How Many Sleeps Until Christmas?

 Hi, I'm Pippa Jay, author of sci-fi and supernatural stories to engage your emotions. It's that time of year again when Halloween is paste and I'm thinking of Christmas, so here are a few seasonal reads to consider for the holiday season.

Four-year-old Maggie Bock loves living aboard her parents’ space cruiser, but it’s almost Christmas. What if Santa doesn’t know where she is now? Someone will have to find him and tell him, of course. But when she stows away on her mother’s transport to Terr, she sets off a chain of events that brings the holidays to the Atlantis.

Join Maggie and her family for a hilarious and heart-warming adventure as Matirans and Terrians come together to celebrate what makes the holiday season so very special.

(Blue Christmas is a companion story to my novel Prophecy, Book One of the Prophecy Series. This story takes place three months after the end of Prophecy.)

Stranded on Earth after a hyperdrive malfunction, the five surviving members of the Zau’gaut’s crew learn to blend in and survive on a backwater world. Opening a seasonal decorating company, their captain hopes it will help them blend in while learning about Earther culture. Despite Earth’s primitive state, they find themselves growing attached to the planet and its people. When one crew member takes a chance and finds himself growing attached to a certain human woman, the crew begins to wonder if being stranded on Earth means they must also give up their chances at finding love.

Our heart has its own compass. It knows where we should be heading, even if the rest of us doesn’t. Through loss and love, our heart’s compass guides us through life, often to somewhere completely unexpected. When the world ends, the heart’s compass of several people has them headed in directions they may have never traveled otherwise.

Each book in the series is a stand-alone story, but is written within the same fictional setting in which the Earth has just been struck with several massive solar flares. All modern technology has been rendered inoperable. Cars, computers, city infrastructure, phones – all gone in an instant and without warning. In the days directly following the end of the modern world, people must learn to depend on each other, and on their heart’s compass, if they hope to survive.

She doesn’t want a lot for Christmas…

Claire Otton dreads spending another holiday alone. When her best friend convinces her to approach the sexy mall Santa, she takes the chance and asks him out, hoping for so much more.

He’s waiting under the mistletoe…

Although Andreas Castellanos blends in on Earth, he knows he will never belong. But when the gorgeous woman he’d been staring at invites him to dinner, he has a hard time saying no.

All they’re asking for…

Can these two lonely souls find magic together or will their secrets steal their chance of a happy Christmas?

To find more, please visit the SFR Station.

A Small Epiphany by Pippa Jay

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT is our Theme this month in honor of our Eleventh Blog-o-versary! I found some very special posts from past years to repost in case you missed them the first time around. 

In "A Small Epiphany", first published Jan. 17, 2014, SciFi and Superhero Romance Author Pippa Jay recounts the discovery that transformed her into a professional writer. (File this one under "Writer's Life")

In the summer of 2009 I sat and watched my three little monsters playing in the garden. My youngest had just got mobile enough to chase his older siblings around the place and play with them on more equal terms. Me - I was overweight, bored and miserable. I felt I'd lost myself. I was proud of being a mum and wife, but beyond those labels I felt I had no purpose. No identity. Who and what was I?

So I sat at my computer, pulled out an old short story that I'd left in storage and put on some music. Having not written in nearly 20 years, I decided to give it another go.

A six week frenzy of scribbling and typing followed. My husband thought I'd gone mad. Maybe I had a bit. Because once I'd started putting down the words, I just couldn't stop. They poured out of me. At the end of those six weeks I had a 40 000 word rough draft, which I then split in two. By the end of 2009 I had a 100K novel ready to pitch, and nearly as much for a sequel.

At the same time I went on a diet, started a dance class, changed my hairstyle and dyed my hair, and completely changed my wardrobe, from baggy black to tailored reds, blues and greens. Hubs refers to it as my midlife crisis. I call it my epiphany. Because after 40 years I'd found myself and my real passion - writing. Until that point I hadn't realised how much I loved to write, and that it's what had been missing. And I haven't looked back. It took another eighteen months of rejections and rewrites and a change of tack before that first novel got a publishing contract with a small press but I count myself lucky. And now, four and a half years down the line I have five titles out, two contracted, one request on a full and one out on submission. I have two short stories scheduled for release in October and November this year. My only regret is that it took me nearly forty years to figure out what I really wanted to do. >.<

Right now, that debut novel isn't available to buy. My publisher - Lyrical Press Inc - has just been bought by Kensington, and titles have had to be taken down as the transfer occurs. But in the meantime, I'm doing a giveaway at Goodreads for three now rare paperback editions of that novel, and you can enter here.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Keir

by Pippa Jay

Giveaway ends February 14, 2014.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

And my scifi romance short went up at All Romance Ebooks just last week at the discounted price of $1.01 until the 23rd HERE. :)

EXCERPT | Available at... B&N
|ARe | Amazon US | Amazon UK
| Smashwords |

Happy New Year and happy reading!

What is the Obsidian Rim? by SFR Author Jody Wallace

Early this year (2019), Jessa Slade (w/a Elsa Jade http://www.elsajade.com/) contacted me about a project she and Maggie Lynch (https://maggielynch.com/) were helming. Like Thieves’ World and Heroes in Hell, they envisioned a shared world concept set in the far future, after the devastating effects of war had destroyed nearly all of the “Salty Way” galaxy except for the outer rim. How would humanity have endured after achieving great heights of civilization and technology only to be forced back into hardscrabble survival on a limited number of M-class planets?

Obviously, humanity would have endured in part in the traditional way—via romances and making some babies! Thus the authors in the shared world would be writing adventurous romances (Not generally with babies, though, because adventure. And guns.) about the explorations, the danger, and the joys to be had by the humans inhabiting the Obsidian Rim .

So far we have launched eleven books in the series, from revolts on mining plants to intergalactic shenanigans with princes and mob bosses to the discovery of sentient beings whose intelligence rivaled or possibly surpassed our own.

CATS ARE SENTIENT BEINGS
ON THE OBSIDIAN RIM

I’m talking about CATS, of course, in the Cat Ship Trilogy that is my contribution to the Obsidian Rim’s offerings. Though Jessa and Maggie were very firm about certain aspects of worldbuilding (stories would take place in the Rim itself, no alien intelligence, no messin’ up other people’s ideas), cats did not count as alien intelligence because they’re already among us, bossing us around. 

Thanks to the premise of Maggie’s books, wherein the q-bombs that destroyed the universe also enhanced a few humans with limited but useful abilities related to stellarship navigation, I decided that same effect could be extended to cats, who finally learned to communicate their superior intellect to their waitstaff, aka two-leggers.

I also decided that humanity in any civilization is going to need somewhere to take the trash, and thus Trash Planet was born.

CATALYST

Cats and trash. What more could you want out of an adventure romance series? Find out more about Catalyst at http://jodywallace.com/books/catalyst/ and encourage me to keep editing Catapult, which is the second in the series due to come out in a month or two.

So a little more about the various offerings. Maggie Lynch’s Cryoborn Gifts series and the first book, Gravity, instigates the whole world with a pirate heroine crashing on a mining planetoid and getting accidentally involved with an escaped miner who just wants to save his children. The next book (and series) belongs to Elsa Jade with Rock Rift  and the Edge of Sunrise series, wherein the miners who got crashed into in the first book plan and execute a revolt from their masters—that is, if the sexy secret agent from a doomsday type cult doesn’t spoil it for them. Third in the release list is Traitor’s Code  by Jane Killick (the Freelance series) where a sort-of innocent freelance stellarship captain gets involved with the prince of an agricultural planet in a deep conspiracy that may involve his entire family.

The fourth series we get to taste, Pipettes and Plows, is the science adventure from Shree C Aier, Coexistence  which relates, like Traitor’s Code, to the food issues that the inhabitants of the entire Rim have in the absence of places to raise plants and animals when a sheltered scientist and a farmer are sent to the edge of the galaxy for research. Next we delve into the world of mercenaries for hire, nanobot tech, and space royalty with Mercenary Royal and the Dead Suns series  by Shona Husk when a pampered princess must learn to become a dangerous mercenary if she’s to survive a plot by her family’s rivals.

Sela Carsen’s Fate’s Favor series begins with Ace’s Odds, set on the glitzy Gizem space station where the mob boss’s daughter and a desperate smuggler team up to keep her family safe—or tear it down from the inside. My own Cat Ship series involves a garbage picker on Trash Planet who finds a man in the garbage—and a talking cat. Last but not least in the series countdown we have the Ghost Planet series by CJ Cade and her book Hunter Green where a down on her luck waitress tries to hide on the strange planet of Vorona, but the leader of the only settlement there doesn’t want her bringing her bad luck to his attempt at a new life.

The Obsidian Rim adventures strike a rich balance between romance and science fiction, more Romancing the Stone than 9 ½ Weeks in space. As readers we love to read all across the romance genre, and as authors we are adoring the experiment of the shared world and larger-than-life intergalactic quests. Books from different authors have links to each other, sly little mentions and connections, but the Obsidian Rim novels do not have to be read in order to make sense. I hope you’ll pick up a book and visit some day soon!

Jody Wallace

Author, Editor, Cat Person, Amigurumist of the Apocalypse

www.jodywallace.com * www.meankitty.com

Jody Wallace grew up in the South in a very rural area. She went to school a long time and ended up with a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing. Her resume includes college English instructor, technical documents editor, market analyst, web designer, and general, all around pain in the butt. Ms. Wallace writes sf/f romance with occasional forays into contemporary romance. She resides in Tennessee with one husband, two children, four cats, one bearded dragon, and a lot of junk. When not writing, she crochets things she shouldn’t and drinks too much coffee. At all times she is ruled by the eternal Meankitty of the Soul.

Collaboration is not a dirty word

Hello! I'm Pippa Jay, author of scifi and the supernatural with a romantic soul. How are you?

One thing I've learnt over the last five years as I've ventured into publishing is that collaboration and networking is key. There's nothing more awesome than working with your peers, whether on an anthology, co-authoring, writing communities, or a bunch of solid, supportive beta readers, critique partners, book bloggers and editors, or other creatives such as cover artists. In the publishing world as it is today, sometimes it's the only thing that stops you drowning.

WEBSITE | GOODREADS
Available for FREE from...
 Amazon US | Amazon UK | ARe
 Smashwords |  B&N | Kobo

Last year I had the privilege of becoming part of a science fiction romance anthology - Tales from the SFR Brigade - produced by the Science Fiction Romance Brigade, a community of authors, readers and fans dedicated to the genre. (I'm very proud to be a part of the community and one of their admins.) To me, an anthology provides readers with the opportunity to meet new authors they might not have seen or tried before, who perhaps picked up the book because one of their favourite authors had a story in it (I've done that myself). It also means that, in these days of authors pretty much having to do all their promotion, at least you can share the time, effort and energy to promote between you. At a later stage I even got to help with putting the anthology up on Amazon and tweaking a few of the format errors - great experience in terms of learning the ins and outs of self publishing. It was yet another learning curve, but with the benefit of having fellow authors and editors who each knew something I didn't about the process and were all willing to pitch in, make suggestions, or fix problems. It's a project I'm so proud to have been a part of, and a huge team effort.

But those people I love the most are my critique partners (sorry, I'm a bit biased!). I have a large group, each with their own particular skills in picking up plot holes or ferreting out issues, and not all stories go to all of the group depending on the genre and heat levels. These are the people brave enough to look at some of my, er, shall we say 'less polished' projects, and spend some time helping me slap them into something coherent. The ones not afraid to say 'this sucks, fix it', often confirming my own thoughts on a scene but that I've tried to avoid facing. Just lately most of my book dedications have been to these courageous souls who have taken the time to help me turn chaotic primordial soup into a story.

My current upcoming release probably went to the most critical of them, especially as I wanted to put the opening into The Rebecca, a RWA contest run by LERA that provides amazing feedback on your story as part of the competition (well worth doing even if you don't place. Which sadly, I've yet to do. Three so close but not quite there attempts so far, lol). The interesting thing with putting something through critique and beta readers is that they are just as likely to give you contradictory feedback as to agree. If they're agreeing, then you can be fairly certain their concerns need to be addressed. But when they contradict? What do you do then?

I've had the same situation with The Rebecca feedback. Two saying the world building was good, one saying it was confusing. Two disliking a particular phrase, one liking it. One saying the story was too slow, one too hurried, and one asking for more detail. In those situations, it can be hard to decide what you actually need to fix, or if it even *should* be changed. Sometimes I look at the qualifications of the judge or the experience of the critique partner. In the case of the contest, you might have published and unpublished authors, editors, publishers. You might think that perhaps an unpublished author would not give as good a level of critique as one published, but there's no way to tell how much critiquing they might have done, how much experience they have, how new they are to critiquing or judging. And even if you consider they might be too inexperienced as an author to judge, perhaps consider that they might be looking at it more as a reader than a writer, so therefore it still has value. Although all authors are readers, I think sometimes we can forget to look at a story simply as a reader and judge it by our experiences and expertise purely as an author, or even as an editor. So I like to send my work to a mixture where possible, and several to give the best possible range of responses. All of them hated your heroine? Might need looking at. Same phrase being questions by everyone? Might need reworking. Only one had an issue with calling the hero Gavin? Might get away with that one. :P

But at the end of the day, you really have to rely on your own judgement. If the reactions are pretty mixed, my solution is to go with the version that *I'm* happy with. Because if you can't be happy with your own story, what's the point?

So, to finish, here's my upcoming release for the 25th July, and my last Rebecca entry. Can't wait to here what the reviewers think after all the critiquing it went through!

EXCERPT |  GOODREADS
Available at... Breathless Press |
Smashwords | ARe | Bookstrand

What has your experience been with critique partners?

A Small Epiphany

In the summer of 2009 I sat and watched my three little monsters playing in the garden. My youngest had just got mobile enough to chase his older siblings around the place and play with them on more equal terms. Me - I was overweight, bored and miserable. I felt I'd lost myself. I was proud of being a mum and wife, but beyond those labels I felt I had no purpose. No identity. Who and what was I?

So I sat at my computer, pulled out an old short story that I'd left in storage and put on some music. Having not written in nearly 20 years, I decided to give it another go.

A six week frenzy of scribbling and typing followed. My husband thought I'd gone mad. Maybe I had a bit. Because once I'd started putting down the words, I just couldn't stop. They poured out of me. At the end of those six weeks I had a 40 000 word rough draft, which I then split in two. By the end of 2009 I had a 100K novel ready to pitch, and nearly as much for a sequel.

At the same time I went on a diet, started a dance class, changed my hairstyle and dyed my hair, and completely changed my wardrobe, from baggy black to tailored reds, blues and greens. Hubs refers to it as my midlife crisis. I call it my epiphany. Because after 40 years I'd found myself and my real passion - writing. Until that point I hadn't realised how much I loved to write, and that it's what had been missing. And I haven't looked back. It took another eighteen months of rejections and rewrites and a change of tack before that first novel got a publishing contract with a small press but I count myself lucky. And now, four and a half years down the line I have five titles out, two contracted, one request on a full and one out on submission. I have two short stories scheduled for release in October and November this year. My only regret is that it took me nearly forty years to figure out what I really wanted to do. >.<

Right now, that debut novel isn't available to buy. My publisher - Lyrical Press Inc - has just been bought by Kensington, and titles have had to be taken down as the transfer occurs. But in the meantime, I'm doing a giveaway at Goodreads for three now rare paperback editions of that novel, and you can enter here.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Keir

by Pippa Jay

Giveaway ends February 14, 2014.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

And my scifi romance short went up at All Romance Ebooks just last week at the discounted price of $1.01 until the 23rd HERE. :)

EXCERPT | Available at... B&N
|ARe | Amazon US | Amazon UK
| Smashwords |

Happy New Year and happy reading!