Showing posts with label Art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Art. Show all posts

Thursday, October 17, 2019

Happy Release Day Book Tour, #Excerpt, & #Giveaway ~ A Bestiary Alphabet by Felix Eddy ~ Illustrated Guide to Mythological Creatures #Mythology @MirrorWorldPub


About A Bestiary Alphabet:

From Al-Mi’raj to Zlatarog, The Bestiary Alphabet features a different mythical creature for every letter of the alphabet, lovingly drawn and illustrated by the talented Felix Eddy.

Like the medieval bestiaries of old, the Bestiary Alphabet collects mythological creatures from all over the globe. Some are household names, others are delightful obscurities, but all will move and inspire you to dream of a world that you have never seen. Felix Eddy’s trip through the alphabet will show you the magic, mystery, power and beauty in all the things that might have been.

A Bestiary Alphabet is an illustrated guide to mythological creatures for a general audience.


Follow the Tour:


Book Details:

Hardcover: 92 pages
Publisher: Mirror World Publishing
Publish Date: October 17, 2019
ISBN-10: 1987976614
ISBN-13: 978-1987976618

Read an Excerpt:


The al-mi’raj is a Middle Eastern beast that looks like a very large yellow rabbit with a long black horn growing from its head. Sometimes called simply a-mi’raj, they are said to kill and eat horses, and are very deadly to humans. They are featured in Islamic poetry and said to live on a mysterious island somewhere in the Indian Ocean.

Highly skilled traveling witches were the only ones able to destroy these creatures and prevent them from returning to an area. In fact, it’s likely that these “highly skilled traveling witches” actually spread rumors of these creatures so they could use their “skills” to exterminate them— for a price. They didn’t have to stretch the truth too far, though, because the al-mi’raj was possibly based on real life “attack bunnies”.

There are a few diseases that afflict rabbits, causing lumpy growths or making their fur matt up painfully, appearing like horns, or like bumps where a horn fell off. These rabbits are often driven mad with pain from their twisted and matted fur, which can make them unusually aggressive. While it’s doubtful that a rabbit could kill a horse, even if it was mad with pain, certainly a rabbit that was acting insane and rushing at people would cause some real alarm— perhaps enough to start the myth of a monstrous horned rabbit.

Horned rabbits have been translated into modern use by a number of fantasy writers and game companies. They are featured in video games and role-playing game books, both as monsters and as humorous creatures, called “horned rabbits” or “bunnycorns” or “unibunnies”.

Purchase Links:


Meet the Author:


Felix Eddy is an artist from Upstate New York. She is the illustrator of several books, including Dragonbait, The Time Traveller’s Resort and Museum, Bark’s Mulberry Socks, and Witches Witches Everywhere. You can find out more about her work at www.felixeddy.com.

Enter the Giveaway:



Tuesday, September 25, 2018

Halloween Poetry and Art by Victoria Danann ~ Haunted Halloween Spooktacular ~ Read an Excerpt from Stalk ~ #PNR #Giveaway



“My mother says I must not pass       
Too near that glass;         
She is afraid that I will see        
A little witch that looks like me,
With a red, red mouth to whisper low 
The very thing I should not know!”   
         
“Alack for all your mother’s care!      
A bird of the air,   
A wistful wind, or (I suppose   
Sent by some hapless boy) a rose,              
With breath too sweet, will whisper low"        

Stalk
Victoria Danann

Genre: paranormal romance

Publisher: 7th House, Imprint of Andromeda LLC

Date of Publication:  October 21, 2018

Number of pages: 388


Word Count: 82,000

Cover Artist: Victoria Danann

Tagline: Every breath you take.

About the Book: 

The first coming of chaos. Twelve thousand years ago, members of a more advanced race crossed into our dimension when the barriers temporarily collapsed.

Trapped in our world, the aliens, who were also shifters, built structures that eventually caused the great flood and the sinking of Atlantis.

Some of the alien DNA survived in progeny that carried an untraceable shifter gene, dormant until awakened by mating with a full blooded werewolf.


Read an Excerpt: 


Shortly after the incident, the event came to be known as May Day simply because it occurred on the first of May. The term would be forever after altered to represent the pandemonium that followed the dimension overlap that left so many stranded. It worked because it was a good choice because of disassociating the incident with high emotion.
Some from other places were left here. Some that belonged here had disappeared and, even though every city had a centralized location where loved ones could post photos and leave flowers or burning votives, everybody knew somebody who had lost someone. And the world had been turned on end in the blink of an eye.
The conventional wisdom about withholding news panic-inducing news from the public was bypassed. Cover up was impossible in this case and overnight, everyone knew that we experience reality alongside many others, invisible to us. Everyone also learned conclusively that other species exist in those realities.
One of the species that had been stranded in this dimension were canine shifters, werewolves as they were sometimes called in fantasy. Being disinclined to panic, the werewolves, each individually, used their cunning to quickly assess their circumstances and determine what was required to survive. Utilizing their innate talent for strategy, and seduction, they were able to identify missing humans who were a reasonably close match to anthropoid bodies, were without families and were, basically, antisocial. Being shrewd as well as cunning, they made matches with candidates with financial assets.
New lives could be built in a new world without money, but money could go a long way toward building walls of privacy and providing the one thing they needed most, after company, of course. That thing was territory. Freedom.
The government made it almost too easy by publishing an open database of the missing and requested that corrections be made if someone listed was present and accounted for. Each shifter made his choice then notified the government that they were not missing. They were sorry for the misunderstanding, but had been sailing in the Caribbean or fishing in the Gulf or on an archeological expedition in the Amazon.
By the time the dust of the catastrophe began to settle, seven shifters had found each other through a curious intersection of tech and primeval instinct. Each of the seven, while dealing with his own personal disorientation and sense of loss, quickly identified the Pacific Northwest as the most suitable habitat on the North American continent. Millions of acres of national parks and wildlife reserves was attractive. That, and the cooler temperatures, made the locale almost ideal as shifter temperatures run a full three degrees warmer than humans.
It took only a few weeks to come across each other. Shifters in wolf form can cover great distances. In so doing they came across the scent of others who were similar to themselves if not identical, but definitely distinctive from wild wolves. And each felt immeasurable relief to find others. For social animals, abject solitude would be a sentence to hell.
That was one of the reasons why Ken Sahabe was admitted to the pack without hesitation even though he was not a canine, but a spotted hyena. The pack decided Ken’s social and hunting needs were close enough and admitted him.
The hard wiring of pack behavior hadn’t changed for millennia. However, the language used to describe certain facts of pack life was altered for modern times so that it seemed more politic. For example, rather than saying the alpha decided, which was true, the thought would be expressed as ‘the pack decided’. In Ken’s case, though the actual wolves didn’t have a real vote, they accepted him like one of their own species.

About the Author:


Eight times #1 Amazon Paranormal Romance Bestseller

OVER ONE MILLION BOOKS SOLD

New York Times and USA Today Bestselling author, Victoria Danann, has won the prestigious Reviewers’ Choice Award for BEST PARANORMAL ROMANCE SERIES the past four years in a row! Click follow to get notifications of new releases.

Knights of Black Swan – BEST PARANORMAL ROMANCE SERIES (2013, 2014, 2015, 2016)

A Summoner’s Tale – BEST PARANORMAL ROMANCE NOVEL (2013)

Moonlight – BEST VAMPIRE/SHIFTER NOVEL (2013)

Solomon’s Sieve – BEST VAMPIRE NOVEL (2014)

Falcon – BEST PARANORMAL ROMANCE NOVEL (2016)

In addition to the brave and beautiful vampire hunting knights, Victoria writes other paranormal romances that often touch on scifi/fantasy along with contemporary bikers for those who love it when the bad boys are soooooo good.

Victoria co-hosts the popular ROMANCE BETWEEN THE PAGES podcast which can be found on itunes or at www.romancecast.com. She and co-host, Riley J. Ford, interview the biggest names in romance every week. Ever wonder about the personalities behind your favorite books? Some of them just might surprise you with their interests, wit, lifestyles, and sense of humor.






Enter the Giveaway:

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Friday, December 1, 2017

Book Review ~ Midnight Labyrinth (Elemental Legacy, Book #4) by Elizabeth Hunter @EHunterWrites


About the Book:

He’s one human caught in a tangled maze of theft, politics, magic, and blood.
 In other words, it’s just another night.


Benjamin Vecchio escaped a chaotic childhood and grew to adulthood under the protection and training of one of the Elemental world’s most feared vampire assassins. He’s traveled the world and battled immortal enemies.


But everyone has to go home sometime.


New York means new opportunities and allies for Ben and his vampire partner, Tenzin. It also means new politics and new threats. Their antiquities business is taking off, and their client list is growing. When Ben is challenged to find a painting lost since the second world war, he jumps at the chance. This job will keep him closer to home, but it might just land him in hot water with the insular clan of earth vampires who run Manhattan.


Tenzin knew the painting would be trouble before she laid eyes on it, but she can’t deny the challenge intrigues her. Human laws mean little to a vampire with a few millennia behind her, and Tenzin misses the rush of taking what isn’t hers.


But nothing is more dangerous than a human with half the story, and Ben and Tenzin might end up risking their reputations and their lives before they escape the Midnight Labyrinth.

Book Details:
Print Length: 382 pages
Publisher: Elizabeth Hunter
Publication Date: November 7, 2017
ASIN: B07583KBQP


Midnight Labyrinth was everything I'd hoped it would be and more. Ben and Tenzin far exceeded my expectations and when it comes to Elizabeth Hunter, my expectations are high. Why? Because she's damn well worth it! Everything she writes is phenomenal. Elizabeth Hunter is, by far, one of my all-time favorite authors. She has writing skills that just draw the reader in from the very beginning. When I was originally approached to review the ARC of A Hidden Fire (Elemental Mysteries, Book One) in 2011, never did I expect as much literary power to come from within the pages of a brand new author and every single book I've read from Elizabeth Hunter since then carries that same power. I have been mesmerized by her books from the very beginning.

Ben and Tenzin have moved away from Gio and Bea (who make a cameo - well, their voices do) to New York. When Ben happens upon a distraught museum patron and learns that in a sequence of three paintings previously owned by her family pre-WWII, one was lost. Ben can't help but jump at the chance to help a damsel in distress. Tenzin is wary about the story surrounding the painting but she's all for the excitement involved in figuring out where the painting went. What starts out being a good deed, however, may prove to be Ben and Tenzin's undoing.

I'm a bit behind in the Elemental World (working full time and getting college degrees tends to do that to person) but I'm glad I was able to read Midnight Labyrinth. Despite that, I fell into the book headfirst, not having read the previous Legacy novellas, and I wasn't disappointed. I know I missed some key information by not being up-to-date in the series but I still left the book completely satisfied - well, not completely satisfied - I wanted more, but that's just me being greedy and has no reflection on how I actually view the book. The book was exciting, frustrating, engaging, and down right awesome.

This novel continues the world building, character introduction & development, and back story (as deemed necessary). None of these criteria are overwhelming or lacking in detail. All of Elizabeth's novels reach deep within my emotional center and manage to trigger reactionary responses. These types of books are my favorite. The emotions don't have to always include tears; it is just the ability to invoke proper emotional responses to scenarios being played out.

Everything about Midnight Labyrinth just works. The novel is interesting and draws the reader in from the start. The writing is fluid and cohesive, never becoming wordy or confusing. The pacing of the story is excellent and isn't too fast, slow, or boring. The main and supporting characters are well written, developed at the proper speeds, and likable. 

I highly recommend anything and everything from Elizabeth Hunter.

My Rating: