Blog Posts

Dear Reader, I'm Sorry

8/3/2015

Dear Reader,

I'm sorry to bother you again but your job's not done quite yet.

I know, you thought your part was over, right? You read the books, you liked the page, and now you've pre-ordered the next one in the series. But you've forgotten one important thing: to write a review.

I know, I know, please just leave you alone! You enjoyed the book; why do you have to tell everyone about it. When did becoming a fan get so hard?

I think it's because we are living in a golden age of entertainment. Never in the history of mankind have such a large portion of the population had this much leisure time. And never before have there been so many choices of how to spend that time: outdoors, watching TV, reading books, crafting, playing video games, ect. With all those choices, the competition for how you spend your time is getting pretty stiff. And social media has started to erode the power of advertisers and corporations to tell us what to like, do, and enjoy, which is awesome! Power to the people! It's really a chance for the little guy to make a big difference.

And who doesn't love a good Cinderella story when it come to the American dream? The only catch is that we have a lot of Cinderellas trying to make it. This, of course, is awesome, too! Everyone who has a story to tell should be able to tell it. But this is what makes my chance at publishing success so small. Success that will make it possible for me to keep writing and sharing my work with you. There are just so many good writers out there sharing good stories. It's hard not to get lost in the crowd.

So I'm relying on you, dear reader, once again to help out. I'm hoping that you enjoy my book enough to tell your friends and family about it. I hope that it distracted you from your worries long enough to relax a little want to share that with others. I hope that it gave you just a little bit of fun when you were needing to pass the time and that you'd be happy to let others know that it was worth your time. And if you have a moment in your already hectic life, please fill out the review for any book that has brought entertainment to your life. It is the best gift you can give any author and I would appreciate it so much.

Sincerely,

Your Author

Never Tell Me the Odds!

7/31/2015

Today I'm channeling my inner Han Solo. My favorite space captain never wanted to know the odds of success and neither do I!

I have little over a week until the release of Mage Assassin (Book 3 in the Mages Series) on Tuesday, August 11th. I still have great hopes of making the bestseller's list!

I have wonderfully supportive friends, family, and fans. Yes, fans! I need those fans more than ever now.

Please spread the word about the Mages series! Together we can beat the odds and make Mages a success!!!

Pre-order Mage Assassin on Amazon today :)

Book Review: Stolen by Lucy Christopher

7/30/2015

Hello fellow Mages fans! My name is Anne and KR has invited me to write the occasional guest blog for kryaddof.com. I am thrilled to be included and to be able to share a bit of myself with all of you!

Several months ago, my friends and I decided to start a book club. I guess it was time to find a grown up reason to get together on a weeknight and have a few drinks! For me, it was the perfect excuse to step away from Netflix (seriously, I don’t think I needed to binge watch Gossip Girl in its entirety AGAIN) and dust off my Kindle. Reading has always been a big part of what I think makes me, me, so I was delighted to commit to reading at least one book a month. I also am the type of reader who doesn’t always stray far from her favorite authors or genres. Book club has prompted me to pick up books that I never would have given a second thought to before. I have decided to focus my guest blog on reviewing the books that I have come across through this experience.

The first book I encountered through book club was the Young Adult novel Stolen by Lucy Christopher. It told the first person tale of teenage Gemma, a girl who is kidnapped at a foreign airport while traveling with her parents. She is taken by a man who has been stalking her and planning her capture for years. He takes her to a remote location in the Australian Outback and over the course of her captivity; Gemma begins to show signs of Stockholm syndrome and begins to sympathize with her captor.

I am not always fast to admit this, but I am a mom. I take a lot of pride in not defining myself solely by this aspect of my life. I’m a lot of things: a friend, sister, wife, writer, beer lover, party girl, vampire fiction addict, karaoke enthusiast, and my favorite song is I Would do Anything for Love by Meat Loaf. My family room floor might be covered in toys, but when I look in the mirror I don’t see myself as “Mom.” I’m just Anne, and for the past five years Anne has also been a mom. I do have to admit that my mom identity deeply colored my experience with Stolen. I couldn’t get over the horror, as a parent, of a child being kidnapped while reading this book. I found myself desperately picking apart the details to assure myself that the book was completely unrealistic and could never in a million years happen. I mean, with airport security the way it is after 9/11, there is no way a child could be abducted at an airport, drugged, and then get on a different airplane with a fake ID, right? Please tell me this could never happen to my child or anyone else’s! Gemma, the narrator, also has very negative feelings about her parents in the book. She even thinks that her parents are probably not even looking for her, and if they are it’s just for the publicity. I get it. Being a teenager is hard. We all had those “nobody loves me, everybody hates me, guess I’ll go eat worms” feelings about our parents. There were plenty of times I felt completely unappreciated and misunderstood by my parents, but I also know that my parents would never stop looking for me if I were missing. I would never get over losing a child to kidnapping. I just couldn’t get on board with that aspect of the book. Maybe I would have had different feelings if I had read the book when I was seventeen.

The other thing I struggled with in the books was the Stockholm syndrome. I couldn’t place myself in Gemma’s shoes and feel what she was feeling. Every time she sympathized with her kidnapper, Ty, I wanted to scream at her through my Kindle. How could you have warm fuzzy feelings about someone who drugged and kidnapped you? I just couldn’t get Stockholm syndrome along with Gemma. A few of my fellow book club members were able to immerse themselves in Gemma and were able to see Ty as a sympathetic character. We had very different feelings about the book!

I can’t really say that I liked Stolen, but it was a fast read and I was very much intrigued by the characters and that kept me going. I wanted to find out if Gemma escaped Ty, so I was definitely entertained by the story. I would recommend this book to nature enthusiast (the author is obviously in love with the Australian Outback), those who enjoy Y.A. fiction, anyone who has an interest in kidnapping or Stockholm syndrome, and those who are looking for a book that devotes a lot of time towards the relationship between a boy and his camel. Wait, did I really bring up a camel in my conclusion with no further explanation? I guess you’ll have to read the book to figure that one out!

MAGES Blog Tour August 3-7

7/29/2015

Hello Bloggers!

It is less than two weeks until MAGE ASSASSIN (Book #3 in the MAGES Series) comes out on Tuesday, August 11th!

All next week I will be sharing all kinds of fun stuff about the latest installment in the MAGES series. I will have exclusive excerpts, interviews, and giveaways!

Please let me know if you are interested in sharing any of this on your blog by becoming a stop. It doesn't have to be a book blog to participate. I'd love to stop by and visit anyone interested.

Thanks! - KR

The Shame of Self Publishing

7/20/2015

"We don't read ebooks," my friend said awkwardly when I asked her about suggesting my book series for her book club. I laughed and said I understood, which I did, but that doesn't mean it still didn't sting a little. You'd think I'd be used to it by now. Some of my best bibliophile friends bash ebooks in my presence, reviewers banish self published books from even submitting to their website, and older people get that disappointed look in their eyes when they find out my books aren't printed on paper.

I get it. I really do. No one would trust someone who self-proclaimed herself a doctor or a lawyer without passing the tests set-forth by the experts in their fields before her. It makes sense that I would have to go through the powers that be of publishing to share my stories with you.

It didn't start out this way. It started with creativity. The need to tell a story. The fun of creating characters and the drive to see where they go. Then there was hope. The hope that someone else would enjoy my characters as much as I do. The hope that they, too, couldn't wait to find out what happen to them next. I had a few close friends read it, I fixed it up, and I finally sent it out to the wolves. Hope is never as high as when the first editor you query requests the whole manuscript.

I paid to print the entire 283 pages and ran it to the post office. I sent it with a post card that came back a week later. He got it. Then I waited. And waited. And waited. Nothing. So I politely emailed after three months and nothing. I never knew if the editor hated it or was eaten by a horde of horrible hamsters.

So I went to writer's conferences, learned how to write a proper query, and began looking for an agent. I spent hours researching, rewriting, and emailing anyone I thought would enjoy the books. Some agents I never heard from but others were enthusiastic. Pages they requested and prose they enjoyed. But they couldn't sell it they said. It was too late. A little thing called the Hunger Games had just come out and they had their fill of dystopian. One year earlier and my life may have been different.

There was other feedback, of course. My main character wasn't relatable. But I chocked this up to my third person narrative and the fact that she was a teenage girl who had high self-esteem. Who would want to read about that, right? I had no set genre with dystopian and fantasy but that, ironically, turned out to be its own genre later: urban fantasy. And even though it was a stated series there were too many characters. Hope was dwindling.

As the years passed, I continued to query as I wrote the second book. I queried them together but nothing. My first child was due and I still hadn't accomplished my dream of getting published before he was born. So I decided to do it myself. Had I not earned professional status through the hours of writing, research, and business planning I'd been through? I made a cover and published my first book on my 31st birthday. My son was born the next day.

I shared my literary accomplishment on Facebook. My friends and family were ecstatic for me. They were buying the book and they liked it. Hope was back. I quickly got the second one ready with my newborn strapped to me in his wrap. My friends gave me reviews and I thought I could really do this. But then the excitement wore off. I hadn't finished the third book and I got a bad review for not having professional editing done. That's when the shame started. Embarrassed, I stopped taking about it. But I didn't stop writing. And with the support of one of my best friends, I finished.

This time I have decided to go balls to the wall and have the entire series professionally edited. I have designed new covers. I have built my own website. Hope rides again!

All of my friends and family are supportive but I need to reach a bigger audience. I have found review blogs online and started to get that nervous query excitement again. But there it is over and over again: no self-published submissions. They had bad experiences with overzealous authors over bad reviews or there were too many grammatical errors or the covers weren't pretty enough. Had these reviewers never read a crappy book from a big publishing house? What a charmed literary life they must lead! And, really, when did it become socially acceptable to judge a book by its cover again?

Shaming someone for following their dream would never be acceptable outside of the snarky confines of the Internet. With musicians and film makers going the indie route for decades, why are we so hellbent on fighting writers doing the same thing? Why do we put so much trust in literary agents and publishing houses to tell us what is good enough to read? Shouldn't we be celebrating someone, anyone fighting to tell their own unabridged story? Can't we decide for ourselves if it is worth reading? Shouldn't we embrace new technology that gives a voice to anyone regardless of their financial status?

If it's about the paper, then print it yourself! Ebooks are arguably (energy consumption vs. deforestation) better for the planet and cheaper for for everyone. I'm not begrudging anyone owning a beautifully bound book. I love the smell and feel of old books. My mother is a librarian after all. That doesn't mean I can't enjoy some good electronic fare sometimes!

So I take it back. I'm not ashamed of my ebook series. I'm proud. I'm proud of the hours I spent crafting my characters and story. I'm proud of the times I typed into my phone late at night with a baby asleep on my chest. I'm proud of the editing I did during lunchtime when the kids are busy at the table. And I'm proud of the shameless self-promotion I do during naptime to keep my dream of being an author alive. I'm proud to be an indie author!

Dreams of Comic-Con

7/13/2015

Every year Comic-Con sneaks up on me. I think about how nice it would be to go visit my friend in San Diego and attend the nerdiest convention ever, but I never quite seem to get the planning done. Then July rolls around and the pictures, articles, and even never-seen-before Star Wars videos start pouring in and I get insanely jealous. I need to go to comic con!

I've never been the type to want to meet my favorite actors. Well, not since I was a pre-teen dying to meet Thomas Ian Nicholas. Since then, I've intrinsically known that I love the characters these people play and that illusion would be shattered to see them as ordinary people. Comic-Con is different. The actors know that, for once, it isn't about them. It's about the worlds created, the characters developed, and imaginations set free. The fans are king at Comic-Com. It wouldn't exist without them!

Fans are free to dress up and become their favorite characters. They can swap their favorite collectables and fan fiction without fear of someone mocking their interests. They get exclusive information and access to never-before-seen trailers. The actors, writers, and producers answer their questions. It is quite the cool kids get everything role reversal. I love it, and I can't wait to experience it someday.

They do have a smaller con here in Denver, and I've already made plans to go next year. I will be sharing Mages with anyone interested, and can't wait to see what my town has to offer in quintessential nerd fair. I still dream of going to the big one someday as an author, but mostly as a fan!

Jedi: The Ultimate Superheroes

7/6/2015

You can keep your Superman, your Spider-Man, and even your Batman. My favorite superhero isn't a specific character. But he, or she, is one of the coolest bad guy killing hero set. My favorite superhero is a Jedi.
I don't remember watching Star Wars for the first time. Growing up in the eighties with an older brother, it was something that just existed. Death Vader was always Luke's dad, Leia was always his sister (that kiss - yuck!), and the Ewoks were always awesome. Jedi were huge part of pretend play at our house with old TV antennas duck taped to flashlights serving as light sabers before the flood of plastic ones in the stores.
My foray into fan-fiction was full of Jedi, official and made-up. What makes Jedi so awesome? Let's start with the Force. It flows through the universe, giving Jedi their extraordinary powers. First, there is the ability to manipulate things from across the room. I spent hours trying to levitate my pencil as a kid to no avail.
Then, there is the ability to read the minds of other Jedi. Handy for talking to your best friend in class, no doubt. Even better is the ability to control weaker minds. Bring on the mind-controlled minions! But a good Jedi would never control innocents for their own personal gain. That brings me to the Dark Side. Every Jedi has the potential to lose who they are and slip into the evil side of the force. A hero fighting his own demons on a regular basis never gets dull.
Finally, is my favorite part about the Jedi, the coolest weapon ever: the light saber! A laser beam sword that deflects laser bullets, is light enough to throw, and comes back like a boomerang: send me one! Only Jedi can use them which also makes them extra cool. So far the best part of the ever expanding Star Wars universe, is more elaborate and fancy light sabers.
When I put down my fan-fiction and started Mages, I had to let the Jedi and their light sabers go. But their talents live on through the mages' magic and a few good sword fights. I'm looking forward to seeing where the Jedi go this coming December and where my mages end up in the years to come.

Book Club Giveaway July 2015

6/30/2015

Looking for a new and exciting read for your book club? How would you like to get eBooks for the ENTIRE book club for FREE? Just sign-up for the BOOK CLUB GIVEAWAY, get your FREE copies of BLOOD MAGE (Book #1 in the MAGES series), and leave a review on your favorite eBook platform!

How to Enter:

Go to www.KRYaddof.com
Click on the Book Club Giveaway page
Enter your book club information

It's that easy! KR will send you coupon codes for your free eBooks. All she would like in return are reviews on your favorite eBook platform!!!

Rules:

Must enter in July 2015.
Must enter the names and email address of all book club members wishing to receive a free book.
Please leave a review for Blood Mage on your favorite eBook platform.

Click here to go to the BOOK CLUB GIVEAWAY!

Pre-Order Mage Assassin today!

6/29/2015

Mage Assassin (Book #3 in the Mages series) is available for pre-order on Amazon and Smashwords right now!

Lauren Trinidad is the best private security money in the League of European Nations can buy. She's been trained by her father for her entire life to protect the good guys from the bad. But when the good guys seem to be working for the mad man responsible for blowing the world into chaos and her family is suddenly the bad, she is forced to choose between what she is taught to do and what she thinks is right.

Captain David Trinidad is the best soldier the New Republic of Texas can find to pull off a secret mission that will decide the fate of the small country. He’s been raised in his military family to do anything to help his homeland. But when he discovers he is the only chance at saving someone he loves, he has to choose between the only two things in his life that he's never doubted.

Meagan Trinidad is the best assassin the United Countries of America has for hire. She has walked the tightrope between making her father proud and protecting those she cares about for a while. But when her work threatens to destroy her friends, she must choose between the familial loyalty that has guided her whole life and the promise of being loved for who she is and not what she does.

Release date: Tuesday, August 11, 2015!

The Boys Are Back in Town!

6/29/2015

One of my favorite guilty pleasure TV shows right now is Teen Wolf. Coming back for its fifth season, it starts tonight and I'm beyond excited. How can I love a teen MTV show based on a cheesy 80s movie so much? The best bromance on TV since Merlin and Arthur on Merlin!

It's like a supernatural buddy comedy that has the ability to scare the shit out of you. Who wouldn't love that?

Scott and Stiles are the adorable best friends trying to navigate their overrun monster-ridden town when Scott becomes a werewolf. It's like The Vampire Diaries with dudes, which obviously equals awesome! Plus, surprisingly, the chicks need little rescuing and are pretty badass themselves!

I think my favorite thing about the show (besides Stiles because, duh, he's the best! He's hilarious, smart, sweet,ect…) is the ability to be funny while being scary at the same time. It is a thin line between getting laughs and getting too campy. And this show manages to ride that line beautifully. Most of the humor is over how absurd their situations are and I love that! Sometimes the hardest thing for me to do in a supernatural show is to suspend my belief that these things don't exist. This show addresses it directly through its characters and says, "Hey, we can't believe this shit is happening either but we gotta deal with it!" With that, you're empathic and invested and worried sick their going to kill your favorite main character because who kills off the main love interest? This show!

So start bingeing so you're ready for tonight. It's going be ridiculous and epic, two of my favorite things!