Tag: Lisa Kessler

The Sunday Post AKA What’s On My (Mostly Virtual) Nightstand 10-21-12

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | The Sunday Post> Virtual Nightstand

What’s the difference between wicked and naughty? Why is this question relevant to my Sunday Post?

The Wicked Romances Blog Hop (hosted by Reading Romances) started yesterday at Reading Reality (and LOTS of other places) and that is the question you need to answer in the comments to throw your hat in the ring for a chance at a $15 Amazon Gift Card. But the answers, oooh the answers are utterly fascinating.

And, tomorrow starts the Romance at Random Naughty & Nice Blog Hop. Of course, I couldn’t resist being a hop stop for that hop. Which totally brought up the question, what is the difference between wicked and naughty?

Two days is not one of the answers. Except maybe in this case.

So what wickedness occurred last week at Reading Reality?

Ebook Review Central Featured Titles from Dreamspinner Press for August 2012: #1 Tigers and Devils by Sean Kennedy, #2 Wake Me Up Inside by Cardeno C., #3 Strengthened by Fire by Andrew Grey.
B Review: Of Blood and Bone (The Minaldi Legacy #1) by Courtney Cole
A- Review: Down for the Count (Dare Me #1) by Christine Bell
B+ Review: A Date with Death (1Night Stand) by Louisa Bacio + Interview
B- Review: The Naughty Angel (1Night Stand) by Shiela Stewart + Interview and Giveaway!
Wicked Romances Blog Hop (still plenty of time to enter!!!)

Whew, what a week! But that’s done and dusted. Except for the wicked, wicked hopping, of course.

What about this coming week, you might ask? I hope you’re asking. I’ve already told you about tomorrow’s Naughty & Nice Hop brought to you by the very lovely Romance at Random.

In addition, tomorrow’s Ebook Review Central will feature the Samhain titles from August 2012. Samhain can always be counted on to provide lots of options for featured titles, and this month was no exception. I’m still furiously tallying.

Tuesday, my guest will be Jessica Scott. She’ll be here to talk about her military romance series, Coming Home, and particularly the latest book in that series, Until There Was You. I’ll also have a review of the book.  (The first book in the series, Because of You, was excellent!) And Jessica has agreed to giveaway copies of both books.

Wednesday is my day to interview Nikki Logan, the author of Wild Encounter. Nikki’s romances feature both a romance between two people, and her romance with nature. In conjunction with the interview, Nikki will be giving away a copy of Wild Encounter. I’ll be reviewing Wild Encounter on Friday this week.

And on Thursday, my feature will be a review of Jillian Stone’s The Moonstone and Miss Jones. This is the second book in her Phaeton Black series. The first book, The Seduction of Phaeton Black, was an incredibly cool mix of decadent Victorian low places and bad boys with steampunk and, really surprising, Egyptian gods and magic powers. With a side-dish of Scotland Yard for spice. I had a lot of fun (see review) with the first book and have definitely been looking forward to the second!

And speaking of looking forward, I have a couple of guests that I’m looking forward to the week of October 29 (and who would have thought that the month was ending so soon!)

Lisa Kessler will be back on October 30 to talk about the latest book in her Night series,  Night Thief. I really enjoyed the first book in the series, Night Walker (review here), so this will be a treat.

And on November 1, my guest will be Cindy Spencer Pape, the author of not one but two of my favorite series, the paranormal/urban fantasy series Urban Arcana, and the one she’ll be talking about, her Gaslight Chronicles. The latest book in the series, Moonlight & Mechanicals, will have just come out, so I’ll also have a review.

It seems like I’ve always got something good to look forward to. How about you?

 

Q&A with Lisa Kessler, author of Night Walker, plus book, poster and Amazon GC giveaway!

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | Author Q&A> blog tours

Today’s guest at Reading Reality is Lisa Kessler, author of the absolutely fascinating tale of vampires and reincarnated love, Night Walker (my review here, the book is awesome). She’s here to talk about her life, her research for the book (it’s really cool!) and her plans for her Night series.

Take it away, Lisa!

Tell us a little bit about who Lisa Kessler is when she isn’t writing about vampires.

I’m a wife and Mom to two great kids.  And if I’m not at the keyboard writing, I’m usually singing or at a rehearsal…  Keeps me very busy!

Night Walker combines two interesting themes for paranormal romance, vampires and reincarnation. Either one would make a pretty powerful story all by itself. What made you decide to put those two together in one story?

Night Walker was my first attempt at writing a book, and while I knew wanted to write about vampires, I also wanted to set it in San Diego.  I didn’t want a European vampire.

So I visited the oldest building in San Diego, the Mission de Alcala and started researching.  When I discovered the unsolved Kumeyaay uprising when they burned the Mission to the ground and bludgeoned the priest to death, it occurred to me that maybe the uprising was retaliation for the murder of a Kumeyaay maiden…  Then I realized reincarnation would play a role in the story as well.  It all came together from that point. 🙂

The pictures of the Mission de Alcala in San Diego on your website are fascinating. What made you decide to feature the Mission and its history in Night Walker?

Thanks for checking out the pictures!  One of the coolest parts of publishing Night Walker is all the emails from readers who have actually visited the Mission after reading the book!  🙂  I knew if I wanted an immortal in San Diego I would need to dig into the history of the city, and all of San Diego’s beginning starts with the Mission de Alacala.  It’s an amazing place to visit, and the sanctuary is still used for Sunday Mass…  I couldn’t pass up using the real history in the book. 🙂

Who or what most influenced your decision to become a writer?

I started writing every night for fun about 12 years ago…  My focus changed the day I visited a palm reader in New Orleans.  She gave me a reading, and when I got to the door to leave, she said, “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Are you a writer?”

“Not really.” I shrugged. “I do write every night, but it’s just for fun.”

She smiled and I swear her eyes sparkled. “You’re going to be a famous writer one day.”

I walked back to the hotel in a daze, but 6 months later the first draft of Night Walker was done.

And are you a plotter or a pantser? Do you plot everything out in advance, or do you just let the story flow?

I’m a big time pantser!  🙂  It makes writing the book and adventure for me, because I don’t know what’s going to happen either.  I love getting to know the characters and racing through the book with them…

Do your characters ever want to take over the story?

Always!  In fact, when I was writing Night Demon, I wrote Gretchen thinking I would kill her off early, but after trying to kill her twice, she kept surviving and I realized she was actually the heroine! LOL  Who knew? 🙂

What book do you recommend everyone should read, and why?

Tough question!  There are so many!  Hmmm…  I guess first off I’d have to say The Stand by Stephen King.  It’s a long book, but there are so many meaty characters on both sides of the good and evil lines that it’s amazing.  You won’t want the book to end!

And if I could name one more, it would be The Mists of Avalon.  It’s a retelling of the King Arthur story told through the women’s eyes.  It gives you a really fascinating look at the time period when religion started shifting from Paganism to Christianity and the shift in power from a matriarchal to patriarchal society.  Lots of betrayal and intrigue too!  It’s one of my all time favorite books! J

Can you tell us what you have planned for the future in The Night Series?

I have a prequel novella called Night Thief coming out in September.  You’ll get to meet one of the original Night Walker brothers, Kane.  Can’t wait to share this one with you!  And in Spring of 2013 Night Demon, Book 2, will be out.  It picks up right where Night Walker left off so you’ll know who was watching them in the epilogue…  Night Demon raises the stakes for the human race when an ancient Mayan Demon is freed into the world of man.

What would you be if you were not an author? (I saw on your website that you were also a singer…)

Before writing took over most of my time, I had aspirations to sing in some of the opera houses in Europe.  There is so much history there, and I love opera so it would have been a blast!  But I have no regrets with my choices.  I still get to sing, but telling stories is definitely where my heart is… 🙂

Coffee or Tea?

Definitely Tea! 🙂

Lisa is celebrating the re-release of Night Walker in paperback!  As part of the celebration, she is having a tour-wide giveaway. And that’s what the Rafflecopter form is here for. Lisa will be giving away one signed print copy of Night Walker, one Night Walker Poster, and one $25 Amazon Gift Card at the end of the tour. Check Lisa Kessler’s Facebook page for more tour stops.
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Night Walker

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> blog tours> book reviews

Night Walker by Lisa Kessler is a paranormal romance that combines two very powerful themes in modern PNR, vampires and reincarnation. Either one of those elements would make for a very moving love story. Mix them together and you have one very special romance indeed.

The story begins with our modern heroine facing a very contemporary dilemma. Her fiance is a two-timing snake. Kate’s just caught him with one of his grad students, and their engagement is very definitely over. Now she’s on her way from Reno to San Diego to finish up the other unfinished business in her life, closing up her late parents’ house. After her parents’ death in an accident two years ago, she’s been putting off that closure. Now it’s time. Ending her engagement, cancelling her wedding, and realizing that she’s more embarrassed and angry than emotionally devastated, tells her that it’s finally time to take control over the rest of her life.

Kate and her best girlfriends do the tourist thing in San Diego, visiting the Mission de Alcala on the Day of the Dead for Mass brings her into contact with the darkly handsome and eminently mysterious Calisto Terana as she examines the rare and beautiful flowers placed on a centuries-old grave in the Native cemetery surrounding the Mission. Calisto gives Kate the strangest sense of deja vu, as if they have not merely met, but known each other intimately, before. Kate is certain she’d remember meeting a man as compelling as Calisto before.

Kate is both right and wrong. She’s never met Calisto before. But he remembers her. He’s walked the night for two centuries, waiting for her to return.

When the Mission de Alcala was built, Calisto Terana was Father Gregorio Salvador, and he was part of the Spanish mission that helped to build it. When he fell in love with a native girl he betrayed his vows and decided to leave the church. The church refused to let him go. Someone foolishly thought that if they got the girl out of the way, their errant priest would meekly return to the fold.

Instead, he found an entirely different path. A much, much darker way, but one that allowed him to wait for his lover’s spirit to be born again.

There were only two flaws to Gregorio’s, now Calisto’s plan. In the 21st century, Kate remembered nothing of her previous existence. Calisto had to woo and win her all over again. He loved and wanted her more after two centuries of waiting than he had in the flush of first love. The hunger of a night walker made him even less patient than a normal man.

That other flaw? The church is eternal.

Escape Rating A-: I was surprised at how good this was. Even though the elements of the story have been used before, the combination was different enough that I got sucked right in. One of the particularly neat things is that the historic aspects, the Mission and the history of it, are pretty close to what’s known of the events. It’s one of those points in colonial history where records were lost so there’s a ton of room for speculation, fiction and well, just plain flights of fancy. This story was an especially good way of filling that gap.

I didn’t use the word vampire in the review because, although Calisto is a vampire, he doesn’t think of himself as one or refer to himself as one. He knows what vampires are, and they aren’t him. He thinks they’re flashier, for one thing.

The next book in this series is The Night Demon, and starts out in the Yucatan jungle, sometime later this year. I can hardly wait.

 

 

 

What’s On My (Mostly Virtual) Nightstand? 5-6-12 AKA The Sunday Post

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | The Sunday Post> Virtual Nightstand

As I looked for a replacement Mailbox meme, I looked long and hard at The Sunday Post. Why? Because I do a Sunday post, it’s this one, my mostly virtual nightstand.

Kimba the Caffeinated Book Lover (and I love that name, BTW) created her meme in part to fill the gap. But The Sunday Post is also intended as a

“chance to share News. A post to recap the past week, showcase books and things we have received and share news about what is coming up for the week on our blog.”

I use Virtual Nightstand to do the forward looking parts of that. I’ve chosen Stacking the Shelves as a way of handling the Mailbox bits of the mandate. But Virtual Nightstand is my news and upcoming reviews post.

To make a long story short, I’m going to link Virtual Nightstand to The Sunday Post. Anyone who comes here from that link might wonder why they got here. Or hopefully they’ll just jump down to the cover pictures.

What’s up this week?

Monday is Ebook Review Central, of course! This week is Leap Week, so I’ll be covering two new publishers, Red Sage Publishing and Curiosity Quills. They are permanent additions to ERC. For this first round, you’ll see a round up that takes them back to the beginning of ERC and catches them up to everyone else, so September 2011 through March 2012, if they have titles back that far.

Tuesday, May 8, I’m hosting an interview with Lisa Kessler, author of Night Walker, as part of a Bewitching Book Tour to celebrate the re-release of Night Walker in paperback! I’ll also have a review of Night Walker and an entry for several tour-wide giveaways.

Thursday, May 10 Reading Reality will be the host for a guest blog from Kay Dee Royal, promoting her book Staring into the Eyes of Chance. This is also part of a virtual book tour from Bewitching Book Tours. And I will also be posting a review of this shapeshifter/paranormal romance, the first book in Ms. Royal’s new Lycan International Investigation Agency Series.

On my nightstand, there are books I’m reading to prepare for next week. I always look a week ahead so I don’t get too surprised. Also, next week I’ll be traveling again, which does throw things off a bit!

There are only four, so maybe I’ll have a chance to catch up with myself. Probably not. But a girl can dream next to her nightstand, can’t she?

I asked for A Patch of Darkness by Yolanda Sfetsos from Samhain because it sounded like an interesting urban fantasy/paranormal romance. And because some of Ms. Sfetsos’ previous work has been well-reviewed. And because it’s book 1 in a series, so I don’t have to jump into the middle, or read a long backstory. All good things. I’ve averted my eyes from some early reviews.

Railsea by China Miéville is a book that I selected from NetGalley because my husband likes China Miéville’s work. And Galen is supposed to provide a guest review for this one for me.

On May 17 Reading Reality will be hosting a Virtual Book Tour of Bad Girl Lessons by Seraphina Donovan for Book and Trailer Showcase. So, I need to read and review the book before the tour.  This book just sounded like yummy fun. Good girl seeks bad boy to teach her how to have a good time after she gets dumped at the altar. Sex, love and romance ensue.

I have to remind myself that I also have a print ARC of The Mongoliad Book One by Greg and Erik Bear and a host of others on my nightstand. It’s not only a relatively big monster (450 pages), but I owe my editor at Library Journal a review on May 21. This one is sort of looming out there. Like an attacking horde.

So, are there any books on your nightstand that you’re looking forward to? How’s your Sunday treating you? And what do you have planned for your week?