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C.J. Hart
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Author Feature: Amanda Strong

3/13/2016

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Hidden Monster by
Amanda Strong

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​For seventeen-year-old Samantha Campbell, running back woods trails usually means freedom from her less-than-perfect life. That is, until the day a morning run turns into a living nightmare. When Samantha wakes up to find herself bound to a dirty, pinstriped mattress, she realizes she’s anything but free. With a masked abductor repeatedly injecting her arm with an unknown substance while holding her captive, Samantha tries in vain to find out what he wants, but he refuses to speak. Until the day he breaks his silence and his twisted words are worse than what she’d imagined. He promises her one day she will fall in love with him but the best part will be that she won't know who he is... until it's too late. 

Finding herself freed from captivity, with her captor still at large, Samantha is on guard against everything and everyone around her. Unfortunately, walling up her heart proves difficult when eighteen-year-old Blake Knightley moves in next door. When Samantha starts experiencing strange changes within her, she realizes her captor may have left her more damaged than she originally thought. Now she must turn to Blake for help in order to unearth the truth behind the monster who started this all... or risk experiencing worse things than just falling in love.

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EXCERPT:

​Step, step, breathe, breathe, step, step, breathe, breathe. My shoes kept a steady rhythm with my burning lungs. I veered off my regular path, opting to hear the crunch of the leaves beneath my feet. The image of my mom’s disapproving face was ignored as I leapt across a gurgling brook. Breathe, breathe, crunch, crunch.
    If I wasn’t mountain biking, I was running. I craved speed and freedom. I had to escape the oppressive perfection of living in the Campbell home. Thinking of my two older sisters, one model and the other a star volleyball player, my legs lunged, lengthening their stride. Not good at team sports and terrified by cameras, I knew my family felt my height was wasted on me. 
    Even Jeremy gives me a hard time. 
A stitch pinched my side. Breathe, breathe. I knew I was going too fast, not pacing myself right. Something was urging me on, pushing me to scale the hill before me, and plunge deeper into the woods. I refocused on my rhythm, my inhales and exhales, and my body realigned itself, goose bumps shooting across my arms. There it is. I’d hit my second wind and I surged on, not caring where my feet led. 
     It’s freedom! Complete and--
    There was a rush of air, a whistling in my ear, and a sting to the back of my arm. Instantly, I tumbled to the ground, sliding into the damp morning dew. Cold dirt filled my nostrils as blackness enveloped me. 

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     I heard my own labored breathing long before I realized I was somewhere in between awake and asleep. Forcing my eyes open, I gasped. My senses took everything in at once—the smell of wood shavings, the scratchy ropes on my wrists and ankles, and the pressure of the mattress beneath my body. I screamed, but the empty room with wooden floors and stacked logs for walls was empty. No one burst through the door in the corner.
Realizing it was useless and only making my throat raw, I fell silent. Panic flooded me. How did I get here? I pressed my thoughts to retrace my steps, but my mind felt sluggish. My last memory was running in the woods just before sunrise. I could still feel the burn from the autumn air hitting my lungs. Now the solitary window painted a yellow rectangle on the floor. The room felt stuffy. It’s probably late afternoon. But is it the same day?
The minutes rolled slowly into hours, the silence suffocating. What had my therapist said to do when I was scared? Breathe deeply and don’t panic. It was too late for that; all the years of therapy after my childhood accident were rendered useless. I’m drowning all over again. Only this time, it wasn’t water filling my lungs but pure fear and terror pressing down on my chest. I gulped in dry air, my eyes burning with tears.
No one’s coming to save me. A sob escaped me as the real horror of the situation washed over me. I’m tied up. Someone knows I’m here. What would happen when they came back? As the last rays of light were snuffed out by the shadows of the night, that someone came through the wooden door.

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AUTHOR BIO:

Amanda Strong is the author of two paranormal, young adult series: The Watchers of Men and Monsters Among Us.  
Amanda has loved to spin tales since childhood.   As a child, it was not uncommon to find her hiding in some random corner, scribbling away in her spiral bound notebook, with her bright pink glasses.  You could say some things have not changed. 
Amanda signed with Clean Teen Publishing in the fall of 2013 and has been blown away by the love and support she’s received from her readers since.  Both series have been Amazon best sellers.  Hidden Monster, book one in Monsters Among Us, finished as a Finalist in the 2014 USA Best Book Award: Young Adult Category. 
When she isn't writing, you can find her chasing her three rambunctious children around the house and spending time with her wonderful and supportive husband. On some occasions you can still find Amanda with her not-so-pink glasses, hiding in a corner reading her favorite latest fantasy novel, or working out only to blow her diet by eating chocolate. 
Find Amanda on: Facebook | Twitter | Website
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Author Feature: Becky Doughty

3/11/2016

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A Light in the Dark

Book Two of The Fallout Series

Click on the cover below for a preview!

Play with fire, you just might get burned...

On stage, Tish Ransome sings about heartache and passion, betrayal, and about love gone wrong… but she knows very little about any of it in real life. The rockstar princess who swears like a pirate—literally—is loved and adored by family, friends, and fans alike, and her world is filled with good things, her future bright.

Behind the scenes, however, trouble is brewing. When Tom, her best friend and co-founder of the Marauders, tells her he's leaving the band after graduation, Tish must find a new wingman to step into Tom's hard-to-fill shoes. The moment she hears Sebastian Jeffries play, she knows he's the one.

Yet with Sebastian comes a taste of the things Tish only writes about, and she can't resist the lure of the tortured artist. Sebastian, likewise, is drawn to Tish's brilliance, but like a moth that hovers too close to the flames, is he killing himself just to be near her? Can Tish save Sebastian before it's too late, or will he pull her down into the darkness with him?

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Fun Facts About Becky Doughty

  • I’m part chameleon. Not because I can change colors on demand (which would be AWESOME!), but because I can move my eyes independently of each other. It gives me a serious eye-strain headache, but it’s entertaining. I may post a video one day ….
  • I live in Southern California, but I can’t stand the sun. It burns my eyes and makes my skin turn glittery–er, I mean, red. I should live somewhere like Ireland or Scotland where it rains a lot. Or Forks.
  • Speaking of Ireland, I ran The Dublin Marathon in Dublin, Ireland, in the year 2000, to celebrate the new millennium. It rained the whole 26.2 miles. Chafing and blisters commenced.
  • I am adopted. It’s pretty cool. I come from nowhere, anywhere, and everywhere.
  • Speaking of being adopted, one of my favorite pastimes is people-watching. In airports, and waiting rooms, etc., I pretend to read, but really, I look for people who might be my long-lost birth relatives, then I write reunion scenes in my head. Someday, I might publish those reunion stories.
  • I still read aloud to our 20-something year-old married children after dinner during our weekly Family Night. We like all things Middle Earth, Otherworld, Time-travel, and non-Muggle. We keep it real, baby.
  • I have a secret that I can’t tell you.
  • My children have some incredible tattoos.
  • Book stuff: I love to read historical fiction, but I usually write contemporary fiction. I keep threatening to put out a nonfiction book … but I kinda like the whole … ahem … ‘creative license’ thing with fiction. Baby, I was BORN TO LIE! (Bumper sticker, anyone?)
  • I grew up in the boonies, so we had no television. But one of our supporting churches sent a shipment of all the Nancy Drew books ever published to us for Christmas one year. No, I wasn’t Nancy. I was George.
  • Another of my favorite novels while growing up was Louis L’Amour’s Down the Long Hills. I first read it because my dad loved Louis L’Amour, and I wanted to be like him. (Dad, not Louis. Except for the writing a gazillion books and making a living at lying part.) I still have that original hard-back copy in my library.
  • Speaking of Louis L’Amour, I’m what would be considered a “Pantser” – I write by the seat of my pants. I usually start with a general story or plot idea, but don’t map much out until I’m actually writing the book, and even then, my characters usually take off on their own. I’ve never written a book that ended up the way I originally thought it would. So what does that have to do with my buddy, Louie? This is from his memoirs: “One day I was speeding along at the typewriter, and my daughter—who was a child at the time—asked me ‘Daddy, why are you writing so fast?’ And I replied, ‘Because I want to see how the story turns out!’”

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Connect with Becky Doughty

Subscribe to Becky's Newsletter

Visit Becky's Website

Visit Becky's Facebook Page

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All the Way to Heaven (Book One) is FREE wherever ebooks are sold!
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Author Feature: Sherry Ficklin

3/8/2016

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Playing with Fire
by Sherry Ficklin

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One brilliant young hacker. 
One experimental government aircraft. 
One chance to keep it all from going up in flames. 
Still recovering from her troubled past, Farris is no stranger to change. But when the military transfers her father across the country to an experimental aircraft squadron, settling in to a new life is the least of her problems. As a series of apparent computer glitches threaten the security of the fleet and the blame falls on her father, she decides to put her computer skills to use digging up the truth. Soon she's drawn into the perilous world of a hacker who is determined to ground the fleet—at any cost. 
When all signs lead to someone close to her as the mastermind, Farris will have to burn more than bridges to get to the truth. She will have to risk her fragile new life to uncover the identity of the cyber criminal before they can escalate from harmless tampering… to all out murder.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Sherry is a full time writer from Colorado and the author of over a dozen novels for teens and young adults including the best selling Stolen Empire series. She can often be found browsing her local bookstore with a large white hot chocolate in one hand and a towering stack of books in the other. That is, unless she’s on deadline at which time she, like the Loch Ness monster, is only seen in blurry photographs.
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Sherry also writes New Adult fiction under the pen name Ranae Glass and is a contributing writer for fangirlish.com. You can find her at her official website, www.sherryficklin.com, or stalk her on her Facebook page www.facebook.com/sherry.ficklin.
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Author Feature: Lila Felix

3/5/2016

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Lightning Kissed 
by Lila Felix

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​Colby Evans can leap from one country to the next in a heartbeat. She can see every sunset in every time zone in the same day. She can travel across the world in a flash. She defies gravity and physics with every breath she takes. She's tested her abilities and found them limitless. 
She is the lightning. She is Lucent. And nothing can stop her. 
Except him. 
Theodore Ramsey isn't supposed to be able to flash like Colby. The power of travel is passed on from mother to daughter in their people. Except once in every hundred generations. 
Theo is the one. 
He can flash like Colby. And it makes him a target to their enemies and to himself. His abilities change everything he knows about life and throws his future into an uncertain tangent. In fact, the only thing certain in his life is the love he feels for Colby. 
Their love defies time and space and has been the only constant thing in their lives since childhood. But even their infallible love will be stretched to its limits. 
She will risk her life to protect him. But he will risk everything to protect them all.

EXCERPT:

​I flashed straight into his room after asking the people at the front desk which one he was in. His parents always seemed to get adjoining rooms or cabins, no matter how old Theo was, but I asked anyway. He stood on the balcony in jeans—his shirt flapping in the ocean wind. I could no longer differentiate between habit and desire with him—my feelings were blurry. I swayed in his direction involuntarily, but stopped myself. We were no longer together—I’d made sure that I’d stayed away from him so the Resin, the Synod, and the government were all kept at a distance.
    Because they were constantly on my trail.
    “Took you long enough,” he remarked, still facing the beach.
    I blew out an emotionally loaded breath. “I needed time to think.”
    “And to what conclusion did you come?”
    Leave it to Theo to sound cavalier at a time like this.
    He turned around and my breath caught in my throat. His dark brown hair was gelled in a completely clean-cut style out of another time. Even as a child, he emitted an air of vintage class. He wore suspenders at the age of ten. In high school, he wore button-down shirts and slacks, the exact opposite of the other boys with their sports jerseys and ragged jeans. He was James Dean meets David Gandy, but with glassy gray eyes. He was my every desire and it pained me not to run to him, bury myself in the security of his embrace, and let him tell me it was all going to be okay. It was not going to be okay. So many suspicions and insinuations were flitting through my mind. And none of them ended well.
    “I don’t even know, Theo.” My voice cracked as I said his name. It showed my weakness for him. 
    I hated my weakness.
    “Come here.” He motioned with open arms. 
    I screamed in response. He wasn’t just going to hug me and think all of this would go away. “No. I’m pissed off at you. How are you doing this? You’re gonna get caught. And then what will I do?”
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Lightning Kissed is available on all platforms!
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AUTHOR INTERVIEW:

​What would you be doing right now if you were not an author?
If I were not an author, I would still be editing books for indie authors and loving every second of it.

5 years ago: what were you doing?

Five years ago, I was working nights at Wal-Mart in their cash office, counting tons of money every night.

Do you have a certain writing ritual?

My writing ritual is to listen to some inspiring music for about a half hour or read some before starting. After that, I try to write whenever I can, sneaking in the time gaps in our schedules.

What has been the toughest criticism given to you as an author?

My toughest criticism has been that my endings aren't always what the reader expected. I see this as a criticism and a compliment. I don’t really want to write what everyone expects. 

Ever fangirled over another author? Who was it?

Absolutely! I’ve totally fan-girled over so many authors. I'm first and foremost a reader after all! It was actually Shelly Crane. I flew to Florida to see her and wigged out hard.

Is there an author you'd like to meet?

I would love to meet Jay Asher. 13 Reasons Why is a book that continues to impact my life every day. It makes me think about who I am and how I treat others in every situation. He’s a brilliant author. I’d probably faint.

Biggest writing pet peeve?

My biggest writing peeve is that horrible little word count box at the bottom of the page. Once I learned to make that sucker go away, I was in heaven.

​Do you read other's reviews of your books?

I read other’s reviews of my books in the first month of their release. After that, I check them every 6 months or so. It can be painful and humbling to see what others think of our books.

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    About C.J.

    Author, daydreamer, animal lover, bookworm. I write YA books, love cupcakes and am addicted to crime shows.
    And I drink lots and lots of coffee.



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