Bella Street Romance Goes Retro

One fun thing about being a writer is guest posting or being featured on other blogs. It's a great way to meet like-minded, awesome-in-general people, who have the coolest blogs. And for readers, it's a fun way to win books! A month long event is at the brand new Authors of Main Street blog , featuring authors of indie fiction in several genres. We're doing a promotion for commenters to have a chance win a $100 Amazon gift card, and all the authors are giving away copies of their books. Ends April 30th so chop chop!  I'm also on a couple of blogs today, talking about romance, pixies, and Kiss Me, I'm Irish . Persephone's Winged Reviews and Sweet Not Spicy . Swing by for a howdy (click on the images) and leave a comment for a chance to win a fun, free book. Then peruse the rest of their sites to learn about other books and authors you might like. It's blogtastic!

" Lost in Austen is an ingenious reinvention of the classic novel, Pride and Prejudice, in which Jane Austen’s story is thrown off track by a very modern heroine, Amanda Price ( Jemima Rooper ). Amanda swaps places with Elizabeth Bennet ( Gemma Arterton ) and takes centre stage in the celebrated love story. Disillusioned with her life in London and disenchanted with her boyfriend, Amanda Price discovers Elizabeth Bennet in her bathroom. Soon she finds herself swapping places with Lizzie, and entering the ‘real’ fictional world of Pride and Prejudice . Amanda arrives at Longbourn, the home of the Bennet family, and realises she’s joined the action at the very start of the story, she gets to know the remaining Bennet sisters, and prepares to meet Mr Darcy ( Elliot Cowan ). How will she keep the greatest love story of all time on track when Elizabeth Bennet is stuck in the modern world? " I watched this show with absolute delight and it kept me guessing until th...

Ford Madox Ford famously said, “Open the book to page ninety-nine, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.” Now there's a website devoted to it . As a writer, you can upload published or unpublished page 99s of your work. Or as a reader you can go read the page 99s and vote/comment. You don't get to see who wrote it until after you vote. It's a lot of fun. Here's what I posted from my romance entitled Kiss Me, I'm Irish . “There's a park nearby,” Tinker said. “Let's go sit on a bench and chillax before going back to our stuffy motel room.” Liam glanced down at Emily and thought that might be a good idea. Emily kept her face averted as they walked the short distanced to a playground loaded with screaming kids. He noticed her occasionally wiping her eyes and felt his anger return. Was this just an act to make him feel like a monster? Damn, he needed a cigarette. Maybe nicotine would help him think straight if common sense didn't. ...

The first pages of Halo by Alexandra Adornetto are telling. There's a quote by Shakespeare, followed by one from Beyonce and throughout the book the reader is treated to the old and the new, the heavenly and the physical, the sacred and the worldly. I've been going through a spate of YA reads lately and Halo ended up on my radar, probably by an Amazon suggestion, and I enjoyed it to the last page. It's refreshing to see purity--not just sexual-- presented in a positive light in a book. While the premise of Halo wasn't all that original, the author ( an 18 year old! ) put a fresh spin on it that resonated with all the angst of teen love. And after the grim, dystopian world of Katniss Everdeen , I was ready for some Bethany Rose Church.