#Beltane Blessings! #MayDay #celebration

Today is Beltane, a day to celebrate fertility, fire, and abundance. As a Leo (not that I'm really a follower of astrology) and a redhead, I have a strong kinship for all things fiery. I'll keep quiet about all the secret little fires I used to set as a child--hey, I never burnt anything down! Other than a few of my parents' flowerpots...
The first of May also marks the first anniversary of losing my main publisher as Breathless and Lycaon Press shut their doors and my publishing dream went down in flames. It was, however, also the day I decided to fully commit to being a self published author, partly to save myself more heartbreak at losing a publisher again. After all, it was my third experience of doing so in just three years as a published author. Over the past year I've seen more publishers closing - most shockingly Samhain - while others have cut their expenses and shifted their strategies in an attempt to remain viable. The early success of small presses pioneering ebooks has not been long lived. It just shows how changeable and unpredictable publishing can be, and why authors need to learn flexibility among our many other skills.
And in just over a month my final contract with a publisher will expire. It's a peculiar thought. Five years ago I had a very different view of my future, and it certainly didn't include being self published. In fact, I very much doubted I'd ever be published at all. I'd spent a year submitting to agents in the UK to no avail, and was in the process of submitting to various small digital-first presses in the US. I'd released a scifi short - The Bones of the Sea - on Smashwords, more as an experiment than as an official debut publication. How things change... A year later my debut novel Keir released via Lyrical Press.
So May is a month of special significance. I celebrate two anniversaries - my official debut as an author and my wedding. It was also the month my mum was born, now gone for 15 years. But I try to dwell on the positive. This year I will have been a published author for four years. This year I will have been married for 23 years - now more than half my lifetime - to a very wonderful man who has held my hand through highs and lows and all the bits in between.
Beltane marks an auspicious time and the beginning of summer. Here's hoping May will bring you good things too! And if you're setting fires, be safe and avoid the flowerpots. :P

Release Day - Restless In Peaceville in Print! #YA #paranormal #zombies

It's the official release day for the print version of Restless In Peaceville. I'm back in print, baby! You can now pick up my adorable zombies in gloriously gory paperback from Lycaon Press and all Amazon sites. And why should you? Well, if you like Warm Bodies and Supernatural, this could be the book for you. Set in the rich and swampy depths of Louisiana, this was the hardest book I've every written and one that I'm the most proud of. Not enough? Check out the blurb below, and then you can always pop over to Goodreads to see what the reviewers have said. (psst, for UK peeps at least, you'll get a better deal buying the book direct from my publisher than from Amazon).

Blurb:

Luke Chester has had enough. He's the school geek, the girls laugh at him, he's lost his dead-end job at the pizza place, and in the midst of the world's messiest divorce his parents don't even know he exists. An overdose of his mom's tranquilizers and a stomach full of whiskey should solve all his problems... 

But they don't. Instead, Luke finds himself booted out of the afterlife for not dying a natural death, with nowhere to go but back to his recently vacated corpse and reality. How the hell is he going to pass for one of the living without someone trying to blow his brains out for being one of the undead? 

And it just gets worse. He's got to fight his own desperate craving to consume the living, evade the weird supernatural hunter who's having a field day with the new undeads rising, and there's this creepy black shadow following him around. Add to that the distraction of female fellow undead Annabelle burning to avenge her own murder, and clearly there's no rest for the wicked. Jeez, all he wanted to do was R.I.P.

You can check out the tour stops and release day blitz spots at my hosts below.

6th - Savvy Authors - Getting out of my comfort zone

11th - Literary YA Fiction - Top Five Story Inspirations

Release Day Blitz 11th

Marva Dasef

My Creative Desk

Rachel Leigh Smith

Ian Smith

Aurora Springer

Laurel Kriegler

SA Hoag

12th - spotlight at Lindsey & Jane's Views & Reviews
13th - J.Lilley - Things I Learned from the story

16th - Kelly Smith Reviews - interview

And if you like all things zombie, you can get a sneak preview of the cover for my YA dystopian romance - Zombie Girl: Dead Awakened - by signing up for my newsletter HERE.

Tuesday Teaser - Where am I? #YA #paranormal #zombies

You gotta be kidding me...Waking up inside a small dark space is a pretty bad experience. Although I didn't wake as such because I wasn't asleep. I just became...aware maybe? The darkness kind of faded away until I can see I'm inside this metal box. Well, as far as I can tell. I tap the wall with one knuckle to check, and the hollow metallic knock proves at least part of my assumption right. So, what is this? I died and got kicked out of the afterlife. As far as I know, coffins ain't made of metal. So at a guess, I'm in the mortuary, and since I'm not laid out on a slab I must have been put away in storage. I've never been stuck in a drawer before, but somehow this fits with how I imagine it would be.

I suppose I should count myself lucky they hadn't started carving me up, and that I'd gone for an overdose rather than throwing myself in front of a truck or out of a window. I'm in damn good condition...for a corpse. Still in one piece as far as I can ascertain, and that ain't easy to determine, let me tell you. You know how an arm or a leg goes after you've sat on it for a while, cutting off the circulation? But before the blood flow starts again and you get pins and needles? That numb heaviness? My whole body is like that. Like every part of me is full of lead.

Also, the not breathing is weird. I take a couple of breaths out of habit, for the familiar feeling of air moving in and out of my chest. After that I don't bother. It takes too much concentration and there are other things I need to focus on. Like, what do I do next, for instance?

So, what, I'm just gonna lie here?

Restless In Peaceville, YA paranormal romance coming August 20th, from Lycaon Press. Add it to your Goodreads shelf HERE. Sign up to my newsletter for sneak previews and release news HERE.