Guest author Kerri Nelson: A legend in my own mind

Kerri Nelson discovered her love of writing at an early age and soon became a columnist for her local newspaper winning the Outstanding Young Journalist of the Year Award for her efforts. After a fifteen year career in the legal field, Kerri fulfilled her lifelong dream of publication and is now an award winning multi-published author of nearly every genre under the sun (and moon) and also writes young adult fiction under the pen name K.G. Summers.  

A true southern belle, she comes complete with a dashing southern gentleman and three adorable children for whom she often bakes homemade treats.  Kerri is an active member of Sisters in Crime and Romance Writers of America as well as numerous chapters including Futuristic Fantasy & Paranormal Writers and Celtic Hearts Romance Writers, of which she is president. 


Kerri is giving away a Fall Goodie Bag to one commenter on this post. For details on entering her GRAND PRIZE Kindle giveaway, see below.  



A Legend in my Own Mind

My latest release entitled Courting Demons is categorized in the Urban Fantasy genre.  What is Urban Fantasy?  Well, by definition, it is a novel set in a city that contains paranormal or fantasy elements.  My book is set in a city (albeit a small city/suburb of Atlanta) and does contain many paranormal and fantasy elements - and some romance too, although the romance elements are secondary to the other story elements.

This is an extremely popular genre in the marketplace these days.  I’m sure that most people can think of several books or movies that fit nicely into this category. But what are these things called…Urban Legends?  Are they somehow connected to Urban Fantasy?

Well, not really…by definition…but in a way—they too are fictional stories or folklore which often contain paranormal or fantasy element although the settings may vary. In fact, when I was doing research for this post, I found pages' worth of websites devoted wholly to Urban Legends. They make the perfect scary story for telling around the good old camp fire. Here are a couple that I found that stood out for me (courtesy of urbanlegendsonline.com):

The Curse of the Faceless Woman

Lost in time, this story is told, about a woman, dark and bold. 
She walks the streets on a foggy night, with a hood on her head to hide from sight.


Her story starts one summer’s eve, beside the lake an evil deed. 
A thief stole her daughter’s life, and filled her soul with pain and strife.


On a moonlit night along the shore, two young lovers walked and more. 
In each other’s arms that night, they talked of love and held on tight.


In the morning they were found, their hands and feet with rope were bound. 
Eyes wide open a vacant stare, their souls are gone and no one’s there.


The police did search for the one, an evil deed to be undone. 
In vain, they search to no avail, their efforts weak, lost, and pale.


A mother’s hear broken and splayed, a debt to justice went unpaid. 
She walked the streets at night alone, to make the sinners pay and atone.


She searched the shores by day and night, a vain attempt to make things right. 
And then one early morning dawn, she was found her spirit gone.


On foggy night’s times untold, she walks the streets dark and bold. 
She only walks the streets at night, within the fog to hide her flight.


All clad in black she walks alone, an evil soul she’ll make atone. 
She walks among the star-less night, sometimes seen beneath the bright streetlight.


All children know to be aware, least they see her standing there. 
They hurry home at the approach of night, sure that they would die at her sight.


So in the night if you should see, a woman in black, listen to me. 
Look not at her face I say, or with your soul you shall pay


Teke Teke

Teke Teke is the ghost of a Japanese schoolgirl who roams the train stations of Japan. In life, this girl was a scaredy cat and people were always playing practical jokes on her. One day at the train station after school, her friends decided to put a cicada, a bug that appears in the summer in Japan, on her shoulder. Sadly, this turned out to be a fatal prank. She was so scared she fell off of the platform and was hit by a shinkansen (the fastest train in Japan) and her body was split in two.

Now she is haunting the train stations of Japan, dragging herself with her elbows and sometimes her hands. She is known to kill people with her scythe and split people in half with the harsh speed of the Shinkansen to make her victims feel her pain. Her name is “Teke Teke” or “Bata Bata” because of the noise she makes when she is dragging herself around.


What do you think of Urban Legends and do you have a fave one you’d like to share?  I’m giving away a Fall Goodie Bag to one commenter. Details on how to enter to win the GRAND PRIZE Kindle at the end of my “Dark Days of Demons Tour” located here.

Thanks for hosting today, Liane.  Hope everyone will chime in with their own fave legends.

©  Kerri Nelson 2011

Courting Demons by Kerri Nelson

Paisley Barton was already having a bad day before she turned her husband into a rat. First, she was fired by her boss and then came home to find hubby in the shower with a naked blonde chick. They say that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned but this break-up may just unleash hell on Earth when Paisley casts a spell of vengeance against her philandering husband.

After her spell casting inadvertently opens a portal between dimensions, Paisley finds her family home transformed into a nightly courtroom for settling disputes between demons of the underworld - and she’s the judge! If that’s not enough, she’s got to deal with a charming, ancient demon named Camden who wants to be her personal bodyguard while trying to explain her husband’s sudden, mysterious disappearance to sexy police Detective Dalton Briggs.

But Paisley will show them all that an everyday working mom is better equipped than most to deal with mystical mayhem…and with a tempting demon hottie and a flirtatious young detective vying for her affection, she soon learns that being single again isn’t so bad after all. 

“When a wronged wife turns her cheating husband into a rat, you know you have to keep reading! Kerri Nelson offers up a lot of fun and wild magic in Courting Demons!” --Bestselling author, Linda Wisdom, Demons are a Girl’s Best Friend

Available wherever books are sold!

Read an excerpt

Publisher link—free gift available with purchase of print copy—while supplies last):

Amazon.com

Read more about Kerri’s books at her website:  www.kerrinelson.com 

Follow her on Twitter here:  www.twitter.com/kerribookwriter

Visit her industry blog here:  www.thebookboost.blogspot.com

Best of luck on your book tour, Kerri!

October giveaways

We're giving away four titles on Novel Spaces this month. To enter, leave a comment on this post indicating which book(s) you're interested in, or alternatively you may leave a comment on our Giveaways! page. Good luck!

October Giveaways

Hot Fun in the Summertime by Chicki Brown (Contemporary women's fiction. Digital - Kindle copy only)
Texas Twilight by Caroline Fyffe (Western historical romance. Digital.)
Tastes of Love and Evil by Barbara Monajem (Paranormal romance. Digital or paperback.)
Hot Girlz by Marissa Monteilh (Mainstream. Trade paperback.)

 

Halloween Fiction

With Halloween just a couple of days away, it got me to thinking about some of my favorite Halloween books and others worth noting.

Hallowe'en Party: A Hercule Poirot Mystery by Agatha Christie is certainly I've enjoyed. (Of course, everything Agatha wrote was wonderful). When a teenager is murdered at a Halloween party, Hercule Poirot is asked by a visiting mystery writer to investigate.


The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury is another good Halloween treat. Eight boys are out Halloween night to meet friend at a Haunted House and are taken on journey by mysterious character named Moundshroud.


Halloween Night by R.L Stine. A killer is on loose on this scariest of nights. Part of Stine's Point Horror Series.


Ghost Girl in Shadow Bay by my alter ego R. Barri Flowers, is not a Halloween novel per se, but is does contain ghosts, a haunted house, nightmares, a killer, and plenty of scary moments. It is now an audiobook, along with eBook and in print.


Other Halloweenish books I'd recommend, include the Twilight Series by Stephenie Meyer and the Frankenstein Series by Dean Koontz.


What are your favorite Halloween novels?

Show the love

There are three reviews on Amazon for my first book, Adventure at Brimstone Hill.

I am painfully aware of this because I just released the third edition and spent some quality time with Amazon getting the reviews moved from the old to the new edition and also linked to the Kindle edition. The folks at Amazon were probably wondering why I even bothered!

Having come face-to-face with the paucity of the reviews on my books, I have begun a major campaign to get more reviewers to make their comments online.

Why is this so important? Liane Spicer has discussed this before and a friend of mine who is an author claims that reviews are how readers show their love for authors.

There are millions of books available on Amazon. Readers need some way to make that decision to take a chance on an unknown author. One thing that persuades me to try a new book, apart from recommendations from a friend and a price that is low enough to seem risk free is a thoughtful review with an honest ring. Even negative reviews are useful as what someone else finds unappealing (for example, a strong Christian message), I may think is just the right thing. If I come across a book with no reviews, I am likely to move on without buying it.

So, how am I (clearly unsuccessfully) working to get more reviews?

Well, there is the obvious, Whenever someone makes a positive comment on my books by email or verbally, I try to get them to put it in writing on Amazon. Clearly this is not working!

I tried a giveaway, a free copy of my Adventure At Brimstone Hill Activity Guide to anyone posting a comment. This has yielded me one comment, which is actually not so bad in the scheme of things.

I have also been working on getting "professional" reviewers to comment on the book. At first I would look on Amazon for reviewers who clearly gave thoughtful reviews of similar children's books, look at their other reviews as an indication of whether they wrote frequent reviews and if so, to try to find a way to contact them. This was a time-consuming process as you can imagine, but thankfully I also found an interesting (I am not yet able to comment on the effectiveness) blog which lists reviewers along with some information on their preferred genre and other details. The list is long and many reviewers do not accept electronic copies of the books so I will have to mail a physical copy, however, it is certainly more effective than my first approach!
http://www.stepbystepselfpublishing.net/reviewer-list.html

How do reviews sway your buying decisions? Have you found a successful method to increase the number of reviews on your book?

Research in motion

Researching for a novel today is much different from a few decades ago. Back then an author had to travel to the physical location. He/she had to learn the cultures, customs, and language of the people where the novel was set. Researching involved spending days in the stacks at the library combing through books and papers, or reading several different encyclopedias.

Today, with the easy access of the internet, research is much different….easier, cheaper. A simple Google search can gain an author access to many things the encyclopedia could not. With Google Earth, an author could get a street view of a location with amazing details—no travel necessary. Pictures could provide settings with one click and blogs and local radio broadcasts via the internet can give a realistic assessment of the day to day lives of people in many places. Yes the possibilities are endless.

In spite of that, there are times when research is needed. Dan Brown, author of blockbusters like “The DaVinci Code” and “Angels and Demons”, does painstaking research for his books. The internet cannot fill in the gap for the types of books he writes. There are many books that deal with topics that require much more than an internet search can provide … even romance books.

For me, a romance writer, I have kept my research rather simple by writing about contemporary people in contemporary settings. I have stuck to familiar occupations and cultures, and kept settings in places that I have lived or visited for extended periods of time. My reason for that is simple: I have read novels set in the Caribbean that just did not ring true for me, a native of the Caribbean. They didn’t capture the spirit of the place and were filled with stereotypes.

So for my current WIP I chose a place that I was already familiar with. It is set in a Dominica, a Caribbean island that I have visited on numerous occasions for extended periods of time. Being married to a native of that country, I am familiar with the customs and cultures, and even though I cannot speak the local language, I am familiar with it.

I began writing that novel late this summer, though I’ve had the outline for almost a year. My timing was no coincidence. It was carefully planned to coincide with my pending visit to that country. You see, I am going to do some research on location. No Google Earth or blog sites or tourist sites for me. I intend to verify locations, places, and capture the essence of the island … the feelings the place invokes. Now my trip wasn’t designed for research. It was simply a visit to my husband’s home country to celebrate his parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. But the timing is ideal for this current WIP, and by beginning the novel before I visit the island I can identify the voids and shortcomings in the manuscript and fill them in when I get there.

So yes, in a short while, I’ll be making that journey to do “research”, the type of research that’s best done on location. In my next blog post, I’ll let you know how my research went.

How do you conduct research for your novels?

Purposeful Art

I've decided to take fellow Novelnaut Shauna up on the invitation in her last post to further explore the blog's theme for this month: Should fiction have a purpose?

Last week I attended a lecture where that question was thrown out to the class in a slightly different form: Should art have a purpose? At one point the lecturer urged me to decide one way or another. I could not. Initially I found the ideal of Aestheticism, or art for art's sake, profoundly appealing. Why should art, including fiction, have any underlying purpose? Why set out to be didactic, or political, or moralistic? Why not just be wildly or quietly creative with no motive but to express an innate impulse to make something new, beautiful and utterly useless?

As the discussion progressed and I gave the issue more thought I decided that whether the artist/writer intends it or not, all art has purpose intrinsically: entertainment, yes, but also humour, exploration of ideas, places, eras and peoples, "life, the universe and everything" - or to put it succinctly, it explores all of what it means to be human. The audience brings myriad reference points to the story and each member takes away something unique and lasting. Every book I've read has made an impression, even the ones I've flung against the wall.

What makes a creative piece 'fluff'? The fact that a book was written for entertainment alone does not devalue it; I've found value in some of the most light-hearted, frivolous, agenda-free stories. So here I go, trotting over to the Aestheticist aisle once again. I submit that what debases a work of fiction is not the absence of an overt purpose on the part of the writer but whether, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the story is well or badly written.

The Purpose-driven Novel

The theme at Novel Spaces this month is, "Should novels have a purpose beyond entertaining the reader?" My answer is an unqualified, "Yes!"

It's not that I'm against novels entertaining people. In fact, I believe the most important function of a novel is to entertain. A novel that doesn't is a failure.

But a novel that does nothing but entertain is like cotton candy—without substance and a waste of time and money.

Fluff.

At minimum, I believe a book should have a theme. It can be as simple as "Love conquers all" or "Justice wins in the end " or "Honor above all," themes that run, respectively, through many romance novels, mysteries, and Westerns. It can be something controversial, such as "Fate controls one's destiny" or "People control their own destinies." Without theme, a book has no meaning or resonance, no power to last.

But books can offer a much richer experience than mere entertainment and a theme that satisfies. I have conscious purposes for almost every story and book I write. I put in situations to make my readers think, as well as messages, ideas, or information. Sometimes themes show up on their own, and when they do, I go back and develop them further.

Here are five of my several purposes for my 2009 novel Like Mayflies in a Stream.

1. Like Mayflies in a Stream is set in ancient Mesopotamia about 2750 B.C.E. Most historical fiction readers, like most fantasy and science fiction readers, want to know what it's like to live in another place, time, or society. I obliged them by having scenes set in the city, the wilderness, and a farming village. The characters are as true to their time as I could make them, as are the customs and physical settings. The reader both has an excellent time reading about the characters' adventures (I hope) and learns something about the world's first city and its people.

2. My book was inspired by the world's first epic poem, "The Epic of Gilgamesh," which is about the world's first superhero and his exploits. The tension between wildness and civilization is a thread woven intricately throughout the poem. This theme deeply resonated with me: I am only happy when living in a city with lots of music, good food, and art, yet I am also only happy when I am part of the natural world. I have never completely reconciled those two sides of my nature.

I put into my novel conflicts between wildness and civilization at several levels: between wilderness and village; between wilderness and big city; between Gilgamesh, the world's greatest king, and Enkidu, a wild man brought up by gazelles; between the sophisticated priestess Shamhat and the rustic trapper Zaidu; and within the complex man Gilgamesh himself.

The reader gradually realizes (again, this is my hope)  that we 21st-century Americans are not so different. We still struggle with civilization. We want civic order and prosperity, but we want to do our own thing and make our own rules. We want to breathe clean air and hear birds sing, but we also want to live near our jobs and enjoy the safety of having our houses behind flood walls and wolves well away from our backyards.

3. Shamhat, priestess of Inanna (the goddess of love), only appears in a few lines in the "Epic of Gilgamesh." I made her the heroine of Like Mayflies in a Stream and gave her many ethical dilemmas. Her duties conflict, and she has to puzzle out whether she owes her greatest loyalty to her king, her city, her temple, her family, or herself. She makes choices—but I am still pondering whether they were the right choices. I hope readers are too; I hope reading about Shamhat's decisions will help readers when they have to make similar ethical choices.

4. I have a pet peeve: The collateral damage left behind by macho heroes in books and movies is often glossed over or even presented as entertainment. Audiences cheer, for example, when a movie has a car chase or an explosion that kills many people. Gilgamesh is the prototype for this style of hero.

I thought the world needed a feminist perspective on the epic's portrayal of Gilgamesh as a hero worthy of honor, as well as on his many modern-day successors. (Why do I consider this a feminist issue? Women usually suffer the most in stories with these kind of heroes.) In Like Mayflies in a Stream, Shamhat witnesses the destruction Gilgamesh causes, and she takes on the heavy burden of trying to protect her family, her friends, and her temple.

5. I have another pet peeve: Some authors who want a  woman character to be strong make her rude and sarcastic and bossy, put her in black leather boots (high-heeled, of course), arm her heavily, deprive her of female friends, and have her be as violent and create as much havoc as Gilgamesh and other macho heroes.

I am a strong woman and I am (almost) nothing like that, and I worry about the influence of so-called "kick-ass heroines" on young people's self-concepts and on perceptions and expectations of women. So I  write heroines who are strong in the way real women are strong and who are true to their societies and times. That's how I wrote Shamhat. Hadley Rille Books specializes in fantasy novels and historical fiction with strong, realistic heroines, and Shamhat and Like Mayflies in a Stream found a welcoming home there.


I invite more Novelnauts in their October posts to take up the question of whether fiction should have purpose. I have strong opinions that it should, and I believe that done well, purpose in fiction makes  fiction stronger, not weaker.

What do you Novel Spaces readers think?


I'll be blogging again at Novel Spaces on November 6. Between now and then, I'll be attending the World Fantasy Convention. I hope to tell you a bit about it on November 6 and more in my November 21 post.

If you've read this far, thank you. This post was long, and I appreciate your reading it to the end. I hope it gave you much food for thought.

—Shauna Roberts