New release! “Never Hurt Me” by Shawn McGuire

I’m happy to be sharing the release of Author Shawn McGuire’s new book, “Never Hurt Me.” This is the third book in “The Wish Makers” series and sounds fantastic! If you haven’t read the other two books, make sure to check out the blurb and links. I’m going to be adding this one to my TBR list for sure!

Blurb:

Everyone has a wish. Desiree’s just got real.

For forty-five years, eternally-eighteen-year-old Desiree has been in a sort of limbo, granting wishes for others while never receiving her own. Now it’s her turn, and she’s finally going to get what she asked for so long ago: a second chance at life.

Once back in the real world, Desiree meets Dara, a girl who must beg for money in order to buy food. With nothing to give her and powerless to grant a wish for her, Desiree begins to wonder if she would have been better off staying where she was.

There’s one other thing Desiree hadn’t bargained for. Not being a genie means not being with Kaf. And that’s a huge problem because falling in love with her chauvinistic, exasperating, gorgeous boss was the last thing Desiree expected.

Buy Links:

Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Never-Hurt-Me-Wish-Makers/dp/0996103546/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1421984571&sr=8-2&keywords=shawn+mcguire

B&N:http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/never-hurt-me-shawn-mcguire/1120872327?ean=2940046443721

iTunes:https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/never-hurt-me/id948773551?mt=11

Excerpt:

I’d never gotten close to any of my charges. Not that I hadn’t cared about them, I had. It’s just that I was put on their life path to do a job, not to become attached to them. We were never meant to have long-lasting relationships. Then came Mandy and Crissy.

In a little more than three months, those girls had become a permanent part of my life path. I’d do anything for them. That’s why instinct took over when Crissy was being attacked. I hadn’t thought, I’d just reacted. The call afterward to appear before Kaf, my boss, didn’t surprise me. The fact that he’d waited so long did. Crissy’s wish had ended days ago. Maybe the delay was a timeout, of sorts, so I could think about what I’d done.

I found King Kaf at the very back of his cave seated on a throne. An actual one this time, made of gold and emerald instead of the cloud formation he usually perched upon. Very formal. That couldn’t be good. Orange and green smoke swirled behind him like an acid trip through a kaleidoscope. He had his big book, his compendium of wishes, out and opened to a specific page. One that had been bookmarked by a strip of tie-dyed fabric.

About the author:

Shawn McGuire is the author of young adult novels that blend contemporary settings and issues with a touch of fantasy and magic. She started writing after seeing the first Star Wars movie (that’s episode IV) as a kid. She couldn’t wait for the next movie to come out so wrote her own episodes. Sadly, those notebooks are long lost, but her desire to write is as strong now as it was then.

Her books deal with harder topics (dating violence, death of a sibling, divorce, substance abuse, runaways, etc.) because she believes it is important to talk about these things. Those kinds of topics can be hard to handle and a bit overwhelming, so she infuses a bit of humor in her work as well because she also believes that a sense of humor can help you get through just about anything.

Shawn lives in Colorado with her family where she loves to read, cook and bake, craft, decorate her house, and spend time hiking and camping in the spectacular Rocky Mountains.

Author links:

Website: http://www.Shawn-McGuire.com

Facebook: http://www.Facebook.com/ShawnMcGuireAuthor

Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/shawnmcguire1/

Twitter:  https://twitter.com/Shawn_McGuire

Catch up on the Wishmaker series with:

Book 1: Sticks and Stones

Book 2: Break My Bones

Interview with author Tiffany Flowers

Last month, author Tiffany Flowers joined in on the fun with several other authors for my “Ugly Christmas Sweater” contest. Today she joins me again for an interview to help promote the newest release in her Pieces Series, “Broken Pieces.” I admire Tiffany for her optimism, energy, and her message on the meaning of “true beauty” for women. After you enjoy the interview, you can find her social media and book links 🙂

1) Tiffany, the blurb for “Missing Pieces” sounds like an intriguing paranormal romance. For readers who are just discovering the series, tell me a little about it.

Neeko finds and takes Gabby to protect her. She ends of having feelings for him that she tries to fight. He has feelings for her but he can’t be with a human. They have everything working against them. Read and find out if they can make it as a couple.

2) Congratulations on the recent release of the second book in The Pieces Series, “Broken Pieces.” What direction do you see your writing going from here? Will you continue with The Pieces Series for a while or do you have another project planned?

I am starting a whole different series. One where all the books will be stand alone’s. It will be about Vampires.

3) I would love the chance for readers to get to know you a little better. We haven’t met in person, but from what I know about you, you’re a mother who, like myself, has to juggle the fine balance of motherhood and writing. Tell me a little bit about a typical day in your life. Where do you fit in the time to write?

Think about a hurricane hitting a house… well that’s my day to day with my three kids. I have to find quiet times to write. When they are all in bed or watching tv together. That’s why I can’t produce a book a month. I am a mother first and my kids will always come first.

4) Since we are also personal Facebook friends, I love to read your posts about building up your own self-esteem, and I love to read your outlook on life about the perception of beauty. I know you write for an “adult” audience, but for my younger followers who are faced with mixed messages of what beauty is from the media or for those women who are struggling to lose post-baby weight, what message would you give to them? **As a total side-note, I think you should consider writing a self-help book some day on this topic 😉 **

Find Beauty in yourself. Don’t let others tell you what’s beautiful and what’s not. Everyone has beauty, we just have to look in the mirror and find it. Never give up on making yourself healthy. Losing weight is not a goal you should have, but getting healthy is.

Quick questions for fun 🙂

5) Favorite cold weather hot beverage?

Cold- coke, but I am trying to not drink as many. Hot- anything with chocolate.

6) Favorite dessert?

Chocolate ice cream and a hot brownie covered in caramel

7) Top three favorite books? (I couldn’t make you pick just one, LOL)

1. Black Dagger Brotherhood (whole series)

2. Fifty shades (whole series)

3. Sexed into Submission by Julie Bailes

4. Harper Sloans Corp Security series

5. There are just to many lol

8) Favorite TV show?

Right now it would be The Walking Dead and Scorpion

9)Milk chocolate or Dark chocolate?

Milk, but really white is my favorite.

10) When you aren’t writing, what do you like to do for fun?

I love to read and play with my kids.

          

“Missing Pieces”

This is the first book in The Pieces Series and is approximately 50,000 words in length. Due to sexual content and violence, Missing Pieces is for mature audiences 18 years and older.

Gabby survives her ex-boyfriend’s brutal attack, only to be ripped away from her life by a complete stranger. She is thrown into the world of Immortals, where every nightmare out there exists and walks free. She can’t deny her attraction to this stranger, Neeko, but he must earn her trust before she will ever let him into her heart. Can she learn to love again? Will love be enough, or will everything come crashing down?

Neeko sees Gabby and immediately knows she is someone special. He makes a rash decision to kidnap her, because he can’t stop thinking about her. Now he must somehow prove to her that she is his mate and his soul’s other half. How can he have a human for a mate? Can he keep her safe from Demons? Or is he her biggest threat?

When the missing pieces fall into place to reveal all their secrets, will they stand together or apart?

Continue the series with “Broken Pieces.”

Missing Pieces:

http://www.amazon.com/Missing-Pieces-Book-1-ebook/dp/B00K6TBNQK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1420817494&sr=8-1&keywords=tiffany+flowers

Broken Pieces:

http://www.amazon.com/Broken-Pieces-Book-2-ebook/dp/B00ROC6B6Y/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1420819193&sr=8-1&keywords=broken+pieces+tiffany+flowers

Find out more about Tiffany and follow her on:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/authortiffanyflowers

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/Authortflowers

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7881911.Tiffany_Flowers?from_search=true

Guest post by author Ginger Scott

It is my absolute pleasure to share today’s guest post written by fellow Arizona author, Ginger Scott. I met Ginger at a recent author convention, Phoenix ARC, and we became quick friends. At the convention, I picked up her book “This is Falling” which sounds fabulous and is next on my to-be-read list. Now that I’ve read her guest post, which I invite you to enjoy below, I am even more anxious to read the series. Ginger’s writing offers “real” characters to Young Adult literature which is not only refreshing from the mundane, cookie-cutter sort of characters often found in books, but also very much needed in a world where teenagers are faced with exploding media filled with faces of unrealistically beautiful and perfect models and actors. My thanks goes out to Ginger Scott for providing today’s guest post. After the article you will find links to the books she mentions as well as her social media links so that you can continue to follow her.

My 2014 Writing Challenge – Shedding Light on Differences and Disabilities
Ginger Scott – New Adult Author of THIS IS FALLING and YOU AND EVERYTHING AFTER

I wrote a hero who can’t walk, and he quickly became my favorite character. Tyson Preeter, the main H in book 2 in my Falling Series (You And Everything After), is a paraplegic. But he is also so much more. He’s a character I have wanted to write for a long time—one that intimidated the hell out of me, and one I feared I wasn’t strong enough to be able to put into words.

Before I get into that, let me back up a little and give you the mini version of my method and the building blocks of my writing. Before I got the courage to share my fiction with the world, I spent years working in journalism, a career that also served as a mighty powerful boot camp when it comes to writing things that are real. I approach my novels with the same sense of reporting and fact gathering as I do my journalism, and writing characters that feel real, say things that seem natural, and sometimes a little ugly, is probably my biggest goal with everything I write.

My first series, Waiting on the Sidelines, was very real. Teen love is painful and sloppy and selfish and full of wrong choices. I wanted to make sure my Waiting series showed a good dose of it all. And when I finished it, I had this amazing feeling of pride for how true it was to the life of a teenager. Capturing that, and giving readers the ugly along with the happily ever after was scary.

Finishing the Waiting series also left me with a hunger to test myself, to see if I could reach for more of those real characters we find in life. This is when Ty’s character first popped into my head. I wasn’t sure where he’d fit, or what he’d be, but I started keeping some notes, started asking questions of a close friend with limited use of his legs and started thinking about the things I really noticed about
him. Perhaps most interesting was the fact that I rarely noticed his disability. Partly because I knew him, but also because of the way he made certain things seem effortless even though when I thought about it, I knew they weren’t.

In the meantime, I challenged myself with a different story—one that shed light on what it means to be different in another way, touching on a cause that is very near and dear to my heart.

Autism.

I’ve volunteered for an autism organization in Arizona for years. I have family and many close friends who are affected by a diagnosis of this disorder. Telling its story, and telling it accurately, was important to me. I started with what I knew—a meltdown. I’ve been through many, watched them play out for friends and colleagues, and I’ve heard the stories from those I’ve interviewed, stories that years later could still cause tears.

The end result was a book I published in June, HOW WE DEAL WITH GRAVITY. It’s a steamy love story, yes. But it’s also a glimpse into the life of a single parent of a child with autism. I’m tremendously proud of it, and it helped me prove to myself that I could write a story about something delicate.

Ty…he was delicate. This character growing in a notebook of mine needed a home. He needed a brother. And when I got the idea for THIS IS FALLING, I found where he fit. Tyson Preeter is first a side character in the Falling Series book 1. He’s arrogant, obnoxiously charming, witty, older, smart and sexy. Oh, and he can’t walk.

I wasn’t convinced that THIS IS FALLING would be a series until somewhere around the thirty percent mark. And book 2 is entirely Tyson’s fault. I got to explore him in pieces; showing hints of who he was, how he was more than a disability—how he challenged the very idea of being disabled. And then I realized something, I loved this guy he was becoming on the pages, and the fact that he
couldn’t walk…well, that was just something written in his character.

Writing him—a story focused on him—that still scared me. But the more of FALLING that I got under my belt, the more I got inside Ty’s head, the more I wanted to be there. I began to believe that I could do his character justice, and tell the story of someone with a disability in a dignified way.

Oh, it still scared me, but the challenge excited me even more. This is about the time I decided Ty’s love interest, Cass, would have multiple sclerosis. And unlike Ty, she wouldn’t be so bold in the face of her obstacles. She would challenge them, but silently, and her disease would give her pause at times.

This is where I get back to my promise to always write things that feel real. I tapped a good friend who has grown up with the same type of MS Cass has, and I learned about episodes, what causes them, steroid infusions, risk factors, fears and the truth of life with MS as a teenager.

And then I put these two characters together and waited to watch their sparks fly. And fly they did.

I think more than any couple I’ve written, Ty and Cass just fit. They are strength for one another’s weaknesses, and they are a celebration of what it means to be different. They were my biggest creative leap, one I’m so grateful to have made. And one I want to make again.

Tyson Preeter is my favorite character of mine, and he raised the bar—just like the beautiful, sexy, arrogant bastard he is.

** Ginger Scott writes young and new adult romance. She lives in Peoria, Arizona with her husband and son. Her books include Waiting on the Sidelines, Going Long, Blindness, How We Deal With Gravity, This Is Falling and You And Everything After.

She is working on a new standalone YA romance, Wild Reckless, which will release early this spring, as well as the final book in the Falling Series, The Girl I Was Before.

You can find her at http://www.littlemisswrite.com as well as @TheGingerScott on Twitter

and https://www.facebook.com/GingerScottAuthor on Facebook. She loves talking to readers, and feels weird writing about herself as if she isn’t the one writing this bio.

“This is Falling” http://www.amazon.com/This-Falling-1-Ginger-Scott/dp/1500677671/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1420515602&sr=8-1&keywords=this+is+falling

“How We Deal With Gravity” http://www.amazon.com/How-Deal-Gravity-Ginger-Scott/dp/0692238549/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420515725&sr=1-1&keywords=how+we+deal+with+gravity