Coming soon: Aye, I am a Fairy

My apologies (or humble explanation) up front: The Fairies Saga has been published out of sequence due to my insistence that it remain in draft stage until it was ripe and ready for consumption. Book two in the series, Aye, I am a Fairy, is in the final edit and proofing stages and should be ready before autumn equinox, September twenty-something-or-other.

In case you want a little ramp up, here's where we left off, the last chapter in book one and a half, the novella Ha'penny Jenny.

10 Please don’t go

(last chapter of Ha'penny Jenny)

  “Don’t go. Please, Grandpa Jody, please don’t go,” begged Jenny, her eyes red and brimming, her tears almost—but not quite—spilling over.

  “I’m not goin’ anywhere, lass.” Jody reached down, picked her up, and swung her in a tight circle. “I have to stay here and teach ye how to dance.”

  “Promise me you won’t leave, please. Pretty please with honey and candy and flowers and sugar and please, please…”

  “What’s the matter, lass? I’ll always be here fer ye. Yer my family—my granddaughter.”

  Jenny shook her head, trying to get the bloody image to go away, but it wouldn’t leave. She sniffed. She couldn’t tell grandpa that sometimes she ‘saw’ things before they happened. She’d never tell anyone that again. She shivered with the memory.

  “Now, dinna be afeart of somethin’ bad happenin’ to me.” Jody gave her an extra hug of reassurance. “Ye canna go through life afeart of what’s on the other side of a door, or down the road, or…”

Jenny nodded rapidly, but even as he spoke the words, telling her not to worry, she saw him lying in the road, covered in blood. She squeezed him around the neck, almost choking him. “Well, if you have to go somewhere, be verra careful and don’t go anywhere alone, okay?”

  “All right, I promise. Now, loosen yer grip about my neck so I can show ye the proper way to dance. That is, with yer feet on the ground and yer hand on my shoulder—if it’ll reach that high.”

  Jenny slid down his body until she was on tip toes, then reached up as high as she could with her fingertips. 
 “I’m not tall enough yet, but I will be. Mommy said I’ll grow tall and pretty if I eat my greens every day. But I can’t eat too many, or I’ll get a bellyache, huh?”

  “Aye, lass. Too much of anythin’, save lovin’ yer family, is seldom a good idea. And I’ll be verra careful whenever I leave yer presence. Oof! I need to stay around long enough to give ye a few more dancin’ lessons, at least. Yer next partner’s feet may nae be as tough as mine.”

  Jenny looked up at him again, squinting hard. Maybe he’d be okay now that he promised not to be alone.

  But maybe not.

  The sadness was still there.

  But now there was hope. And help.

  Someone else was coming to their home, maybe next month, maybe next week.

  And maybe he’d bring a big sister for her, too.

Formula for a time travel novel

Naked in the Winter Wind is a time travel story. A lusty, action-packed time travel tale.

Yeah, right. Whoop-de-doo. Those are all over the place. If my stories are to make a splash, they have to have something different.

So, how about a 'real' person falling into another story about time travel? That could work. I know I wouldn't mind falling into my favorite novel. But if I did, I wouldn't want to be in this chunky old lady body! Shoot, I'd want the one I had when I was in my late teens. Firm and frisky--yeah, that's what I'd want to be if I were running around the woods, interacting with hunky 18th century men.

Okay. One bottle of Fountain of Youth water, coming up.

But the guilt! How could I leave my family behind? There are friends and pets and creditors... Okay, forget the creditors. But my daughter would miss me, I'm sure.

Okay. One case of amnesia, coming up. Bring out the twist of pollen stem for the sweet, but clumsy, little old lady, administered by a master time traveler/guide-type person.

Oh, and don't forget smart women, strong men (some good, some troubled), villains, an innocent child or four, and critters. They are absolutely necessary for a good tale. They're included, too.

What else is needed? The tried and true formula says that a series is required. Readers always want more. Let's call it The Fairies Saga. Fairies can be what time travelers are called. Sounds more fantasy-like to me.

Finally, and to make mine even more different from the rest, I've thrown in a solar-powered smartphone. An inadvertent video can make a difference in convincing others that going back (and forth) 230 years is possible. But remember: keep the (painless) how-to time travel a closely guarded family secret!

Enjoy Naked in the Winter Wind, the first in The Fairies Saga series. Buy the e-book version here http://amzn.to/1j3QtxY or order a hard copy from Amazon, personally autographed from www.danihaviland.com, or from your favorite bookseller.

And tell your friends that you, too, believe in fairies and time travel.

How an 18th century girl sees time travelers

Summer, 1781, near Gibsonville, North Carolina

Young Jenny knows her new mother and grandmother are from a different place--a place where people travel in carriages that fly through the air and where books have pictures that move and talk--but where, or when, they are from doesn't matter.

They love her and she loves them.

Enjoy the novella HA'PENNY JENNY for free on June 5th and 6th,  2014.

If you don't already know, you'll find out what a ha'penny is.

And why her nickname is so wrong...and mean.

Read more about the chatty and optimistic youngster, how she came to be with the family where time and people's ages seem upside down, in NAKED IN THE WINTER WIND, the first book in THE FAIRIES SAGA.

(excerpt)

Why did they lie to me?

(a mother-daughter talk begins) 
 

“So smart people lie, too?”

“Jenny, too many people lie. There have been times I’ve not told people things that I thought they didn’t need to know, but I promise you, I have always tried to tell the truth.” Uncertainty suddenly kicked in. “You haven’t been lying, have you?”

“No. My brothers lied to me. I didn’t even know what lying was for a long time. Sometimes they’d tell me one thing, like the sun always came up in the east because that’s where the sun birds stayed in the mornings and it was their job to carry the sun across the sky. Other times, they said it was because the sun was a great big candle and it floated from one side of the mountains to the other and then big giants blew it out for the night. They never told me how it got back again, though, or what sun birds looked like, or where the giants slept.”

Jenny’s frown was back. “But when they lied to me, they made me feel like there was something wrong with me because I was a girl. They said I was born a boy, but that part got chopped off because I wasn’t smart enough. That’s why I had girl stuff, because my boy stuff got chopped off. Well, they called what you pee with stuff, but still, it’s okay not to have a penis, isn’t it?”

....

(read HA'PENNY JENNY to find out Evie's answer) 

What's she worth?

Waiting for spring

I have to consider myself an optimist. Or realist. Or, as my husband calls me, a Pippy Longstockings.

Alaskan winters seem to go on and on forever. I try to break up the six-month plus season with a trip 'Outside' for color, warmth, and sunshine. As you can see from the photo above, April is still a time of white and grays for us. That wee bit of green on the conifer is just a funky shade of gray to me. Sure, we now have over 14 hours of daylight, and the sun is creeping northward. The sun rises and sets in the east and west now instead of in the southeast and southwest, visible from the same south-facing window three months out of the year. The snow piles are shrinking,  the snow cover on the ground evaporating. The soil below is dark brown, soggy, yet promising.

I envy, sort of, my friends' pictures posted on social media, showing off bushes loaded with rose blooms, while my recently released from cold storage potted plants are only beginning to green up, a few buds striving to photosynthesize sustenance from the fluorescent tubes above and limited sunlight, peeking through the north and east facing windows.

June, July, and August will get here eventually. They always do. As I said, I'm a realist. And the Pippy Longstockings attitude knows that while others are suffering from high heat and humidity, cockroaches and hornworms, water restrictions and drought, I'll rely on the evening rains and occasional breezes to take care of my plants and the air conditioning. And I'll snap as many pictures as I can, to look over through the long winter.

Summer always gets here.
And when it does, it's fabulous.

What a difference a visual makes.

Okay, so the model (Harvey is his real name) on the new e-book cover of Dances Naked doesn't have enough gray hair. Would you have wanted him to? To be more true to the story, yes, but to be more appealing, nope!

DANCES NAKED is the story of a 60-ish British Lord, Marty Melbourne, who has traveled back in time from 2012 to 1782 via The Trees, portals through time. All turns out well, at first, and then he gets lost, is robbed, is rescued by a Cherokee hunting party who accept him into their small tribe, and then...well, the chief knows where the crazy white man he calls Dances Naked wants to go, but he doesn't want to return to those bad medicine trees that swallowed his brother years ago. He makes him wait, and then a couple of pretty white women join the tribe for their own reasons...

Lots of other events occur, too, but how much can you, or should you, show on the cover?

And then there's the discretionary issue. If you're getting a print version of a book, and you already know its a good story, wouldn't the tame version on the right be a little more appropriate to have lying about if the in-laws or pastor showed up unannounced?

The truth is, the e-book cover needs to pull in readers with a glance. Tame doesn't work for that. As soon as I changed covers for THE GREAT BIG FAIRY, sales shot up. True, it was for e-books, but print versions are less in demand.

Instant gratification with inexpensive downloads is what is selling right now. So, I'll share the eye candy for the e-books, but will also offer 'tamer' print versions...just in case you want to give your mother-in-law a great book to read, that won't make her blush if the pastor catches her reading it.

(Cover art on left by TheKillionGroupInc.com. Illustration on the right by Tony Woodward)

Free Fairy Day: March 28, 2014

Get THE GREAT BIG FAIRY for free on Friday, March 28...and a few others, too! http://www.freeebookpartay.com/

***Authors supporting authors with readers getting the (free) results! Sign up for Free ParTay weekly emails (not every day like some others) and you're entered into a free Kindle contest, too.

Free ParTay Super Free Friday! For One Day Only, March 28, The Great Big Fairy will be

FREE! If you like The Great Big Fairy you might also like these other FREE books:

Living with The Hubster, He's the banjo-playing captain of her life's ship. By Judy S. Watts.

The Paris Caper, A rogue detective will do anything to catch the sexy international thief he's fixated upon. By Nina Bruhns.

The Huntress, When they first met, he shot her. Catch The Huntress. By Dorothy McFalls.

The Bedeviled Heart, A Scottish Earl finds love in the medieval highlands. By Carmen Caine.

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