Bloodroom Review

Horror writer Carl Alves gave my vampire novel a cool review, calling Bloodroom's characters"compelling" and saying it "presents some interesting elements in vampire lore." Thanks Carl! Check out the review and then explore Carl's books. I'm currently enjoying his novel Blood Street on audiobook.

Win Books on Valentines Day!

My vampire novel, Bloodroom, is an extremely dark and twisted romance. For Valentines Day, I give you an excerpt where two vampires, Julian and Swisher, argue about what love is.

Join their conversation on Valentines Day, 4PM CMT at the For the Love of the Written Word Facebook event.

What's your definition of love? Tell us for a chance to win one of these great prizes:

1) Bloodroom -- in audiobook
2) Bloodroom and The Bad Death -- a two-fer e-book bundle 
3) Night at the Demontorium: The Complete Anthology -- e-book ARC (or if hardcore horror isn't your thing, an e-book of one of my novels)

See me at 4PM CMT Valentines Day. I can't wait to hear what love means to you!

Bloodroom is now an Audiobook!

Who could resists those eyes! Wait'll you hear him speak! Yes, Julian Mouret now has a voice, courtesy of award-winning narrator, Paul Heitsch. Bloodroom is now a downloadable audiobook. You can listen to a sample at Amazon, Audible, and iTunes.

For a synopsis and character bios, visit my website's Bloodroom page.

Audiobook reviewers, contact me at http://naimahaviland.com/ for your review copy.

 

Lighting Pallas: A Photoshop Trick

I recently altered some photos for a cast-of-characters animation on my site thebaddeath.com (the landing page for The Bad Death, the first in a historical trilogy and the second in the Bloodroom series of vampire novels). This blog post explains some tricks I used in Photoshop to make an image more atmospheric. First of all, meet Pallas, as pictured in the image I got from 123rf.com. Pallas is the best friend of the trilogy's heroine, Anika. Pallas is either a victim, a predator, or both. To know for sure, read The Bad Death  ;-)

Once in Adobe Photoshop, I used the Apply Image feature to replace the black backdrop to an image of an outdoor setting. To learn more about this step, read my post called A Photoshop Trick for Book Marketing. After Applying the image to Pallas, I decided to change the lighting on Pallas' image. You see the image above shows the woman in warm lighting. I wanted Pallas to look moonlit because in The Bad Death, Pallas is almost always sighted at night.

To cast a blueish moonlight glow over Pallas, I selected Image from Photoshop's top menu, scrolled the dropdown menu to select Adjust, then chose Variations at the bottom of Adjust's dropdown menu. The Variations pallet visually shows color adjustments. I chose "More Blue" and "More Cyan" to give Pallas a blue cast that would imply moonlight.

I wanted to make the moonlit sky more dramatic, so I copied the layer, cut out Pallas till I had only the sky on the copied layer, then used the blending feature of that layer to alter the sky. The blending feature causes the layer in question to react against the layer beneath it to produce a visual effect. If memory serves, I chose the Hard Light blending option. You can see in the third image how Pallas' background has more contrast between highlight and shadow, resulting from my choice of blending option.

So, there you have it, boys and girls!

The Bad Death on all eReaders

Previously an Amazon exclusive, The Bad Death is now also available at iTunes, Kobo, and Barnes&Noble.com. Captivating, sensuous, and terrifying, The Bad Death, at once a sequel and a prequel to Bloodroom, unfolds against a background of eighteenth century human bondage and southern gentility. Passion rules the heart but terror rules the night in this breathtaking tale of love, desire, betrayal, Gullah sorcery, and supernatural horror in the antebellum South. 
 

Thomas Jefferson, Single Parent

Thomas Jefferson, writer of the Declaration of Independence and 3rd President may have also been our nation's 1st hot dad (DILF?). When his young wife died; the grief-stricken man had infant Lucy, four-year old Polly, and 10-year old Patsy to raise. Due to a deathbed promise never to remarry, he remained a single parent. Lucy died in childhood. Jefferson, Polly, and Patsy clung tenaciously to each other and, though more often separated than not, remained in constant contact through letters. Jefferson set standards for his girls in education and deportment that were unusual for his day and appear impossible and unhealthy in ours. I give you a few parenting rules from Thomas Jefferson, with tongue in cheek:

No Casual Friday:  Jefferson instructed Patsy in one letter, "Be you from the moment you rise till you go to bed as cleanly and properly dressed as at the hours of dinner or tea. A lady who has been seen as a sloven or slut in the morning, will never efface that impression ..." Ouch!

Sources Cited Below Post

No Downtime:  Here's a typical study schedule:

• From 8. to 10 o'clock practice music.
• From 10. to 1 dance one day and draw another
• From 1. to 2. draw on the day you dance, and write a letter the next day.
• From 3. to 4. read French.
• From 4. to 5. exercise yourself in music.
• From 5. till bedtime read English, write & c. 

Of Course, I'll Always Love You, If ... Jefferson's instructions were at times given as a road map to his heart. In a letter to Patsy, he wrote, "I have placed my happiness on seeing you good and accomplished, and no distress which this world can now bring on me can equal that of your disappointing my hopes ...Keep my letters and read them at times that you may always have present in your mind those things which will endear you to me."

It Ain't Just a River in Egypt: What illegitimate children? What mistress? When Patsy and Polly lived at Monticello as young adults, it can't have gone unnoticed that his unmarried slave woman, Sally Hemings, only got pregnant when their father was home from Washington. The illicit relationship was never acknowledged. When it became a national scandal, the Queens of Denial visited Jefferson in Washington to provide a united family front.

As women, each developed her own way of resisting their father's demands. Patsy blamed kids and a troublesome husband for her lack of free time, and pointed to Lucy as being way more behind than she in keeping the pace. Polly seems to have adopted the slacker role to her advantage, basically throwing up her hands and saying, 'I know, I'm so lazy!' But there can be no doubt that the three of them were crazy about each other.


I thought it would be fun to create a similar relationship between The Bad Death's Julian Mouret and his much younger sister, Charlotte. She was three years old when their father died and left the fifteen year old Julian as man of the house (and therefore, its legal head). Raising a child to be the Ideal requires you to embody that Ideal, yourself. By the time we meet them in The Bad Death, Julian has achieved this. But what happens when the Ideal "parent" falls from grace? We'll see in the next novel, House of the Apparently Dead.

Sources: The Women Jefferson Loved by Virginia Scharff; The Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson edited by Edwin Betts and James Bear, Jr.; Thomas Jefferson, An Intimate History by Fawn Brodie.

A Photoshop Trick for Book Marketing

I have cast-of-character strips on my book web pages, bloodroomthenovel.com and thebaddeath.com. They give potential readers a chance to read bios of major characters. Also, the individual images give me visual aids to use in marketing my books. For instance, I'll post an individual character on Instagram with a provocative tagline and the web addy. Adobe offers a monthly subscription for Photoshop for less than $20/month, but you could probably find a good price on eBay or somewhere if you want to own it outright.

At left, you'll see the image I purchased at istockphoto.com has a dark background. Derek Murphy of Creativeindie Covers used this graphic to produce the cover for The Bad Death. At the time, I didn't have a large file of Derek's work. I used a jpeg of the cover in progress, pictured right. To change the model's brown eyes to my heroine's gold, I used Photoshop's marquee tool to select the gold eyes from Derek's small file and copied them into my large file, resizing them to fit my stock image.

Then I had to give my Anika the background Derek had. I have a graphic design background, but this trick is easy if you know where Photoshop's interface keeps the right tools.

Since I also bought the blue watery background from istockphoto, I had that large Photoshop image to work with. I opened that image in Photoshop and copied it into my working file. Copying into my working file automatically put the background on its own layer. On Anika's layer, I used Photoshop's pen tool to draw a path around her. See that thin light outline? That's the path.

When you click on the arrow in the Paths palette, a dropdown menu gives you the option to "Make Selection" of the path.

With the path selected, I clicked on Image in Photoshop's top menu. From the Image dropdown menu, I chose "Apply Image". At that point a palette popped up allowing me to select the layer containing the background.

TaDOW!

Ballet, Then and Now

Ballet figures largely in my novels. Bloodroom, a twisted romance set in today's Charleston, stars a vampire named Julian who's obsessed with a ballerina. The Bad Death, a vampire novel set in 18th century South Carolina, stars a slave named Anika who's possessed by the spirit of a modern ballerina. In The Bad Death, Julian is nonplussed (to say the least) when his field hand starts dancing like a prima ballerina and displaying some diva 'tude. Taking a writerly grand jeté through time required a ballet history lesson.

Arabesques, Then and Now

Under possession by the modern ballerina's spirit, Anika's movements look exaggerated to Julian's 18th century eyes. Today's "flexerina" had more in common with that century's acrobatic grotteschi in the lower brow commedia dell'arte, as described in Jennifer Homans' comprehensive Apollo's Angels. Compare 18th century prima ballerina La Carmago's arabesque to the modern version, right.

Anika had to dance demi-pointe (on the balls of her feet) because in The Bad Death's setting of 1788, pointe shoes weren't invented yet. Ballerinas wouldn't dance en pointe until Marie Taglioni perfected the art of dancing on the metatarsals of her toes (like the "neck", not quite the tip, of the toe). She was aided by extra stitching that stiffened the forward soles of her tight, soft satin slippers. Compare the old style of slippers with today's pointe shoes, below.

Ballet Sippers, Then and Now

I borrowed the left-side image from a student's terrific wiki-history of Marie Taglioni's impact. And see a signed pair of Miss Taglioni's actual slippers in an image that I was too cheap to pay for here.

Ballet Evolved  is a wonderful series of ballet history lessons in dance, featuring ballerinas from London's Royal Opera House. In this one, Ballet Mistress Ursula Hargeli leads four ballerinas in demonstrating innovations in dance through the centuries. In Baroque costume, Ms. Hargeli demonstrates that era's style of plié, pirouette, and port de bras. It's amusing to see the ballerinas, each at the top of her game in modern ballet, attempt these deceptively simple steps from the distant past.

Frenemies in The Bad Death

Charlotte, Jane Eliza, Eugénie

Oh, the complicated nature of female friendships. One's a murderess. One's using black magic to get pregnant. One's the product of her big brother's OCD. They're besties as long as no one tries to best the others. Each has a unique relationship to Anika, the plat-eye slaying heroine of The Bad Death. Here's a short bio on each.

Charlotte Mouret - As close to perfect as Julian could make her, Charlotte was educated in a schedule that never left time for idle (or independent) thought and married off at seventeen to the family's financial manager. Though Julian assures her their field hand is an idiot savant, Charlotte suspects there's something unnatural in Anika's sudden talents.

Jane Eliza Farmington - Cherished daughter of a retired slaver. Society beauty. Poisoner. All magic that turns a profit is good magic, and Jane Eliza's murders are just business. As a witch doctor's delivery girl, Anika must avoid becoming a toy in Jane Eliza's deadly games.

Eugénie Mouret - Julian's sister-in-law knows full well the power of magic. She'll pay any price for the charms that guarantee a pregnancy. Anika promised her a son destined for power. But if the magic works, who -- or what -- will live in Eugénie's womb?

Readers Vote on Book Descriptions

Congratulations to Aubrey Laine, the winner of a $25 Amazon gift card. To enter the raffle, Aubrey and other readers commented on which of two book descriptions for The Bad Death they found most compelling. I thought it would be fun to compile their input and share.

You can read the descriptions on my last blog entry. Option A was written by a professional book blurb writer I contracted with through The Serious Reader. I wrote Option B. Results: Option A won by one vote. I was really surprised to see the description I wrote fare so well. Hey, I can write a novel. But ad copy throws me like a wild horse.

Readers commented that Option A was "sultry and scary" and "matter-of-fact ...let's the reader know what he/she is in for". Others commented that Option B gave more insight into what the story is about, "drew me in", and "I would pick up the book if I read something like that!" Opposing viewpoints reminded me that one person's trash is another's treasure. For instance, while Option B snared some commenters, another said it was "poorly written". On a related note, when I get too scared of bad novel reviews, I remind myself how long the spectrum of opinion is. My novel, Bloodroom, has gotten 2 star reviews, but it's also gotten 5 star reviews. We humans are a diverse bunch!

Which description will I use? Both! Not at the same time, of course. Successful self-published authors change descriptions on books from time to time to see how each affects sales. That's what I'll do.

Thanks, all who gave their opinions. It's been a great help!

Dressing Julian

Julian Mouret is a vampire in my contemporary novel, Bloodroom. My upcoming historical vampire novel, The Bad Death, also stars Julian Mouret. Today I took the stock image photo I bought for the cast-of-characters animation on bloodroomthenovel.com and "dressed" it in 18th century clothing for the cast-of-characters animation to be featured on thebaddeath.com. This wasn't quite as fun as dressing a good looking man for real, but it was still pretty fun.

The hottie in the tux is from http://www.istockphoto.com/. The young gent with the pistol is from 123rf.com. My challenge was to get Julian out of his tux and into the sharpshooter's old-timey clothes. I used my Photoshop 6.0.
.I can just hear the hoots of incredulity. Yes, I use 12 year old software! It has all the features I need for simple image manipulation. If you don't have Photoshop, Adobe now has an affordable monthly subscription service for its creative programs.

I'll assume you know very little as I explain what I did here. I copied the sharpshooter into the tuxedo photo, which put it on its own layer so I could manipulate it independently. Really, the dressing trick amounted to resizing sharpshooter's body to "fit" Julian's. I used the pen tool to create a path around the cravat so that I could cut and paste it into its own layer. I used the transform tool to resize the cravat and torso.

To fit the the cravat "around" Julian's chin, I used the lasso tool to free select portions I didn't need and also used the eraser tool. Julian looks awfully fierce about his new outfit. Could be that moody sky; it fortells of vampires on the horizon. I cut the sharpshooter out of the sky and dragged the halves of the sky together. Then I duplicated layers and played with the layers blending feature till I got this moody effect. The blending feature in the Layers palette makes the layer in question "react" to the layer beneath it for visual effect. I include a screenshot of my layers. You'll see the selected layer has blending set to "Soft Light". If you mess with enough layers' blending features they all sort of affect each other, which can make for interesting results.

Sex Scenes: Are You Doing it Right?

Yesterday, I wrote a sex scene in my novel The Bad Death and added a little to a preliminary scene where they're lying in each other's arms and he's lost in her eyes. Sex scenes in a romantic storyline are harder to write than readers suspect (and people who don't read romance would never suspect how hard it is to write a romance well).

You can't use 'penis' or 'vagina' because that's too clinical. But you have to choose euphemisms carefully because if you get too inventive it sounds ridiculous. A romance I read recently used 'love muscle' for 'penis' twice. I'm sorry, not only is 'love muscle' not romantic, I don't think it's even accurate! 'Peachy globes' for a woman's ass is funny too. But I'm not against using the word 'ass' when the scene gets rockin', especially for the guy, who can be a little objectified in this genre. The sex scene starts out small (no pun intended) and builds to orgasm, which can't be described in porn-y terms. You can use the word 'came' after they've had sex a few times, but you usually can't get away with using 'orgasm'. Why not? I think it's because intimacy, itself, is a fragile state. You can be in bed with someone you're wildly attracted to and if it's a new relationship, a word wrongly spoken by either person can bring the whole house o' cards crashing down. So reading a sex scene in a romance; well, it's a fantasy and a non-fantasy word punctures the illusion. To use a non-sex scene example, it's like that episode in X-Files when Mulder was put in this hallucinatory state in which he'd been injured and Scully was nursing him very tenderly. Her attentiveness deepened the illusion because Mulder was secretly in love with Scully. But when she says something like (I dunno ...), "I hope you feel better soon, Fox" he snapped out of it. He told her later he knew right then it wasn't real because she would never call him by his first name, Fox. Like when I read 'love muscle', I giggled and the moment was lost.

Yesterday, I first set the mood for writing with music. In this scene, the mystery girl is very assertive so I created a Youtube playlist called 'Seducing Julian' with videos such as Chris Isaak's Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing. Then, I started out with word salad. The English language has thousands of sexy words and I can't keep them in mind all the time, so when I hear or read one I like I write it down. I then fold that piece of paper up and drop it in my salad bowl. To start a scene, I grab a folded slip from the bowl. Whatever that word is, I write a sentence using it. That gets me moving forward instead of sitting like a lump waiting for a stroke of genius. Write enough sentences with word salad words and pretty soon I'm thinking up words and sentences on my own. Then, I'm off! I know I'm onto something when I start getting turned on by what I'm writing.

So, I wrote my sex scene. It's a bit long and shaggy (two words you definitely shouldn't use together in a sex scene) but tomorrow I'll refine it.

Readers, what are your likes and dislikes about romantic sex scenes? Writers, what are your challenges and tricks? Has Fifty Shades of Gray changed the rules for sex in romance and paranormal romance genres?

Bloodroom Available for All e-Readers

Prima Ballerina Natalie Heyward never saw the man who attacked her and her partner with lightning speed and brutal force one moonless night. Physically unharmed but inwardly shattered, Natalie throws herself into Charleston Ballet's new performance, but the ballet's enigmatic benefactor, Julian Mouret, undermines her contrived defenses. Why does her attraction for this handsome stranger feel illicit? Something in him calls to her and she can't just pirouette away.

Will Bloodroom's damsel in distress live or die -- or both? Visit your favorite e-book retailer and find out. 

FREE Bloodroom Download

 Bloodroom will be a FREE download from Amazon.com Friday, April 27 and Saturday, April 28. So, for those of you with a Kindle or the Amazon Kindle app, have a great weekend and happy reading!

bloodroomthenovel.com

Bloodroom, my vampire novel of romantic suspense, has its own website: bloodroomthenovel.com. You can also access it on my website, naimahaviland.com. Learn more about Bloodroom's characters (the good, the bad, and the hot). Download the first four chapters, free. Naturally, you can buy the Kindle-exclusive e-book there, but come back soon for a chance to win an autographed copy of Bloodroom in paperback!

Bloodroomthenovel.com was designed by Clever Ogre, a Pensacola-based creativity shop with talent and style.

Bloodroom - an Amazon Kindle Exclusive

Bloodroom, a vampire novel of romantic suspense, quietly debuted this week as an Amazon Kindle exclusive and has since broken the Top 100 Bestsellers list in the category of Horror/Dark Fantasy. I am thrilled! I could write reams about my experience writing, working with a professional editor and book cover designer, or the influences that affected character development and setting for the novel. But for now, I'll let Bloodroom speak for itself, with its "back jacket blurb":


Turn to me, Natalie.

His mental call to her was dangerous, of course. Dangerous for him. Dangerous for her too, but she was in danger, anyway.

Look at me now.

Her gaze traveled slowly upward. With every moment, physical awareness stretched tauter between them. Her eyes wandered over Julian's face, over his slashing dark brows, down the ridge of his aquiline nose to his chiseled mouth.

“You're our angel!” The ballerina smiled.

The vampire smiled back.

She explained, “An angel is someone who makes an extremely generous donation to demonstrate his or her love for the ballet.”

“I do love the ballet,” Julian told Natalie fervently, his shadowed eyes fixed on her breasts. Their firm swells strained against the sweat-soaked fabric; buttons were undone to the moist hollow between them. God.

He didn’t have to kill her right away, did he?

Working with a Professional Editor

If you're undecided about hiring a professional editor before you self-publish, I strongly advise you to do so. My editor is Linda Wasserman of Pelican Press in Pensacola, Florida, USA. She strengthened my story so much. For instance, I never realized how many times I used passive voice, which resulted in weaker sentences. 

She sent me two Word document versions of my edited novel. One has all her edits accepted and Track Changes turned off (so I could read her version without distractions). The other has no edits accepted and Track changes on (so I could see each edit and read her comments on the purpose of the edit). I am going through the second version and accepting or rejecting each edit myself. For the most part, I agree with her. Every now and then, I reject an edit. Below are five examples in the form of "Before and After " edit comparisons:

Example 1: 

My original version:

Julian knew the candlelight was making his features ghoulish. It was darkening the hollows of his face, concealing his eyes and throwing his shadow up to the ceiling.

Linda's version:

Julian knew the candlelight made his features ghoulish. It darkened the hollows of his face, concealed his eyes and threw his shadow up to the ceiling.

Example 2:

My version:

“This annual gala I throw every year, Holiday Lights."

Linda caught the redundancy. Her version:

“This annual gala, Holiday Lights.”

Example 3:

My version:

“Yes,” Julian said a little awkwardly, “I am sorry."

Linda's version:

“Yes,” Julian said, disliking himself for feeling awkward. “I am sorry.”

Linda's embedded comment explained her edit as a suggestion: "I just threw the “disliking” in because it seemed to fit.  What do you think?"

I disagreed with her edit on the grounds of Julian's personality. Julian doesn't dislike himself for feeling awkward. He likes himself all the way down to his rotten core. His apparent awkwardness is an affectation. However, considering the rest of the narrative as context, it no longer seemed necessary to explain that or even keep the word awkward, so I deleted it entirely to make this sentence:

“Yes,” Julian said, “I am sorry.”

Example 4:

My version:

Flat, golden ringlets parted at the center of her high waxy forehead, clinging to her tiny skull and spilling to her waist.

Linda's version:

Flat, golden ringlets parted at the center of her high, waxy forehead. Clinging to her tiny skull, the curls spilled to her waist.

I rejected her edit because I like the flow of the original sentence and because when you take in someone's appearance, your vision flows from her head down, in one sweep.

Example 5:

My version:

Julian's nerves tightened until his long, white fingers became talons impaling the tapestry arms of his chair.

Linda's version:

Julian's nerves tightened until his long, white fingers transformed into talons that impaled the tapestry arms of his chair. 

Linda's comment explained her suggested change:  "I just wanted to offer this as an option."

I had written that his "fingers became talons" as a metaphor, but I liked Linda's suggestion –especially in light of the fact that a few paragraphs down, Julian does transform physically into something monstrous. I accepted her edit.

To sum up, I recommend spending the money and time on collaborating with a professional editor before self-publishing your work. Each individual edit may not seem like a big deal, but together they add up. The result is a stronger story that is still true to your vision.