Book Review: Turbulent Sea by Christine Feehan

I know, I know, Christine Feehan is pretty much a household name, but I she is one of my favorite authors. I have to give her props for her Drake Sisters series, of which Turbulent Sea is one of the many stories.

The first of the series that I read was Dangerous Tides, which is about the Drake sister Libby, a doctor with mystical healing talents. The book intrigued me from the quick plot line to the depth of detail the author went to make it more realistic. But one sister caught my attention more than the others, and I wanted to know more about her.

Since I come from a musical family Joley Drake, whose story is in Turbulent Sea, sparked my interest. When I had the opportunity to pick up the story, I was very excited to read it.

Joley is a singer for an extremely popular band with world-wide recognition. She is a bit of a "bad girl" and very head-strong. So when Ilya Praenskii walks into her life with a domineering personality, she is immediately repelled by the Russian...yet oddly attracted as well.

I won't give the story away, but I found the plot to flow well despite a few jumps forward here and there. I laughed with the characters, mourned with them, felt what they were feeling. The story carried me away as all good books should, and I highly recommend it for anyone who loves a good romance with a dash of danger, magic and intrigue.

WINNER ANNOUNCEMENT

And the winner of the random drawing is... Post # 4, Tami, for sharing on Pinterest!!

Tami, please email me your contact info at AuthorAmberManuel@gmail.com so I can get your FREE autographed copy of Waking Up sent to you!!

Thanks for playing and CONGRATS!!

Note: if prize is not claimed within a week from this posting, it goes back into the prize pool.

GIVEAWAY TIME!!

Guess what?! 

GIVEAWAY TIME!! 

You heard me - I'm giving away an AUTOGRAPHED paperback copy of Waking Up! 

Here's the RULES:

1. Go to Waking Up on Amazon.com (click here)
2. a) If you've already read it, REVIEW it!
    b) If you haven't read it, SHARE it!

Facebook, Twitter, it doesn't matter as long as it's shared! (the more the better!!) 

3. Post a comment to this blog with a link to your share and/or review. I like a visual. ;-)  
4. You will be assigned a number according to your number in the posts below. So if you posted the first one, you are #1, and so on.

All the numbers will be entered into a random number generator. If your number is pulled, you WIN!! 

Contest ENDS in 2 weeks on March 29! 

Questioning My Conviction

2013 has so far been a tough year. I won't get into details but suffice it to say that I've had enough stress that I'm ready for a vacation.

I began to wonder what I was doing with my life. While I enjoy my day job, I was beginning to realize that something was missing from it.

What was it missing? Passion.

You heard me. Passion. Do what you like and you'll like what you do, someone once told me, but I think he wasn't focusing on the bigger picture.

Do what you love, what you're passionate about, and you'll love what you do, even on bad days.

So I got to thinking about it and it occurred to me that I have never had one thing that I was passionate about. Oh, I did many things growing up - sports, band, choir, ROTC - but I never felt that any of those things were something that I couldn't live without.

I called my mom to ask her if there was something that I just *had* to do when I was younger. Not something like the soccer league I was on that, while I enjoyed it, it was just something to do to pass the time. Playing the French Horn was the same thing. I did it because 1) it was something that was pretty fun and 2) in a family where all the guys play an instrument and mom sings gorgeously, I definitely felt I was expected to to something musical!

Anyway, mom thought about it for a moment and said, you were always playing pretend, using your imagination.

Huh. Go figure.

Guess I never really grew up, then, because what it writing fiction if not a form of playing pretend?

And writing is something I feel is necessary to who I am. If I don't write, there is something wrong. Or it's tax season, which always saps all the energy out of me lol!

Maybe the blog is slightly misnamed. My passion is for writing, and my favored genre just happens to be romance.

And I guess I am doing what I love, what I'm passionate about.

Now if I could just figure out a way to work that into my day job...

Writing for Pleasure Isn't the Same

I have always made up stories, ever since I could remember. All my life the spinning of tales has been about one thing: me. An escape from the real world, something fun and relaxing. When I had to clean my room or I couldn't come out, I pretended I was Cinderella. When we moved to a new house and my room had a huge mural with a rainbow on one wall, I remember pretending I was a Care Bear because they could ride rainbows and I so wanted to climb that rainbow to see where it went.
Over the past year since publishing Creole Escape, I have have had plenty of new ideas come to me, but have struggled to flesh them out. In the past month since publishing Waking Up, I have struggled to find the inspiration to really sit down and work on any one story.
I have at least thirty story lines that I have started but lately I just cant figure out where to go with them.
This morning I was reading a writing blog when i had an epiphany: I am no longer writing for myself. My writing has another audience: you, the readers! This may seem like a no-brainer and of course I realized I was writing for you, but I never realized that that could also mean that I had to write something that goes against the grain. Something that I would really have to sit down and mull over to make certain I got it right. Something that isn't about just doing what I please.
It doesn't mean that I love writing any less. It is an integral part of who I am and always will be. It just means that I have to take a step back and rethink the way I have always written, and then revise it to meet the expectations of the most important person: you, the reader.
It may not seem like a big thing but after 30+ years of pretending to please myself, I have a feeling that I have a lot of work ahead.
And I'm looking forward to it.

Waking Up... Romance or Drama?

I was thinking about my recently released novel Waking Up and I realized that while there is romance in the story, there are darker themes that perhaps make it less romantic than other novels I previously grouped the novel with. It certainly isn't in the same category as my first novel Creole Escape.

Waking Up is a darker novel than Creole Escape. While Creole Escape is a light-hearted story of love conceived and written when I was in my teens and early twenties, Waking Up has more depth to the story, the characters, the themes. There are parts of the story may be uncomfortable to the reader.

As such, I may have been a bit hasty to label Waking Up a romance novel. While it certainly can fit in that category, it is more of a dramatic fiction novel about a contemporary woman's struggle to accept herself and her past in a world that she feels will not accept her as she is.

So the disclaimer's coming a bit late, but here it is: Waking Up is a darkly-themed novel thick with deep emotions. If you're looking for light-hearted reading, may I suggest Creole Escape?

Pre-Release for Waking Up

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