Winner of Amanda Brice's e-book!

Congrats to Suzan Harden! Please email me directly at amandabrice (at) romancedivas (dot) com to claim your copy.

Read an E-book Week!

This week only, Smashwords.com is doing a special promotion to celebrate Read an E-book Week.  They are discounting selected ebooks 25%-100% off!  (Yes, FREE ebooks!)  The promotion runs from March 6-12, so hurry over!
Some ebooks from our Killers that will be discounted include:

SCANDAL SHEET
by Gemma Halliday
price: FREE!

TROUBLE IN MUDBUG
by Jana DeLeon
price: FREE!

I SHOT YOU BABE
by Leslie Langtry
price: FREE

Welcome Guest Blogger Robin Badillo!

Happy Saturday!

Let me introduce you to new RWA chapter mate Robin Badillo. She's one heck of smiling face and rumor is she's a heck of a writer.

So, take it away, Robin!

* * * * * *

A MUSE BY ANY OTHER NAME….IS STILL JUST AS AMUSING!!

If you have spent any time around writers in their own world, the ominous writing world that is, you’re sure to have heard mention of the ever elusive…muse.

These creatures come in different shapes and sizes and sometimes even with their own agenda… which of course, more often than not, they refuse to share with their master, or mistress, whichever the case may be. They can be ungrateful, sneaky little buggers, sometimes, too.

While blog hopping lately, I’ve noticed that a lot of people are experiencing severe cases of melancholy. I don’t know if it’s because half the country has been snowed in for weeks on end now, or if it’s the same little slump we always tend to fall into after the holidays have come and we’re anticipating the arrival of Spring. Where’s the Easter Bunny when we need him?

It doesn’t matter the cause. What is important is how the heck we get out of it.

This brought me back to the thought of a muse… yeah, that blasted thing again. See, I’m the type of person who needs inspiring for a lot of things, not just writing.

My kids need inspiration to do their homework or to clean their room which I fondly refer to as “devious threats of long drives through hell” (insert eerie pipe organ music here).

Actually, one may label it whatever they want because anything that creates motivation can be considered a muse, or at the very least a long distant cousin. Hey, I’m from the south, I have cousins everywhere.

The point is, we all need a muse and if yours just so happens to be Ian Somerhalder from Vampire Diaries, then you and I are about to become acquainted because I’ll know where the little devil keeps running off to when I need him.

NOTICE: This is my muse! I can substantiate that he is indeed MY property by the bright pink hand print on his left butt cheek, and yes, it can be legally verified through the FBI, CIA and Homeland Security!

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, YOUR need for a muse.

I’ve heard writers talk about visions of beautiful sunsets on the beach, snowcapped mountain peaks, or even taking an afternoon drive down a peaceful country road when the leaves are first turning orange and gold in the fall.

Music is also a great way to get those creative juices flowing. The type may depend on the nature of whatever it is your working on. If you’re an artist, you may prefer classical music. If you’re cleaning house, a little Huey Lewis and The News, from back in the day may get that vacuum cleaner gliding across the floor.

Some golden oldies may help you Splish-Splash while you’re taking a bath, or some George Strait may get you through that final push on cooking dinner. And some Luther Vandross may be just what you need to hit that high note while you and your significant other are… well…uhhh, washing the car. Nudge Nudge!! Nohtin’ beats a good waxin’ to make that chrome shine.

I suppose the main thing to remember is that it doesn’t matter what floats your boat as long as you stay above water. Don’t let yourself get bogged down with all the hustle and bustle and for goodness sake, learn how to call for help if you fall overboard. I guarantee there’s a friend nearby that can toss you a life preserver or at the very least whip up one hell of a margarita!!

Have fun and Happy…whatever it is you do!!

My website: http://www.robinbadillo.com

My blog, Sealed With A Kiss: http://www.robinbadillo.blogspot.com

Buy link for Blood Hunter~The Beginning: http://tinyurl.com/4m7z32s

It's the most wonderful time of the year...

It's that time of year again, when one minute it's January, then I blink twice and it's March.

Where the heck did February go? Not that I'm terribly upset. I know it might get me kicked out of RWA, but I personally think February is a waste of a month.

Yeah, yeah, hearts and flowers, I get it. As a huge fan of the Romance genre, I'm supposed to revel in February in all its Valentine's glory. Meh. Whatev.

Sorry, but it's way too short to even count as a month. It's more like a really long week. To me, it's the month that comes after that's infinitely more exciting. That's right...March Madness, baby!

This week marks my favorite part of regular season -- Rivalry Week! On Sunday, my Duke Blue Devils will be taking on the evil Tar Heels to decide Tobacco Road bragging rights. Back when I was in college, it wasn't unheard of to spend half the semester sleeping in a tent just to get into the big game. Good times...

And then next week are all the conference tourneys leading up to the Big Dance! Whoohoo! Next Sunday is what's known as Selection Sunday, when the NCAA announces the seeds, officially stopping office productivity dead in its tracks for the next few weeks, as people fill out their brackets and continuously hit refresh to update the scores.

(That's assuming the office has disabled streaming video. Um, not that I would know anything about that. Nope. *whistles innocently*)

Last year I filled out two brackets. The first one I researched, carefully making my picks according to strength of schedule, how the teams matched up, what the analysts were saying, as well as my longtime method of never allowing Carolina or Kentucky to advance past the third round. Of course, I had Duke winning it all, but anyone who knows me would pretty much expect that.

I had my then-3-month-old daughter pick my second bracket. Say, what?

I know it sounds crazy, but if my friend Christina can win regularly $500 or more in her office pool by asking herself which mascot would win in a fight, then surely reading off the names to my baby and choosing the team she smiled at wasn't too ridiculous of a method.

OK, fine, I admit it. It's pretty darn ridiculous, but I had a colicky newborn who thought that 2 am was a really awesome time to wake up and scream. And 3 am. And 4 am. And pretty much every hour of the day... So you have to forgive me in my sleep-deprived state for not making a lot of sense.

Except that it did make sense.

You see, the first weekend last year was plagued by Bracket Busters, games in which Nobodies beat the Somebodies. All across the country people were lamenting the state of their brackets, but not my baby. Sure, she can't talk, but if she could, I bet she'd be talking some serious smack right about now because her picks were ABSOLUTELY PERFECT for the first two rounds!

Ohio over Georgetown? Oh yeah. She picked it. Cornell over Temple? Old Dominion over Notre Dame? St. Mary's over Villanova? University of Northern Iowa over Kansas? Check, check, check, and check.

I think there were like 5 people in the entire US that picked UNI to even make it to that game, let alone beat the #1 seed Kansas, and my infant was one of them.

She didn't end the tourney with a perfect bracket, but she still scored in like the top 2% of entrants in the ESPN.com contest.

So what do you think? Should I take her to Vegas this year and get a jumpstart on her college fund?



In honor of March Madness, I'm giving away an e-book copy of my upcoming YA mystery "Codename: Dancer" to one lucky commenter. Leave a comment and I'll let my toddler choose one of the names at random on Sunday night. She's pretty good at picking winners. (Of course, you'll have to wait until it's released in April to read it. I'll just let you get giddy with anticipation in the meantime.)

If It Walks Like A Duck & Talks Like A Duck It's Not A Goose

At any given time I’m usually in the middle of reading three books. One that could be considered “serious literature,” one nonfiction and one light-weight escapist read. More often than not the escapist read is a chick lit title. But here’s the thing that bugs me, frequently I’ll read a review that classifies a certain book as being chick lit only to find out that it’s not chick lit at all. It’s a book written by a woman about a woman set in contemporary times and for some strange reason, the critics of the world have decided that all such books should be labeled chick lit. So what if the book isn’t really funny or even trying to be. So what if the issues that are being addressed have nothing to do with fashion and dating and everything to do with child abandonment and drug addiction. If the protagonist is a young woman who occasionally worries about her weight, it’s chick lit, period, end of story.

Of course no one would read Kenneth Miller’s excellent nonfiction book, Finding Darwin’s God and say, “hey, he just cracked a joke! This book belongs in the humor section!” No bookseller has ever said, “Check it out, somebody in this latest Grisham novel gets laid, let’s call it a romantic suspense!” No, those kind of mistakes never happen. But then again, those authors are men. Yes, I know, I just played the sexist card, but if the stiletto fits…

The reason I take issue with all this is because, as an author, I like to see books judged for what they are, not what they were never supposed to be. If you’re going to call my books romance novels then they pretty much suck. Romance novels have nice happy romantic endings and those don't always work out in the Sophie novels. She doesn't even get to have sex until the second book into the series and it takes three before she finds her way into a relationship (a relatively noncommittal one at that).  But if you call the Sophie novels what they really are (chick lit murder mysteries) then it’s fair to say they achieve their goals. They’re funny, suspenseful and a little gossipy (at least I hope they are). That series deserve to be classified as being part of a chick lit subgenre.

But So Much For My Happy Ending isn't chick lit. It's a story about a woman who marries her prince charming only to later discover that he's suffering from bipolar disorder and she tries to cope as he unravels in...well, in a Charlie Sheen kind of way. That novel is darker and a bit grittier than my Sophie series.  That's not to say it's not funny at times and my protagonist, April, is a character I think a lot of women will relate to but that doesn't make it Chick Lit.  And yet, one review praised it as being "a unique entry in the chick-lit genre and should appeal to those looking to move beyond the typical fare."  I realize that's a compliment but the reason it's beyond the typical fare is because it's not actually part of that fare and when you lead people to believe it is you're misleading them.  When you do that the people who might most enjoy the book will never pick it up and those who do pick it up are more likely to be upset because it didn't provide them with the emotional escape they were looking for.  On the same token, Jennifer Belle's books are also not Chick Lit.  In Little Stalker she writes about a woman who got pregnant at thirteen and had an abortion.  The whole experience changes her life, and not for the better. She grows up to become obsessed with a director who happens to be attracted to an adolescent girl in her neighborhood and we follow her as she uses that obsession to address some of her long repressed issues.  It's an interesting book and Belle manages to find humor in rather dark situations. But Chick Lit? No. And yet when I read the reviews that's the category everybody puts it in. My feeling is that once you start dealing with issues like pedophilia the book stops being Chick Lit regardless of how many times the protagonist makes you smile.  Not every book written by a young new female author is chick lit.

So you can imagine my frustration when I read an online review for Martha O'Connor's book The Bitch Posse that said, "Drugs, crime, mental illness…in chick lit? Got that right." I literally yelled at my computer screen, “No, you got that WRONG! Does the woman have to put a neon sign on every cover telling readers what her book is and isn’t?”

Maybe she does. Maybe we all do.  But until that happens I will continue to be irritated by the misclassification of books. 

--Kyra "Fashionista Fatale" Davis

Note to Self...

Note to Self:

1) My basset will pull a whole bag of flour out of the pantry and dump the entirety on the carpet in a pile that stands 5 inches above the carpet.

2) My children will walk around this giant mound of flour in the middle of the living room carpet, pretending it isn't there and claiming they never saw it.

3) I will bring a friend home making the customary disclaimer, "My house is a mess," without realizing how true that is because there's a mound of flour in the middle of the living room carpet - that the basset dragged out of the pantry and dumped - that my kids walked around, ignoring.

4) Flour is so fine a powder that even my Dyson Animal can't pick it all up. Cocaine - sure. Angel Dust - of course. Anthrax - any day. Flour - not a chance.

5) My friends find it easier to believe that I dumped $8,000 worth of cocaine on my carpet than the truth that I have a flour-snorting basset.

I'm off to rent an industrial-strength suction machine thingy.

The Assassin

Taking the Road Less Traveled

Romantic Times Review!

Born at Midnight
C.C. Hunter 4 ½ Stars

Great for fans of Vampire Academy. This book has it all, from vampires to werewolves to witches and shapeshifters. There’s romance and action, ensuring readers won’t want to put it down. Hunter – Christie Craig in her YA debut – packs on the twists and turns, and then leaves you hanging with an amazing hook ending, just wanting for more.

Taking the Road Less Traveled

Have you ever suddenly decided to try a new path—veer away from the norm, try something different and call it an adventure? Have you ever realized you might be in a bit of a rut? For those of you who know me, you know I’m a big advocate of trying new paths. But if you really know me, you know that I’m dyslexic and I’m . . . helplessly directionally impaired. And if there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s getting lost.

Let me make myself clear. I’m not talking paths as in life decisions. I’m talking paths as in roads, or sidewalks as this case is. Not “lost” as in what you want to do in life, but lost as in…Where the hell am I . . . and haven’t I already seen that dead thing once? (Don’t worry, I’ll explain the dead thing in a minute.)

Now, not everyone who is directionally impaired, or challenged, is dyslexic. Some people are just easily turned around. And if I find myself out and about with a person who is like this…Well, we’re pretty much crap out of luck. And that’s what happened the other day.

Me and my friend, another writer, (whom I shall leave unnamed) walk for about an hour, five times a week. Now, here’s the part you might find hard to believe. We walk in our neighborhood—our neighborhood where I’ve lived for eighteen years and she’s lived for only thirty.

On our designated mornings, we brave the outdoors. Each morning, we take the same path. I mean, we’re so busy chatting about writing that we seldom even notice our surroundings.

This particular morning, I had a beauty appointment to get my eyebrows waxed, so we headed out early. I would have an hour after my walk to clean up, before running out to have hot wax placed on my unruly eyebrows and yanked off. (Hey, my beautician does a better job and it’s less torture than plucking.)

Anyway, it must have been something about the change of time that inspired the need for another change. “Let’s try a new path,” she said. Yeah, it was HER idea. Not that I didn’t go along with it. It was a beautiful, sunny day.

However, I must have had a premonition, because I told her, “If we get lost, we can call it an adventure.”

“Right,” she said and grinned. How likely was it that we could get lost in our neighborhood?

Very likely, as it turned out. We were twenty minutes into our walk when she said… “I don’t have a clue where we are.”

“We can always knock on someone’s door and ask for directions,” I said laughing. “We can lie and say we just moved here.”

Now, at a good forty minutes into our walk, at which point we should be heading back to our houses, we find ourselves back on the main street of our subdivision. We’re proud of ourselves. We ventured off our normal path and probably added a good ten minutes to our walking time. With confidence, we headed home. We walked. And walked. The beautiful day started feeling too warm. Sweat dripped from my brow.

One of us stated that our adventure had taken us farther into our subdivision that we’d thought. But we kept moving like little troopers. “As long as I’m not late for my brow waxing,” I said, jokingly.

We passed something on the sidewalk. Something that wasn’t breathing, and appeared to have gotten acquainted with the bumper of someone’s car. “What was that?” I asked.

“Don’t know,” she said, “But I’m pretty sure it had fur.”

“Oh, I saw the fur, I’m talking about the organ outside the fur? Liver?” Grimacing, we kept walking. And walking. It wasn’t just my in-need-of-a-waxing brow sweating now. My clothes were soaked.

“Wouldn’t it be funny if we were walking the wrong way?” she said.

“Yeah, that would be funny.” Doubt etched into my voice.

She heard it. “I know we’re going the right way,” she said. “I pass that green house all the time.”

“I’m sure we’re almost there” I said agreeing. Onward we go. And go.

Finally, she spoke up, “If we get to the end of this street and see the grocery store that is at the opposite end of our subdivision, I’m calling my husband to pick us up.” She hesitated. “Or I would if either of us had a phone or if either of us had a quarter.” We chuckled. And then all the sudden we saw it. The grocery store. We had walked the wrong way…for miles. Faced with the harsh reality of our mistake, we did the only thing we could…we laughed some more.

“We could always ask someone to borrow a quarter,” she suggested.

I stared at her sweaty, tired appearance, and I knew I looked worse. “They’d probably offer to drive us to a shelter,” I told her. “And we might have to explain how we got lost in our own subdivision.”

We started back. When we got to the dead object with its exposed liver, we decided it was a squirrel. And we also decided that it hadn’t died in a hit and run, but had met its fate trying to find its way home. By the time we got back, we’d walked a little over two hours, and I was about fifteen minutes late getting my brow waxed.

“Traffic?” my beautician asked, knowing it’s not like me to be late.

“Nah,” I told her. “Just . . . got caught up in an adventure.”

So do you ever get lost? Get turned around? Have you ever seen a squirrel’s liver? Do you wax or pluck your eyebrows?