October Book Picks

Are you in a spooky mood? Getting ready for Halloween? I have some fun supernatural reads to tell you about this month. I wanted to begin by sharing news about the new anthology Spirited. The proceeds from the sell of this book support 826 National, which is an organization promoting literacy. All of the authors, including myself Maria V. Snyder, Judith Graves, Kitty Keswick, Shannon Delany, Jill Williamson, Linda Joy Singleton and many others, have donated their time and stories to the cause.

These are young adult ghost stories told from a multitude of points of view. My story is a contemporary setting in Finland, and it’s based on Norse mythology. Yes, there is at least one dead Viking in the story. (Smile) The e-book version is out this month, with the printed version available on March 28, 2012. Support a great cause and read some fun, spooky stories.

Now let’s chat about some of my friends...

One of my favorite peeps in the world is Kristen Painter. She and author Jax Cassidy were instrumental in helping to launch my career in fiction. Now it’s time I returned the favor. I cannot tell you how much I love her new book Blood Rights. She has created such an amazing world and heroine for her new series.

"Blood Rights came out of an idea I’d been carrying around with me since college," Painter says. "I’d had a vision of this mysterious woman in a slinky white dress that dipped low enough to reveal a gold tattoo on the small of her back. On the surface, this woman seemed trained to serve and charm, but underneath that, I knew she was so much more. That woman became Chrysabelle, my heroine, and her story became the House of Comarre series."

The lovely C.C. Hunter’s new book is Awake at Dawn. Just about every teenager deals with some sort of an identity crisis, a reality that C.C. Hunter remembers all too well. "When I was sixteen, I was totally clueless about what I wanted to be when I grew up. I didn’t even know who I was." C.C. relies on these memories to flesh out her heroine Kylie Galen in Awake At Dawn, the second book in C.C.’s YA paranormal Shadow Falls series. But Kylie’s identity crisis isn’t just about figuring out who she is—she needs to figure out what she is. And fast.

Brightarrow Burning is Isabo Kelly’s latest. "It started from a snippet of dialogue that came to me when I was trying to think of a new story idea," she says. "I didn’t even know what genre the book would be (it ended up being a fantasy story). But when I heard the hero asking the heroine when she was going to stop trying to kill his brother, I knew I had a fun conflict to start a story."

Phoebe Conn absolutely owns the crazy title of her newest book, Defy the World of Tomatoes. "The zany title comes from a packing crate label from the 1930’s," Conn says. "I saw plaques with the labels at an art fair and thought, ‘My God! DEFY THE WORLD TOMATOES’ is the best title I ever heard. Now all I have to do is write the book.’"