Lady Emmi Rue: guest post

I love anything sweet, succulent, and delicious, and so I am pleased to share Celia Kennedy's Top 10 Favorite Candies! Yum!

Top 10 Favorite Candies:

"I thought I would grow out of loving candy. Nope!" -Celia Kennedy

1) Swedish Fish – Comfort food

2) Sourpatch Kids – When I’m feeling sassy

3) Starbursts – Everyday pick-me-up

4) Jordan Almonds – My healthy candy

5) Cadbury Cream Eggs – Need a massive sugar infusion

6) Butterfingers – Childhood favorite

7) Flake Bar – British! Haven’t had one? Run to your local Cost Plus and indulge!!

8) Cadbury Fruit and Nut – Heaven on Earth

9) All things nougat – When I need to think and chew

10) Ferrero Roche – Makes me feel Oh-La-La!

Visit Celia Kennedy on Social Media

Website: www.celiakennedy.weebly.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CMKAuthor

Twitter: @KennedyCelia

Google+: Celia Kennedy

Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/celiakennedy/

Purchase Links:

Venus Rising

Charlotte’s Restrained

About the Book:

Akshaya Bertrand, is a Professor of Art History at an Ivy League college in New England. Young and incomparably beautiful, she hides her traumatic childhood in India behind vibrant veils of secrecy.

Jared Harrison, a war correspondent in the Middle East accepts a position as guest lecturer. Upon meeting, the two find themselves drawn to one another, sensing the others deep wounds.

Thrown together on a voyage of discovery, the two travel through exotic India. Amongst beauty and poverty, sorrow and friendship, they both will finally face the past that has shaped them and the present that defines them.

Will the answers they find close the gap

between them or push them further apart?

Reviews: Venus Rising

Carol Osborne: Venus Rising by Celia Kennedy, 5 Star Review

An extremely enjoyable read, you will instantly be intrigued by the 2 main characters in this novel and the storyline is an enthralling journey. Be prepared for an interestingly captivating and very emotional time.

Akshaya is a gorgeous, intelligent, successful, educated goddess like lady who captivates the attention of every man she comes in contact with. Jared is an intelligent, successful, educated, handsome, athletic, witty, charming, and well-traveled man. Individually these characters seem invincible and perfect, the envy of all those around them. However, under the perfect facade the world sees, they each have their own personal demons to deal with. Both physical and emotional scars that they manage to hide from the outside world, but struggle to come to terms with themselves.

Developing uncontrollable emotions for each other makes things even more complicated. Can they trust each other enough to share and conquer their demons and still continue with their success, including a "business" trip through tumultuous parts of India? You will have to read it to find out! Enjoy...

Edel Rogers: The best book I've read in a long time! 5 Star Review

Venus Rising is a beautiful story, beautifully written and clearly very well researched. It's a love story, but it's much more than that. From the first page on, I was hooked and I didn't want to stop reading till I got to the end.

The more I read, the more I came to know and care about all the characters, not just Akshaya and Jared, and I really wanted them to find happiness. I felt their emotions, and both laughed and cried at times.

Venus Rising is one of those books that makes you want to get to the end quickly so you can find out what happens, but when you get to the end you wish there was more to read.

I'm already looking forward to Celia's next book!

Author Bio:

Celia Kennedy was born in Wurzburg, Germany on an American Army base. Her parents' penchant for traveling the world, via a Volkswagen Minibus with a Porsche engine, sparked her imagination. Staring out the window, sometimes through fog and rain, at other times at sunny blue skies, she began to make up stories for the places and spaces they passed by. The in-between time, the most fascinating to her.

The imagined world has always fascinated Celia. She has studied Landscape Architecture, Architecture, Interior Design, and pretty much every other subject matter. Like her childhood, it was the ride that was the most entertaining, arrival at a degree, not anywhere as important.

Mark Twain said, "Write what you know." When combining this concept with her unusual life experiences (working at a nuclear submarine base when Chernobyl blew, testing software Bill Gates kept close tabs on, travelling extensively while quite broke, or falling in love with her boyfriend's close friend) thinking of what to write about isn't challenging; there just needs to be more hours in the day.

Celia published Charlotte's Restrained, The Accidental Stalker in December of 2012 and Venus Rising in August of 2013. Look for Kathleen's Undressed, The Accidental Enigma, a companion novel to Charlotte's Restrained, to be published in November 2014.

Currently she lives in Washington State with the loves of her life.

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Hand Me the Shotgun

Guest Post by, Lynda Cox

What is my writing process?

Every time I’m asked this question, I have to force myself not to laugh. I don’t have a writing process, per se. That process depends on the situation, what I’m writing, and how much my insomnia is affecting me. When an idea takes hold, the insomnia becomes worse than normal. Medication doesn’t affect my insomnia so when I’m on a writing binge, my pillow and I are very estranged. Fortunately, my writing space (which has to be considered a part of the writing process) is completely separate from the house. We have a small guest house that has been turned into my office. It has everything I need there to disappear for hours (okay…days) on end: electricity, internet, air conditioning, heat…

When it comes to writing I am not a linear writer. I also freely and without compunction admit to being one who writes by the seat of my pants. The one time I outlined a novel I put so much into the generation of that outline I exhausted the creativity.

Most of the time, my stories take hold in my imagination with a pivotal scene. I’ll get images in my head of the main characters in that scene and then the reporter’s questions start and I have a full blown conversation with the people in my head. “Who the heck are you and why are you here? How’d you get here? Where are you going? And you want me to write WHAT????” In the case of my first published book, Colt strolled into my head, hand in hand with Amy, and demanded—he certainly didn’t ask—that I tell their story. My first question in that game was “You do realize I’m writing a twenty page or better critical introduction to my master’s creative piece, don’t you?” and the second was “Why is that Peacemaker strapped down so low on your thigh?”

A.J. and Allison, from Smolder on a Slow Burn, came about very differently. They originally started life as a contemporary romance. And, that one started out as a reoccurring nightmare and the re-imagining of their story came the same way. I recognized both of them, even dressed in period clothing. And I know I stated very clearly that I was not reliving that again. Yeah, that worked well…

Anyway, my novels usually start out with one pivotal scene. For Smolder on a Slow Burn it was the scene during the thunderstorm when A.J. is suffering from a wicked flashback, trapped in the memories of the time he spent at a Union run prisoner of war camp and Allison finding him out in that storm, huddled on his knees, and not knowing where he was or who she was. After being plagued with that nightmare for several nights in a row, I gave in and wrote the scene, thinking if I just wrote that, I could kiss them good-bye. (Cue evil laughter from my Muse, now.)

Three weeks later, I had more than 60,000 words of a rough draft. From that scene in a thunderstorm on the Nebraska prairie I built forward and backward. As scenes came to me, I wrote them. Some of those scenes never made it into the rough draft, but I wrote them. I sometimes write more than 100,000 words for a 65,000 word manuscript.

I’m one of those writers that in the midst of the process will walk, talk, and at times, act out part of the scene I’m working on. (I’ve gotten pretty darn good at a quick draw, just for the record.) I also pace when I can’t get a scene to gel correctly in my head. I will pace from the guest house to the house and back, repeatedly, until I think I have it gelled. When everything is flowing, I have to have music. What kind of music I listen to really depends on the scenes I’m writing.

Because as I said earlier I suffer from insomnia, I don’t really have a set writing time. I write…I pace…I brush a collie (or three)…I write some more…I surf the Internet to verify or find a tidbit of information to add believability to the story line…I pace…I write.

And somewhere in that mess, I manage to come up with a romance novel.

Lynda J. Cox will tell anyone who will listen that she was born at least one hundred and fifty years too late, and most definitely in the wrong part of the country. She holds a master’s degree in English with a concentration in creative writing from Indiana State University after earning her BA from the same university as a non-traditional student. (Think being old enough to be mom to 90% of the students in her freshman cadre.) She’s kept busy with two spoiled rotten house cats, a 30 plus year old Arabian gelding who has been nicknamed “Lazarus” for his ability in the later years of his life to escape death, and quite a few champion collies. When she isn’t writing, she can be found on the road, travelling to the next dog show. She loves to chat about books, the writing life, and the insanity which is called a “dog show” and can be reached through her Facebook page at www.facebook.com/LyndaJCox.

Social Media Links:

www.facebook.com/LyndaJCox (Facebook)

http://lyndajcox.blogspot.com (blog)

https://twitter.com/#!/LyndaCox (Twitter handle)

lyndajcox.com (web site)

Purchase Smolder on a Slow Burn on Amazon