Snippet Sunday #2--Tin Heart

Welcome to my second Snippet Sunday entry, where I'm joining Weekend Writing Warriors from across the globe in posting 8-10 sentences of a story they have written.

My post is again from my romantic steampunk series Tin Heart. In this passage Lady Anne describes the predicament she is in concerning the her future.

Blessed with glossy dark curls, Queen Victoria’s eligible granddaughters were fashionably plump whereas Anne, with hair so fair it appeared almost white, could not have been more opposite. She silently cursed her small breasts and thin frame, which had kept her safely on the outskirts of the marriage market, but now appeared to be the winning favour in the Duke’s eye.

 If rumors were true, Cleone didn’t stand for conventional tastes. He liked women in his bed who were not merely slender, but childlike. Disturbing, but what did Anne know about Andovian men, least of all their conjugal practices?  She had never met one in person, thank heavens, and gossip about the Madagascan island enemy could hardly be solid fact.

She knew only one truth for certain: The Andovians had murdered her parents in a despicable act of cowardice that had nearly destroyed her. She would rather marry a pocket watch than the Duke de Cleone.

I hope you enjoyed this snippet.
Please check out the Snippet Sunday Facebook page to see what other authors have been working on.

***Mark your calendars!***
Ever wonder what makes dirigibles fly?
On November 4th am honoured to be visiting the Coffee Time Romance Steampunk blog to discuss Air Ship Adventures! Stop by and learn about lighter-than-air travel and what it was like when giant Zeppelins dominated the skies.
AND... I will also make an exciting announcement concerning Tin Heart! *squee*

Thanks for stopping by.
~Kate

Snippet Sunday--Tin Heart

Every Sunday, writers from around the globe post a snippet of their work. Here is my entry for today from my Steampunk romance, Tin Heart. It is the unedited beginning of a discussion between Captain Leonidas and Lady Anne where truths are spoken that change the course of  their lives.

Beside the map, a dog-eared copy of Madagascar rested on the writing desk. Defoe? Bah! No doubt she filled her head with romantic ideas of gauzy silks, exotic spices and pirates who wooed adventure with the tip of a blade. The reality of Andovia was somewhat different, however, and he, who’d lived its basest aspects, had no stomach to inform her. Enduring her delight as she ate pastries and tea would be preferable to this discussion.

 “Knowledge is by nature a chancy repast,” he warned. “Sometimes full of sweet revelations. More often fraught with disenchantment.”

Grey eyes held his gaze, steady and clear. “And yet, it’s what I hunger for.”

Leo and Anne have such a turbulent journey ahead of them. It's nice to come back to this point early in the story when the adventure was new and the skies limitless.

Check out  Anne Lange's snippet from her upcoming release, Sliding Into Home.

You can also find more links from participating authors at the Snippet Sunday Facebook page. 

Thanks for stopping by today :) 

~Kate~

Goodbye August, Hello September

August has been a busy month with Steam Bunny making it's début.So far it's been getting good reviews like this one from Amazon UK.

And also from Jane Hunt who calls it, "an erotic quest to find happy ever after." I just love that quote so much. It captures the book completely. Thanks again, Jane, for the wonderful review and also for the interview!

Jane is an excellent writer as well as prolific blogger and reviewer. Check out her Dragon Legacy series if you haven't had a chance to do so yet. Paranormal romance with a very steamy side. The second in the series The Revenge Masquerade is due out in Dec14/Jan15.

Thanks also to Shehanne Moore for inviting me aboard ship for tea with Lady Fury and her book club (and allowing me to disembark again without using the gangplank) I first came across Lady Fury in Shehanne's amazing début historical romance novel, The Unraveling of Lady Fury.

It's the kind of book every reader loves to read. It gripped me, pulled me in and made me a Shehanne Moore fan for ever more. His Judas Bride followed suit with Loving Lady Lazuli (a Night Owl Reviews Top Pick) shortly thereafter. Her fourth book, The Viking and the Courtesan will be making its release soon and I can't wait!

Fabulous Noelle Clark had me on her blog earlier this month and can I just say what a pleasure it was to be interviewed by such a lovely lady. Thank you very much, Noelle. Her own books have been making waves and I can certainly see why. Talented as well as sincere in her work, her writing comes alive as you turn the pages. She has quite a few books in her list now: Rosamanti, Let Angles Fly, and Stone of Heaven and Earth coming soon.

So what's coming up this fall for me?

Writing, writing and more writing.
Felicity is busy working on Fit to Be Tied, the next book in the Little Miss Kick-Ass series where Race and Astrid get each other all tied up in knots. Literally.

And Kate s busy working on Tin Heart.  I know it's been pushed into the background while Felicity made her erotic romance début, but that's because Kate is a very patient lady and has wanted to give Tin Heart the time it's needed to blossom. So I'm happy to say that the first book is now finished and going through a final round of edits before being sent to a publisher, who will hopefully say, "yes!"

September promises to be busy, but that's just the way I like it to be. I hope yours is a great new month full of making the impossible possible.

Thanks for stopping by :)

xo
~Felicity and Kate~

Finding Leo

Staff meeting at work recently which means two hours of listening to people banter opinions about stuff and some drawing time for me. I know. Shocking, isn't it? But I'm a multi-tasking kinda girl, I can listen, take notes and doodle at the same time. In fact, the scribbles and swirls help me remember what was said better than my chicken-scratch handwriting.

Captain Leonidas, as usual, lounged in the back of my mind, waiting to torment me yet again by my inability to draw him. He's a complicated character to say the least, an automaton with a human soul. But what does he look like? Well, that's the problem. He goes through a metamorphosis during the story, starting with a very mechanical body.

"He was such a magnificent marvel of steam-powered science; blackened steel and brass rivets and gruesome sharp edges that caught the light in razor clarity. Close up, his warrior’s body seemed very well formed indeed, with massive shoulders and the ridges of his Aegean-styled breast plating as muscular as she had seen in the anatomy books secreted from her uncle’s library. But the crested helmet molding his head cast his zirconium eyes into shadow, revealing only a glimmer of blue, and nothing of their intent. A bright scarring of tin ran from the corner of his left eye, across his cheek, to the corner of his mouth in an imprecise repair which twisted his lips into a cruel sneer. With the sharp cast of his features and the flutter of his cloak he looked not unlike a vicious bird of prey."

That's what Lady Anne described when she first met him. He's fairly imposing and so I imagined him to be a guy-in-a-metal-suit, very daunting to be around, but with this presence, that she can't help find fascinating, even if he is her mortal enemy.

So I was a little bit excited when out from my pencil popped this quick sketch of an Aegean-style warrior wearing a crested helmet. Could this be Captain Leonidas? He does have a bit of a presence about him. Maybe it's a start.















Scanning the picture when I got home, I attacked it with my drawing tablet and some quick colour.

Glowing blue eyes? Check.
Imposing presence? Check.
Fluttery cape, black armour; check and check.

But wait a minute, that sounds a lot like....this guy.

 

Well crap. Okay, what if we change the colour. How about blue, nice and bright to go with his eyes, and we'll make his face silvery and...

 

And...
 









...And now Captain Leonidas is Optimus Prime. Yeah, he is more than meets the eye, but..bleah.

Thanks, Mr. Transformer. You aren't helping.

Damn and double damn. You'd think I'd know that though, with all the Transformers hanging around my place, infecting my subconscious with their Mecha designs. And you'd also think that with all the source material to work from, with the intense library we have of Manga books about giant robots, Star Wars tech books, and more model kits than there is room for (thanks to my husband's home business as a very talented model maker and graphic designer) that I'd find it easy to cobble together the design for a Steampunk-automaton-robot-guy-with-a-human-soul.

The problem is, when I picture Captain Leonidas and when I'm writing his character, I'm thinking more of his human soul than I am of his metal body, and I'm imagining what he looks like when he has his real body, when he's his true self again. So abandoning all pretense of trying to draw a mechanized version of Leo, I concentrated instead on how I saw him dressed up as a courtly prince.

"True, Cleone did appear handsome in the small photograph which had been placed on her nightstand. Unlike Swiverton, he was young, tall and golden haired, with a fashionably curled moustache and a strong chin. In military finery, he looked grand, the way he held his sheathed sword, noble, but his bland expression revealed little."

 

Oh, boy. More then meets the eye, indeed. She might not know it yet, but I'm thinking Lady Anne's pretty darn lucky to be marrying Leo, don't you?

Dreams and Designs

Lady Anne Amberleigh

Thought I'd post a sketch of my heroine from my romantic steampunk work-in-progress: Tin Heart.

 

I wonder what Anne's thinking about. She doesn't look very happy. Then again, after all the trouble she's been put through in the story lately, I wouldn't expect her to be.

 

But what do you think? Does she look the part? A petite, blonde woman, not beautiful, but pretty, with 'memorable' grey eyes? I'm not certain if I've captured her quite her yet, but it's always nice to visualize what a character is like when writing a story. And steampunk, well, it's just such a fun, visual genre. The gadgets, the fantastic settings, the hats and parasols... I can't help but think this story would make a lovely graphic novel as well as a novella. Perhaps, one day, a publisher out there will think so too. :)

 

Thanks for stopping by!

~Kate

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

June Blooms

Hey, guess what? If you haven’t looked at your calendar lately, it’s June. I’ve always liked June. Strawberries come into season, roses bloom and the school year (finally!) reaches it’s end for a lot of kids. Bring on summer! Beach trips, sandcastles, barbecues and chocolate dipped ice cream cones at the local Dairy Queen. Yum!!! Time to relax, time to have fun.

June is also my birthday month (my grandfather nicknamed me Rosebud). Not that I’m happy about being a year older, but hey, can’t stop that clock and still be around to notice, unless you’re immortal like a vampire, or some kind of freaky automaton robot thing with a human soul trapped inside. Heh.

So how’s that story coming along, you ask?

Well, I’ll tell ya. The last six months have been a whirlwind of productivity in getting my life onto some sort of forward moving track. Thanks to those twin sisters of success, Persistence and Patience, I now weigh a lot less and am in better shape than I was ten years ago. My home business of creating photo art is about ready to launch, and getting up at 5 am to put in a solid hour of writing a day has resulted in paragraphs of crap being revised into paragraphs of slightly-more-readable crap. Yep.  Progress has been made. Am I done the book yet? No. But every step counts, every word counts, every second spent on making my dreams a priority count.

Yolo: You only live once. So just do it. Very sage words spoken by a very wise friend.

And sometimes just doing it means taking a chance on yourself; stepping out of your comfort zone and trying something new, so it’s with a mixture of excitement and anxious nail biting, that I make my next announcement…drum roll please…I got a new job. A promotion at work which I am very honoured to have been given as it entails more responsibility and slightly more pay for the trade-off of slightly less hours. Actually, a lot less hours. Which means, that’s right, more time for me to put the things that matter the most in my life first, like caring for my son, and running that small business properly and, oh joy, oh bliss…writing stories. Scary for my bank account of course, but I’ll make up the difference soon, won’t I? You know, when Tin Heart is snapped up and becomes a NYT best seller, right? RIGHT?

*sigh*

Truth is I’m not a special snowflake. I’m just like everyone else. I struggle, dream, and paying bills each month will always be a circus juggling act. But sometimes dreams are more important than money. Happiness most certainly is.

 YOLO. Just do it. Let your inner rose bloom. You never know what will happen if you try.

Happy June everyone!

~Kate