tale, so my challenge was to write it within the framework of the fairy tale retelling. Finally, I’d arrived at the fun story retelling I’d expected when I raised my hand for this assignment.
I went from “You have got to be kidding me” at the beginning of the initial brainstorming of The Three Army Surgeons fairy tale to “This is so much fun” as I wrote Once Upon a Marriage, part of the Red Book of Grown-Up Fairytales.
Tomorrow, please look for a post from Tara Quan.
:
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Fallen Angel Interview & April Fool's Fun
Fallen Angel Reviews has posted my lovely in-depth interview with them where I talk about A Man Worth Fighting For and my writing life. You can view the interview here.
Today is the last day to comment on the Romance at Random Luck O' the Irish blog hop. I'll be sending out copies of Penelope's Pleasures on Monday to everyone who commented.
April Fool's Fun: Today and tomorrow only, The Bravest Squirrel Ever is free on Amazon. Download your copy now. If you have a Kindle, you can download it instantly. If you don't have a Kindle, you can you can download the free Kindle app for your PC or phone.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)