News
Well, here we are, three quarters of the way through the year!
Big news - I have all my rights back from Ellora's Cave! I won't go into the details here, but it became clear that EC and I were no longer a good fit, and finally, I have the books back. That's nineteen of them. I plan to reissue them under the LM Connolly name, and one of the series is ready to go now.
I've had Pure Wildfire re-edited, and Ginny Glass of Wordsugar Designs did some amazing new covers for me. If you have these books already, then you probably don't want to buy them all over again, but this series means a lot to me. It was the start of a whole new career for me, my foray into paranormals, which started with the Department 57 series. These books are about - well, see below. I've put a short introduction, the new covers and a brief introduction.
Swanwick
I went to the Swanwick Writer's School in August. What a great time I had there! I met a bunch of people, including the writer of the Charles Paris series, Simon Brett, and the writer of the TV Detective series, Simon Hall. I went on some courses, and had a lot of fun, talking about writing for a week. A real treat.
New Releases and Excerpt
So, releases. I have to concentrate on Pure Wildfire this month, although there are more exciting releases ahead. I just keep writing!
Pure Wildfire is a four book series about a rock band with a difference. They are all shape-shifting firebirds, except for the guitarist, Aidan. He is the phoenix, the one and only.
I wrote "Sunfire" as a one-off, but the book proved so popular, that I wrote more. Aidan, the epitome of the rock guitarist, meets Corinne, a classical guitarist. She is under the control of her father, the manager of the band. I did have certain media types in mind when I wrote this!
The series is about each member of the band finds love, sometimes in very unexpected places. The series takes place during a long world tour, and each book is named after a Pure Wildfire album. But it's not all music-centric!
The books are coming out every week in September, one every week, and after that, a box set. The books have lovely new cover art, and they've been lightly edited, so although there is still lashing of action between the sheets, the language is a tad less graphic and the emphasis is back on the story.
You can see them here - http://lmconnolly.com/genre/coming-soon
They're up for preorder at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple iBooks, and all the other major outlets.
I've put the first part of Sunfire here for you, as a taster. You can read the whole of the first chapter on my website.
Aidan went over the upcoming meeting in his mind. He’d only promised to play on their manager’s pet project, a charity album, because of the news he had for John Westfall. Once Westfall knew Pure Wildfire’s second guitarist had walked out, there’d be fireworks for sure.
But then, who better to face fireworks than the phoenix? Aidan grinned and headed out the grove in the direction of the manor house.
Before John Westfall converted it into a business center, the house was a modest, but handsome, eighteenth-century gentleman’s residence. Now offices occupied half the house, together with the heavily soundproofed studios, the acoustics in them honed to perfection. People came from all over the world to use them. Nobody liked Westfall, but he was a good manager and the studios were a dream.
Buttery cream stucco covered the house, giving an impression of continuity through the ages, which Aidan knew was entirely false.
As he got closer, the coarse grass changed to fine lawn, barbered as short as velvet pile. Aidan tilted his head back and took a lungful of the clean, fresh air. Nowhere in the world had the same crisp newness as England in the spring, the fresh, clean air he loved spiced with a bite of the chill of winter just passed. Just back from a visit to the States, Aidan savored the pleasure of being on home ground again. He loved America, but whoever said there was no place like home was right. Come to think of it, an American said that. Aidan grinned. To each his own. No doubt Chris and Jake Keys, the bass section of the band, felt the same about their native Texas.
Very few places heralded a visitor’s arrival with a burst of Bach, especially played on the guitar. Drawn by the music, as always, Aidan changed direction and strolled toward the west wing, business forgotten for now.
The French windows lay open to the air, invalidating all the careful soundproofing in the studio behind it. Aidan reflected wryly that the staff always closed the windows when Pure Wildfire used the studios.
This was magical, a moment out of time. He stood outside, watching and listening.
A girl bent over a fine Spanish guitar, picking out a melody, spinning the counterpoint on the strings with agile fingers. Her long, straight dark hair fell over the polished wood and even her clothes seemed magical, the fine white embroidered lawn top and gathered skirt marking her as special, untouchable.
Unless Aidan was greatly mistaken, this was Corinne Westfall, the eldest of the three girls known in some circles as the Westfall Gold Mine. Since the age of sixteen, when the music press acclaimed her the latest wonder to hit the classical world running, Corinne Westfall dominated the classical music charts. Corinne’s and Aidan’s worlds crossed only through her father and the few times he’d seen her onstage, but now he wished he’d met her before. He’d never felt drawn to a human like this before, the music, her slender form, calling out to him to touch, to explore.
Aidan watched her fingering with a connoisseur’s eye. Her hands were large enough to form unusual bridges on the fret. He hadn’t considered her level of skill before, distracted by Corinne’s ingénue appearance. Onstage she wore skimpy clothes, which gave him uncomfortable feelings of underage sex the one time he’d seen her, curious to know what drew people to her performances. He’d turned away from the pictures on her many album sleeves. Looking at her now, mentally calculating her current age, he was pretty sure this was the effect Westfall wanted and he mentally labeled any man a slimeball who turned his daughter into an underage sex symbol just to sell a few albums.
But this girl was now a twenty-eight-year-old woman—no ingénue. But the memory of his distaste stayed in the back of Aidan’s mind, however much he tried to dispel it.
Today, Corinne Westfall was a purely lovely woman, lost in a world of her making. Hers and Bach’s.
There you go! It is so good to see the books back on the virtual shelves again!
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