She's Back!

It's been awhile since I posted. Can't believe it's been so long. I feel guilty, which is silly. The blog doesn't care, and I've been busy working on other stuff.

So what's been going on these past months? Well, for one thing, I had two books published by Highland Press. I co-wrote Saucy Girl with my cousin Annmarie Ortega. We launched it at RWA's Spring Fling conference last spring. Saucy Girl is a cute, funny, exciting book about a woman who falls for the handsome widower next door who might or might not be a serial murderer who killed his former wife. Or maybe he's just a nice, lonely guy.

Read the book to find out. And please write a review for it if you read it. It's impossible to get people to write book reviews, but people read those things at Amazon, etc. before deciding whether to buy a book. It's a challenge.

The other book that Highland Press released recently is called Dead Girls Don't Get Fat. It's hilarious and sexy and exciting. This one is about a school teacher who has to move back in with her parents when her ex-boyfriend steals her identity and all her money. It adds insult to injury when she's bitten by a demon and is transformed into a flesh-hungry monster. Her new status makes teaching a little more challenging than it used to be, too. Again, you should read this book and buy copies for all your friends. And write (hopefully good) reviews. Lots of reviews.

I'm trying to do some book promotion for these titles which is hard because it's challenging to compete with all the books that are out there. But for every great book, there's a great reader who would love it, right? So I'm working on getting Saucy Girl and Dead Girls out there on Twitter and Goodreads and of course this blog. And it would be great if the books got some good reviews. Lots and lots of book reviews. Hint, hint.

Happy reading!

Dead People!

Sometimes I worry about dead people. In horror movies, zombies are pretty creepy because of their single-minded focus and complete inability to be reasoned with. Individually they're not a huge threat, but in large numbers (and they always come in large numbers), they're a force to be reckoned with. Vampires as depicted by Hollywood aren't terribly scary. Sure they're merciless murder machines, but it's usually over quickly and they're still human enough to maybe be talked out of killing a victim. In fact, if movies and TV are to be believed, vampires are more interested in falling in love and spending ridiculous amounts of money on humans than slaughtering them.

Ghosts freak me out because I actually believe in them. I make a point of avoiding movies and TV shows about hauntings or general ghost activity because they might prevent me from ever sleeping again. I worry about someday buying a house that's haunted, then not knowing what to do to get rid of it. You've got to disclose that to a potential buyer, right? And they'd probably insist that you drop your asking price. Talk about scary.

Anyway, speaking of scary things, I've just released a new book. I started writing it years ago when my husband and I moved into a house located next door to an old cemetery. (Much as I worry about dead people, old cemeteries aren't scary – just cool.) On one of our many walks through the graveyard, we noticed a headstone that marked the grave of a woman who had been born 150 years ago. Oddly, it didn't have a date of death carved on it. She had to be dead, but why wasn't her year of death on the gravestone? It piqued my curiosity, and I started doing some research to figure out what had happened. Unfortunately, I knew nothing about genealogical research, so the whole thing was a learning experience.

This new book of mine, called Graveyard Kids, is the fictionalized account of my search to figure out what happened to the tombstone's owner. It's a fascinating story that I tell from the perspective of a seventh grade girl who's living at the cemetery because her father is the graveyard's caretaker. And I might have added a little vampire intrigue to keep the readers' interest. The book is available at Amazon in both hard copy and Kindle versions, and it's also available everywhere else as an ebook. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Happy reading!