VAMPIRES...they're are every where! In books, on TV, in movies, and in gossip around the water coolers at work or the cafeteria tables at school.
I got into vampires by accident. I picked up a book called SAFE HARBOR by Christine Feehan...not about vampires, but about SEVEN sisters with tons of paranormal powers.
Once you've read one book by an author than excites you, its natural to start looking at other books written by the same author...and this lead me to Ms. Feehan's Carpathian Series...a rich, many booked series.
I also got my hands on Sherrilyn Kenyon's, Dark Hunter's Series and Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse Series. (Others have come and gone along the way, but these were the ones I latched onto with a tenacity that kept me lapping them up for several years...although, honesty requires I admit I only STILL buy Christine Feehan.)
There are reasons why I moved away from some of these authors...and although I still am avidly reading/buying Christine Feehan, I am not crazy about so much of my hard earned book money ending up purchasing a dictionary of Carpathian dialogue, chants, and other non-necessary minutiae. Still, the stories are still rich enough to keep me coming back for more.
I ADORED Sherrilyn Kenyon and eagerly anticipated ACHERON'S story....but the woman we were directed to believe was his mate, somehow disappeared in the long awaited ACHERON release. When you've been eagerly following the breadcrumbs, it leaves a sour taste in your reading digestion when the promise luring you to hang in there, doesn't come to pass. Acheron's story was brutal, without the anticipated reversal of his fortunes.
My turning away from SOOKIE STACKHOUSE I cannot blame on Charlaine Harris' authorship...but on the idiot behind the TV series TRUE BLOOD. The TV show came into being many years after we, the fans, had been salivating over the trials and tribulations of Sookie, and Eric...I really did not like Bill...he was such a vamp nosing creep...but for reasons I'll never understand, unless it's because the actor who portrayed him became Anna Paquin's real life hubby, he on TV morphed into Eric's superior...Bill, who JUST became a vamp during the Civil War? YUCK!!!
The TV show RUINED the book series...but it goes farther...if you go in today to look up the Sookie series on Amazon, the series comes up as (SOOKIE STACKHOUSE/TRUE BLOOD) series. I was turned off to the series with the onset of Season TWO...so I knew the series ONLY as THE SOOKIE STACKHOUSE Series.
I understand the lure of seeing your work on TV or on the screen...but when your loyal fans have taken the years to BUILD you into such a success to give so much of the creativity that made us LOVE Sookie away puts (PAID IN FULL) to your dedication to your fans and our reason to stay loyal. I regret to say I could not bring myself to read new Sookie books, nor could I reread the ones I had...(I'd purchased the entire series in hard cover up until Season two shattered the foundation of the Sookie Series...ended up donating them to the local library.)
I gravitated away from vampires, with the exception of the Christine Feehan Carpathian Series (despite the over abundance of Carpathian fillers)...never intending to go back.
I found SHAPESHIFTERS....AHHHH another paranormal form of heaven...and luckily it was at the same time I got my Christmas Miracles Series published at Muse It Up Publishing, December 1, 2010.
I was afforded the glorious opportunity to read authors at the beginning of their magnificent climb to world-wide fan-dom
So who did I find?
Oh Be Still my lucky heart...My first...the incredible
BIG GIRLS DON'T CRY WOLF by Kay Dee Royal,
STARING INTO THE EYES OF CHANCE also by Kay Dee Royal, and its sequel
SAVAGE SMOKE
Guess you can tell Ms. Royal is a star on the cusp, and she also loves werewolves...Having read all of her books so far...I can promise one and all, you will too!
I'd be very remiss if I didn't tell you all about S.Durham...WOW!
THE LYCAN MOON was my first S. Durham werewolf tale...and of course it made me panting for MORE.
JAGUAR SUN... also by S. Durham, is phenomenal!
And then you can truly get into the ups and downs of the werewolfie world with Heather Kuehl. Didn't see this one coming...but OH WHAT A STORY! Worth the read!
WHITE WOLF
I thought I'd died and gone to wolfie heaven when Tierney O'Malley came to Muse and released HER first tale of furry whoop-t- doo
WOLF'S SOUL...fangs...oh yeah!
WALKER'S RUN by Mel Favreax...hang on a second while I lick my chops...
I haven't read this next one yet...just found it...but it looks SCRUMPTIOUS in a dangerous kinda way, also by Mel Favreux...
SHADOW WALKER
Werewolves...but Dragons are shapeshiting among us too...
Bryan Fields gave me a tremendous..."so you want to be an animal" story with his book...What a delightful read!
LIFE WITH A FIRE-BREATHING GIRLFRIEND
I could go on and on and on...but I'm a creature of habit...plus I get the rare privilege of getting to read the next author's books as they are in the making.
As you already know I have an EXTREMELY high standard when it comes to VAMPIRE tales...I'm constantly amazed by the creative brilliance of this next MUSE author's HEKATE'S WEB vampire series.
She doesn't waste time with elaborate...easy to forget titles...oh no...she goes right for the literary jugular and pours AB+ tales into you receptive heart, stoking your salivary glands, and giving you stories to drool over, so you'll beg for more. (JUST like a Master Vamp!)
Kat Holmes' HEKATE'S WEB SERIES...is waiting.
HIDDEN book one...30 years Hekate has kept Lilith percolating after seeing to it she got turned. WHY?
SEEKER book two...Atu must decode the ancient scrolls Hekate hands her vamps. They MUST find the horrifyingly powerful orb before the evil ones do. What lengths will he go to fulfill Hekate's mandate?
There you have it...my whys and wherefores about authors I adored but grew weary of, and the authors who are stirring my reading passions anew and why.
Follow the links to all the books above...you won't be sorry.
Forty Years ago I gave birth to you, but when I look at the cherished photos of my precious baby, wearing your onesie, sitting like a little potentate among your many first year Christmas gifts, your chubby face awed by the discoveries at the end of a
Toy phone truck, or see the magical charm in your huge grin and twinkling eyes, a lump the size of the Grand Canyon forms in my throat.
I love you so much, but life has not been kind to us, has it My Son? Somewhere along the way you stopped wanting me in your life, in your thoughts, and in your heart.
I made mistakes...monumental ones...ones I look back on and more often than not still can't figure out how I could have done differently.
My time is dwindling. When I look out at the world of today, it rivals the increasing thickening of my aging skin. I kept hoping we'd find a bridge and move beyond the inadequacies I brought into being your mom...but some strands cannot be unraveled from the massive ball of tattered hopes and dreams they cling to.
There's this break inside me silently bleeding into my soul with each passing day, and even though I have tried finding a common ground, I have to admit and accept the defeat
growling like an angry, untamed beast between us.
I love you my son. None of the deep fodder existing between us has changed that, but with my life inching its way to my
final hurrah, it is with a heavy,
so very heavy heart, I must accept you are lost to me until we are both beyond the veil where all the inconsequential is stripped away and
love is all that matters.
I don't know if you love me...I DO know you hold me in enmity...but I hope beneath the roiling disdain you have for me, a spark of the love we shared when you were
My Little Man still exists.
So on this, your fortieth birthday, I want, no need to say, I am sorry I only taught you to hate me, and I wish you love, joy, contentment, and peace.
Happy Birthday, Son.
Love You Forever and Beyond,
Mom
Seven months...in the overall scheme of things is not that long, but for me, the last seven months have seemed like an eternity.
I was never going to be rich, but with my daughter beside me, I'd learned the joy of contentment even though we managed to subsist on less than fifteen hundred a month.
Somehow despite the limits placed on us by such a small amount of income, we had saved whenever we wanted something outrageously expensive to us. Computers...yes we had two PCs and I'd managed to get Kat a notebook so she could stay on her bed and still do her writing where she'd remain safe should her brain decide to grab her in its seizure violence.
I'd also managed to get her another TV dedicated to her PS2. Our lives were "content"...and then we made the mistake of trusting people with an agenda we could not have fathomed until it was too late.
I suppose the technical term for them is "con-artists" Given the amounts others have lost to such people, I probably shouldn't be so hard on my foolishness...but after the life I'd lived I should have been con-artist proof...but always when they know the right buttons...how can one be con-artist proof?
She got to us through my daughter...treating her like the special and delightful young woman she is, but those who'd seen her seizures would not take the chance to get to know. (Some parents allowed their children to actually walk up to as she went about her business on her scooter in the stores and kick her while she traveled round wearing her soft helmet...a beacon showing she was "different.") Oddly her "difference" did not stop her from being a bit of a genius. I am the luckiest woman in the world because I get to share my world with her, but I see beyond the misfiring of her brain to the unique woman she is.
I don't know when she and her husband decided to destroy us...maybe it was when they learned of insurance policy. $100,000.00. Playing on my determination to make my daughter's life as comfortable as possible, they urged us to move down here. Here they promised, she could finally get the services I'd been trying hard to get her up there...unsuccessfully, and down here we'd have two drivers always available in case of emergencies and they'd take us wherever we needed to go and whenever we wanted to go. We could move in with them and pay no rent...after all they had a house one hundred percent paid off.
Air conditioning? (One of my daughter's worst seizure triggers is heat.) No problem they said...they had cetral air and ceiling fans in ever room. We would be a welcome relief for them to, because they have no one, since both her parent had died. Family. That's what we could all be for each other.
I forgot the first rule of life...if it sounds too good to be true it probably is. But I would have walked through a zillion beds of hot coals for my daughter...so we gave in burning all our bridges to move down here with them.
To say it didn't work out is quite an understatement...We were not told her husband has been diagnosed psychotic, nor were we told he has this love for things like guns and blow-guns. She also failed to tell us he's a pervert who like to "touch" you whether you want to be touched or not. (With our history the last thing we wanted was to be touched...something they both knew before we moved down.)
They also neglected to tell us they had twenty-one animals living in the house with them and the house was both filthy from her lack of cleaning it...even though she had a Dyson Pet vac with the roller.
Biting spiders, fleas, silverfish, geckos all lived inside the house with them. And with me having a hole in my left lung...breathing all that crap in would have killed me quickly...oh and once we actually got there, suddenly we were to pay them five hundred dollars a month to live in one small bedroom...and the scuzzy bathroom I had to sterilize when we first got there and was supposed to be ours, alone...we had to share with them...people who bathed only once in the two and a half months it took us to get the hell out of there.
They stole from us, though we can't prove it. We sent our precious few belongings we were able to keep through the mail, so we KNOW what we sent, and we KNOW what we saw in their storage locker, but they lied and told us they only found one box. Thousands of dollars of hard cover books, kitchen equipment, lamps, and more. Why they stole our stuff? We really don't know, but they did.
Bugs...there's no winter down here. We had a total of two days that got down to forty-three degree degrees, so bugs don't hibernate. Three grow to the size of mini-Sherman tanks and have hides stronger than anything the military has. Our kitties try to defend us, but these monsters fear nothing. Not even the Orkin man.
They mucked with our computers. The Netbook can't be used with MS Word. We don't know what they did, but they screwed with it quite effectively. My PC is nearing it's final days. Both of them mucked with it...and no I did not ask them to...but they do not require invitations...they just step in and do. Luckily, we have not seen or heard from them since, but do know there have been many new litters born...and now at learned 30 animals wallow in that filth. I don't know what the laws are here, but I can't imagine they'd allow that many animals in such conditions within the city limits.
She drives around with a magnetic sign attesting to them running what is basically a kennel in their home inside the city...hopefully someone will turn them in and bring those animals some peace. Until then, hell exists inside the confines of that cesspit and those two continue to lift their yardsticks and make those poor dogs run in fear and hide.
