Karola's Hunt--Blurb and Excerpt

Karola's Hunt by Deirdre O'Dare ISBN: 1-59279-237-5

http://www.amberquill.com/store/p/706-Karola-s-Hunt.aspx

Blurb: 
Karola, daughter of Diana, is totally innocent and wild, having never left the forest where she has grown up. Then one day she encounters an intruder, someone who looks a bit like her but also very different. In Damien she finds her first human friend and much, much more. Before the day is over, she has discovered what it means to be female as she is awakened to the delights of her sexuality and the first stirring of love.

But how can Karola ensure Damien will return again to play more of these magical games with her?

Excerpt: 

"Come. Let us rest in the shade for a while. It is too hot today for more running."

They flopped down on the soft bed of springy green grass. Karola lay on her back, her arms folded beneath her head, gazing up through the leaves at the sky. Damien settled on his side, facing her. Either the mead or the exertion had left her feeling deliciously languid, as if she floated on one of the small clouds overhead.
They looked as white and fluffy as the sheep she had once seen grazing in a meadow beyond her woods. For a moment she dreamed of flying up to land on one of them, drifting along and looking down at the world spread beneath her. But dreaming could be saved for a time she was alone. Today she had a companion. She turned to gaze at him, absorbed in his beauty, in the differences between the two of them.
It seemed totally right when Damien reached out and stroked her arm. His hand was rougher-skinned than hers, in spite of her forest life, yet his touch was not harsh. It sent sparkly tingles running along her skin. She felt as if fireflies were dancing over her body, just out of sight.
"Your skin is soft as the pelt of a baby rabbit," he said. "I could touch you forever."
He lifted a tress of her hair, which had come unbound in their frolics, and sifted the raven strands through his fingers. "And your hair is as dark as night. There are pretty girls in my village, but none of them have hair like yours. I have never seen hair this color--yellow and brown and russet, yes, but not black as moonless midnight."
"My hair is not so very strange. Darlisa and Melody have green hair, while Brylana's is almost the color of yours--just a bit lighter. My mother's is very dark brown like the bark of the oak trees. Everyone has their own color, I think."
"Green hair? Now that is strange! I never saw green hair."
Karola laughed. "They are Kelpies and Bry is a Dryad. All the Kelpies have green hair...at least all the ones I know."
He shrugged. "I like yours anyway. It is much better than green."
She smiled, enjoying the brightness of his eyes as he looked at her, the feel of his hand, stroking her arm, sifting through her hair. Like her mother, she wore a tunic that was cut away on the right side, leaving no fabric to foul an arrow or slow the snap of a bowstring. The garment left her right breast bare, and she saw how his glance kept slipping to focus upon it. Her nipple hardened to a rosy pebble under his attentive gaze.
He gave her a knowing smile before he reached out and brushed his fingers across the tip. At that caress, it hardened even more and a shivery sensation coursed through her body. Then he cupped the whole of her breast in his hand and kneaded it gently with his fingers. Her lassitude deepened as a tingling itch spread from his touch, sinking into her chest, into her belly, into some inner recess she could not name which suddenly felt achingly empty.

Backlist Boogie--1st Entry

I am a day late and hopefully not a dollar short. Circumstances beyond my control, computer problems, delayed my kick off for Backlist Boogie. Oh well, stuff happens!

Okay, now to the business at hand. My very first release in the Amber Heat line, before Amber Allure came to be, was a long time ago. I had been playing with something 'erotic' from the time I attended the RT conference in the fall of 2003 and learned that hotties were the up and coming thing in romance. It was going to be a switch for me since I had been writing pg-13 romance and took awhile to be able to leave the bedroom door partly ajar!

Maybe it just felt easier or more natural but I set this tale in the prehistoric past--in ancient Greece to be exact, in the time when the gods, goddesses and all kinds of fantastic entities were felt to be real and present. My heroine was a semi-wild girl, raised by dryads in the woods although she was the daughter of Diana, the huntress. Diana was alleged to be virginal but who knows...in this world, she could have a daughter, anyway! Of course this girl was very naive and innocent having really not seen other humans at all--until she meets a youth who comes to hunt in "her" forest.

That was the premise of Karola's Hunt. I worked on it for some time, setting it

aside for a bit after the sudden death of my husband, but took it up in a sew weeks to try to break out of the writer's block that hit me hard on some regular novels I was working on when he passed away. We were even working on one together. It was not easy to get back into the projects.

Early in 2004, I heard the then-new publisher Amber Quill was going to be offering erotic romance and was sponsoring a contest to find some new authors for that line. I talked to a couple of friends, one who unbeknownst to me entered the contest also, and they encouraged me to try it. I polished it up as well as I could and sent it off. When the "call" in the form of an email came on April 1, 2004, I at first thought it a joke. But it was real and Karola's Hunt released in June 2004, the very first work to come out over the Deirdre O'Dare pseudonym Since then there have been many more!

At the time I had no idea how much would come about as a result of that rather timid start!

Here is a link to the page where it is sold--yes, it is still available although I have been considering pulling it after over then years. We'll see. http://www.amberquill.com/store/p/706-Karola-s-Hunt.aspx

An excerpt and blurb follows in a second post.

Backlist Boogie

Just a heads up to readers here. Starting in February I plan to feature one title from my back list each week, both here and on the Amber Heat Reader's List and maybe the Amber Quill Authors' blog as well. The covers will be shown, of course, a short excerpt or two provided  and a bit of background about the story: how or why I came to write it, maybe a peek at the inspiration or some other special tidbit about it.

BTW, I seldom post pictures of me here but this shot was from an RT booksigning event a few years back. I was signing under both my pseudonyms there, Gwynn Morgan of the PG-13 romances and Deirdre O'Dare of the sizzlers.

I'm working on my eleventh year as an AQ author in their Heat and Allure lines and I know some of the more recent readers probably are not too familiar with some of my early work. There are a lot of titles to check if anyone does go to my page on teh AQ site and look at the back list! Yep, I am a fairly prolific writer. I know there are more than fifty titles to over my pseudonym up there. It kind of startles me to count up and realize. I will probably be giving away one of my collections--a print book, autographed of course, as part of this promotion.

I'm planning on doing it Wednesday so watch this page on Wednesday, February 4 for the very first bars of the Backlist Boogie!! It may be a long song. LOL.

Winter is not my fave...

...season and days like today are the reason why. Even in "sunny" New Mexico it is gray and bleak with no sunshine and a temperature in the lower 40s plus a sharp NW wind that puts the wind chill around freezing. Well, compared to Alaska and the Yukon, pretty tame stuff. But if you are not used to it...and if you have this nasty Alamo-land bug that seems to be a cold/virus/flu all smushed into one. Well, don't go there if you can help it. I wasn't looking and it sneaked up on me. I'm recovering but very slowly!!

I hope by now some of you have read and enjoyed The Mule Man. I won't have my sales figures for a few weeks yet but I can hope!

I did get a bit of a pick-me-up two days ago when one of the great AQP staffers forwarded me a really great review of last summer's Red Tails in the Sunset. It is just such a lift to a writer when a reviewer really "gets" one of your tales and you can tell you touched them. That's what this review told me.

To read the whole thing, go here:  https://mmgoodbookreviews.wordpress.com/2014/12/25/red-tails-in-the-sunset-by-deidre-odare/

But here is a snippet: Lisa of  MM Good Books Reviews gave it four hearts and said:
"This was a fascinating story with a bit more added in that I had not expected. It was a blast to read and I look forward to reading more by this amazing author....I would recommend reading this especially if you love daredevils, excitement, danger, adventure, and gorgeous men. It gave me almost everything I could ask for in a story and my attention was caught with it."  

Thank you Lisa and smoochies for loving a very special story that had a lot of my heart in it! 

Just a few days until The Mule Man arrives!

The edits are done now and it's moving into the queue to be released on December 7. My editor, who is an avid horsewoman, said she liked it. She did not know that I had quite a lot of experience with mules when I was a young woman; now she does!

I promised a bit on this so here you go. I got my first horses when I was about ten, a couple of old mares who were retired cowponies. It was love at first pat, ride and so on, and that fondness has never left me. A year of so later, a mule joined the menagerie and very quickly found a place in my affections too.

Louie was dark blackish-brown and about fourteen hands high. He had a tan nose that I said was the color of peanut butter! He really was a dear and we had a lot of fun trips together. That is me in the saddle with him on the right. The 30-30 saddle gun was strictly practical because there were cougars, coyotes and other potential dangers out in the hills where we went. And yes, I could and did use it. I really was a "cowboy girl" back in those days!

 If you are not "horsey" let me explain that equines are measured in terms of "hands" which is four inches. The height is taken at the withers which is equivalent to that little bumpy vertebra at the back of our necks and on them is right above the forelegs at the shoulder. As the name implies, Louie was a male and male mules are called "jacks" or now mostly "johns." A mule is a hybrid creature with a female horse for the mother and a male donkey or burro for the father. About 99.9% of mules are sterile but there has been a documented case or two where a female mule (called a "mollie") had a foal with either a stallion (un-neutered male horse) or a jack donkey.

Anyway, I was lucky enough to associate with several old cowboys and expert horsemen who swore by mules. I learned how to manage the long eared beasts and found they were very sure footed, much smarter than horses in terms of taking care of themselves--and the rider, within reason--and the legendary stubbornness and even meanness were far overstated. They make a really great saddle animal if they are properly trained! One old cowboy joked, "First ya gotta be smarter than the mule." Trust me, that is not always easy because they really are very intelligent and crafty creatures! You just have to use that to your advantage. I put a lot of this background into my story, of course. Although I did not neglect the romance and some very hot sex!!

Anyway, between my mid-teens and my delayed departure to start college, my dad and I trained and sold a lot of mules, mostly for trail riders. At that time this was just becoming a popular sport across the country. I probably rode and worked with somewhere between fifty and seventy five mules in that time and only came across a few who fit all the bad stereotypes. Now mules are quite popular in many equestrian circles and some are jumping, doing dressage, used in gymkhana and other competitive performance events and yes, still ridden on trail rides. It is pretty awesome!

To the left I am riding a little spotted mule we called Beano. A similar photo appeared in an ad we ran in the Western Horseman magazine during the time I describe. Those rugged hills are on the west side of Arizona's scenic Verde Valley. Great training ground!

Naturally with this background, I knew I had to come up with a mule story, and The Mule Man is that. There may be others and I may follow the adventures of Orr and Jase a bit further in a sequel. That will partly depend on the readership and sales because I do try to give my readers what they want and a great indicator of that is good sales. But there are also times when my muse takes the bit in her teeth and just tells me what we are going to write about, so you never can tell!

On the 6th of December I'll have a couple of posts on Amber Quill's Author Blog. That's at https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=18545575#allposts
(https//amberquillauthors.blogspot.com ) I will be doing a give-away with a free download or two of this story or the winner's choice from my back list and also have an interview with one or both of the leads in this story so be sure to stop by and check on that!

Amber Quill Friday Fun

AQ has special sales most Fridays now. Today's feature is mystery, detective and crime stories. There are several Deirdre titles in the list as well as lots of cool books by my fellow authors. Click out and take a look and snap up a bunch at a special price!  http://www.amberquill.com/store/c/176-Mystery-Detective.aspx?ps=75  You don't even have to do a special knock or use a secret handshake to get in!

Mules and Me--Part 1

I told you yesterday that I had a history with mules. I know I am kinda weird and a lot of that is due to the way I grew up. I went to one and two room schools from second through seventh grade and most of the time my dad was my teacher. A friend in a local writing group where we're doing memoir type essays laughingly called it "home schooled with an audience." True, and that's just part of it.

Among other things, my dad was a writer for outdoor adventure magazines and got deeply involved in hunting and photography expeditions. By the time I was about ten we had gotten horses and then mules to use on these trips. As the eldest kid I became the main wrangler and by the time I was in high school I was working at close to a professional level breaking and training horses and mules! That led to a lot of bumps, bruises and crazy adventures, I can tell you! I'm starting to write non-fiction articles and essays about some of them.

I have written a lot more about this past life on the other blog Gwynn and I share, https://deirdre-fourds.blogspot.com but will just say that from an old mule named Louie who was the first one I rode and handled through about fifty others, I got to knew mules well and became a fan of the long eared critters. They are smart, sure footed, sturdy and healthy and their reputed stubbornness is more about keeping themselves--and incidentally their rider--safe than just ornery ways. The concessionaire at the Grand Canyon for the cross-canyon rides uses mules exclusively because they are safer for inexperienced riders, rarely trip or fall and stay calm.

Awhile back the Amber Allure writers got together and did a PAX called Heavy Petting. I had a dog story in it. When another was planned, I jumped in and decided to do a mule story. Because of my Alaska trip, I got it in a bit late and five other authors beat me to the punch, so my story wound up being released as a stand-alone tale. More on that next time.

Meanwhile, here is the cover shot from Mules and More Magazine, March 2014 issue. Yes, that is your intrepid author in her late teens on a mule named Beano --'cause he was spotted like a pinto bean--in the rough foothills of central Arizona's Black Hills Range. It lies along the west side of the Verde Valley, renowned as the locale of Sedona's famous red rocks. The pictured rocks were on the opposite side and white rather than red, and also rougher than Hades! Lots of cactus, too; a big inducement to be sure you stayed in that saddle! Most of the time I did, even on the wilder and unreliable mules, but Beano was a good little guy and was eventually sold to a lady who did a lot of trail riding. She loved him.

This same photo also appeared in an advertisement in Western Horseman Magazine when we were selling mules for trail riding etc. Mules are now a big fad and they are a lot slicker and fancier than the ones I knew but still very impressive animals. I tried to make the mule characters in The Mule Man just as true to type and real life as I could!
I hope you will enjoy them and the mule man as well, totally a figment of my imagination but I would have liked to meet him, even if he isn't into girls...