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.

To enter to win a Kindle and $25 worth of Amazon gift cards, simply visit FreePartay.com and
sign up for our newsletter!

Time travel for less than $2000

That's right, folks. I time traveled for under $2000. See where this Alaskan author wound up? That's an 18th century tall ship, sitting in Port Jackson, in the area we now know as Darling Harbour.

Maybe I'd better clarify. The money was for my plane ticket from Phoenix to Sydney, Australia. I truly and honestly time traveled, but I went forward a day (I never experienced January 8, 2014). My intent was to go back 235 years, sort of. I flew to the land where the First Fleet arrived in 1788 in order to experience the terrain and climate those convicts, marines, and sailors encountered when they landed in the 'unknown to white man' region.

If you don't know about the First Fleet, I'm sure you will after reading my book, Fairies Down Under. It's still in process, but I will tell you that it's about a 21st century time traveler, wrongly convicted of a trivial crime, who winds up being transported from England to Australia rather than hang from the gallows.

And that ship in the picture above: that's the James Craig, the only full time tall ship sailing the world today. It's huge, takes quite the crew to sail it, and bounces over the waves like a carnival ride. Both make me sick, but I'd go back to Sydney in a heartbeat (and the 24 hour flight). I think I'll wait a year or so, though. I want to have my book completed for my next journey. Everyone Down Under knows about the First Fleet, but they don't know yet that a time traveler helped them survive that first year...

The Great Big Fairy is the story that precedes Fairies Down Under. If you haven't read it, here's a link. I really think you'll enjoy the story of another time traveler, the 21st century 6'7" red head who goes 'home' to Revolutionary War era North Carolina, to the time traveling family he left behind.

NOTE: I already know of at least one way to time travel. If you know of others, please share. I promise not to tell anyone else...

Hollywood and Vine to Darling Harbor?

Hollywood and Vine? Yup, we have that intersection up here in Alaska, too...Wasilla, to be exact. It’s not my jumping off place, but it’s close.

And, in case you didn't know, Darling Harbor is in Australia: Sydney, New South Wales.

The airfare and hotel are booked and paid for. January 12th, 2014, I will be in Sydney. After taking a day to adjust to the time difference and the 23 1/2 hours spent in the air or in airports, I’ll be walking the same beaches as did those First Fleeters (is that correct terminology?): the convicts and mariners who first set foot on Australian soil to establish a colony for England in 1788. 

I'm going south (just about everywhere in the world is south from where I live in Alaska) to research FAIRIES DOWN UNDER, the fifth book in THE FAIRIES SAGA. 

I’ve read volumes, both online at websites and in paper and e-books, but I want to ‘feel’ the air in January, smell the trees and dirt (arboretums, here I come), feel the ocean beneath my feet. You see, even though I am very prone to seasickness, I will even sail on a big ship, the 1874 barque James Craig, to get as close as I can to being in the shoes of one of my time travelers.

Oh, and it will be deep into our Alaskan winter, with only 6 hours of daylight, when I go down to the middle of a Sydney summer. Counting down, just over 100 days left!

Free stuff can be priceless

No, it's not an Easter gift (well, not really), or a bribe to encourage warm spring weather to come to Alaska  (I doubt anything would work for that!), or an homage to the writing muses.

I'm giving away free copies of the e-book version of The Great Big Fairy: Back Again (part one of three parts). It's a painless, priceless way to see if you like my style of writing. I figure that if you like it, you'll tell others and (hopefully) will give me a good review or thumbs up, encouraging other readers to purchase my books. Hey, what can I say? I'm a capitalist at heart, and would love to quit my day job and write for a living.

And you get to find out how to time travel...at least according to the HOOTT (Haviland Opinion Of Time Travel)!

A free, extended preview of part two (TGBF: The Bartered Woman) is included at the end of part one.

Tell your friends and Facebook buddies, Twitter to all (please), that Easter weekend is their chance to snag a 'Great Big Fairy' for free.

click below to go to Amazon:
Free 'The Great Big Fairy: Back Again (Part One)

(Here I am, giving a print copy of the full book to Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski. All three parts of The Great Big Fairy is available as a complete e-book from Amazon, or hard copy from Amazon and other booksellers)

Thanks for serving, Senator Murkowski!