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amhartnettloose_id_pub - EXCERPT: Annemarie Hartnett's The Company of FoolsamhartnettGenre: Erotic Contemporary
Length: Novella
Kate Doucette’s trying to get her life together. She’s working full time at Mike MacNab’s bar, going to school, and she just kicked out her Do-Nothing boyfriend. Things are looking up but with the construction going on in the bar, her money trouble's looming over her, and her personal life in the toilet, Kate’s on a ledge and Mike is there to talk her down. One night she wants more than a pep talk; Kate asks her charming and handsome boss to spend a weekend in bed with her.
What could be a bigger stress-reliever than two days of bedroom Olympics with a guy who’s as hot for her as she is for him? The only problem is that he wants more than a weekend and it seems like he wants to fix her life for her. She adores Mike, but the last thing she needs is another headache in the form of Mr. Fixit.
Publisher's Note: This book contains explicit sexual content, graphic language, and situations that some readers may find objectionable.
Read the excerpt & buy the book!
amhartnettI woke up this morning to some great news. A little while ago I decided to submit my short story "My Heroes" to the Coming Together: As One anthology and was accepted. I can tell you that this anthology has a great roster of authors including Victoria Blisse and Saskia Walker and early reports from editor Alessia Brio suggest that this is going to be a fun, often laugh-out-loud read.
The proceeds of Coming Together: As One will benefit ONE:
ONE is a campaign and advocacy organisation with more than 2 million members committed to the fight against extreme poverty and preventable disease, particularly in Africa. Cofounded by Bono and other campaigners, ONE is nonpartisan and works closely with African policy makers and activists.
Initially "My Heroes" was written as my submission to the first anthology released by Oysters & Chocolate. It almost made the cut and eventually became a Friday Feature at O&C. I love this story so much so that I attempted to write a sequel that has since evolved into a novel I've been working on for, oh, a year as I work on other things. Just last week I decided to get serious with this manuscript instead of doing pieces at a time and with the original story getting a second round I've been given a bit of a boost.
The story has been nip/tucked, so what you'll see in the anthology is a little different than what's currently online at O&C.
Coming Together: As One - Mercutio would approve.
Yes, this is the real Mercutio. May he rest in peace.
In other news, there's one more chance to win The Company of Fools on the horizon. Lexi Ryan and I have joined up to take part in a blog tour. One big-ass blog tour with a buttload of books to be won. I'll be offering CoF and Lexi will be putting up one of her Stiletto Girls books. This will be taking place at Blogspot on Jan 15 for the tour and your chance to win.
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amhartnettLet's start with the free: I've got a couple of giveaways coming up in the next few weeks. In one I'll be giving away a copy of The Company of Fools. In the other, a copy of the book plus some cool swag. Keep an eye on this blog, website feed, or my Twitter stream for details.
The old: The first erotic short I ever sold, "Left In The Dark" is coming to Oysters & Chocolate Erotic. It was originally published by Torquere Press;s Off The Vine in 2006 and is #1 of my Hurricane Juan erotic shorts. This one is all about the girl-on-girl, which I'm hoping to do more of this year. I'm very happy to have all three hosted at O&C (even if "Blackout" is MIA for the moment)
The new: My erotic short "On The Sly" is going to be published by The Erotic Woman. It's all about (you guessed it) sneaking around.
I don't have a publication date for either story yet, but I'm guessing it will be within the next month or so.
Bites of Passion is still on sale at Ravenous for a limited time. $1.79 is a great deal on something that's normally $7, so be sure to get your copy. Available in epub format for my fellow Sony users.
Happy New Year!
amhartnettamhartnettSo compared to other years I had a great year. I actually took a real vacation this year, I got out of my writing and reading funks, and Tom Hardy played Heathcliff Earnshaw on Masterpiece Theatre. It was gumdrops and fluffy bunnies all around. Of course, the last week of 2009 every little thing that could break did – mouse, DVD player, earphones, power bar, all gone to the electronics pile in the sky.
Paying homage to 2009, a year that looked like it was going to be as crappy as the year that came before it, this is my top ten list of awesome things I’m thankful I had and hope to keep in 2010:
My boss. I’m actually thankful for my boss this year, primarily because early in 2009 a management change resulted in trading in the Boss From Hell for someone who is just fab. M was more than supportive when I needed to juggle my schedule to make some deadlines for The Company of Fools and I’m grateful I have a boss I can trust enough to divulge this information to.
Lexi Ryan. I started chatting with Lexi last year after I posted a mini-review of her short story The Exhibition and she found it. In the last few months I’ve been chatting with Lexi on a daily basis. Whether it’s unsolicited smoothie recipes, midday fangirling over Eric Northman, or just chit-chatting, it’s always nice to see an email from her in my inbox.
3am. I discovered this year that if I wake up at 3am as opposed to going to bed at 3am I can get everything done and be stress-free when I have to leave the house. Hot coffee with real cream, squeezing in some reading or writing, catching up on email, a bit o’ housework, or catch up on some shopping before everyone else gets out of bed. By the time 8am rolls around I feel like I’ve accomplished a lot and spend the rest of the day in a great mood.
Giant Coffee Mugs. One of the luxuries of being single and childless (or sad and desperate, as my grandmother sees it) is that I can waste half my Saturday in bed with coffee and a book. I have about ten of those huge mugs that look like one of Xena’s bra cups. If one breaks I’ll drive to every store in the city looking for a new one.
Post-It Notes. The dude who invented these things earned his or her fortune. Everything thought that pops into my head ends up on a yellow sticky.
Great Canadian Soap. I’ve been raving about this stuff for the last half of 2009. Driving along Route 6 in PEI this summer I kept seeing signs on the side of the road “Did You Forget Your Soap?” and directing me to this little house with a barn on the left-hand side. It’s a good thing I didn’t use the soap until I got back home, otherwise I would have gone back to the store and blown my money for the bridge toll on soap.
Paypal. I was going to list e-books or Sony Reader, but really, Paypal has them both covered. With Paypal I can spend money I already have as opposed to putting it on credit. Take note, internet retailers. If you accept Paypal I will give you my money.
Oysters & Chocolate Erotic. I’ve always had a great experience with O&C. When I was first published with them they were a fairly small site with a paid membership. Since then they’ve gone public and just soared while other sites have folded. Dealing with Jordan and Samantha is always a joy and I look forward to writing for them for years to come.
Supernatural. Oh Dean and Sam. Aside from Eric Northman you’re the only reasons I still own a television. Don’t go too hard on Lucifer. Deep down he’s really a sad little puppy. After all, he had to dig his own hole when unleashing the apocalypse. You know things are bad when Satan has to dig his own hole.
YouTube. Doesn’t matter how shitty my day goes, I can go to YouTube and watch something like this.
Honorable mentions to:
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amhartnettsarannadewylde, who gets mucho kudos for coming in as a finalist in Dorchester's Next Best Celler contest. The ass thugs are pleased: She flipped onto one side and draped her arm over his stomach. "Why don't you complain about how hard my bed is, again? Or perhaps you'd like to go back into the kitchen and point out the sound my fridge is making. I’ll give you some paper and you can make one of your lists."
"I've got a list for you and everything on it involves my ass and your lips."
amhartnettFor today, Ravenous Romance is offering Bites of Passion: An Anthology of Vampire Erotica for 1/2 off. Featuring my short story "What Wind is to Fire".
Excerpt:
“Do you love me?” He rolled with her until he was tangled up in her limbs. “You always say it when you’re coming. You never said it this time.”
She felt his teeth at her neck again and cupped the back of his head when he hesitated. “You know I do, Dominic. My Dominic.”
This time, as he fed on her, she cradled him against her, one hand pressing urgently at the back of his head while the other stroked up and down his spine. As it had before, the world around her changed. She was flying and falling at the same time, moaning softly as his tongue lapped the life that spilled.
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Kate rubbed her temples. “When all this is over you owe your entire staff a big bonus for having to listen to this all day. I personally deserve something special for sitting down there for four hours with my finger jammed in my ear.”
“It’ll be worth it. The place is going to look great and you’re going to get rich on tips.”
“Uh huh.” She placed a polished fingernail at the corner of her eye. “This is the eyeball that has been twitching for three weeks. Behind this eyeball is a tumour that gets a little bigger every day. When it finally pushes my eyeball out of my head I hope you’re there and you get my brain juice all over you.”
amhartnettNormally I like my monsters & paranormals with a bit o' snark, but with Halloween a few days away I thought I'd look through my bookcase and come try to pick out some stuff that really gave me the heebie-jeebies.
Spoilers abound, folks.
The Phantom of the Opera - Gaston Leroux
So Phantom isn’t exactly a scary book and as far as “monsters” go, he’s not much of a monster at all. He’s just some deranged guy with no face who runs around the underbelly of the Paris opera house. He spends the entire book trying to get laid and destroying anyone who stands in his way. He's more like Christian Troy after the Carver cut up his face (and like Troy, proposed marriage to the dumbest blonde he could find.)
Eat me, bitch.
Make it worse for yourself by reading Susan Kay’s prequel – the part of the book dealing with Erik’s childhood alone will win you over. However, Phantom does have one scene that rattled me a little. Erik now has Christine in his hideaway underneath the opera house and he’s trying to convince her that living with him isn’t that bad by demonstrating how his fake face works. He’s made himself a face. A fake face. He plans to wear it while he woos her. Good God, that’s terrifying.
The world has now been overrun by zombies. Sucks to be you. It especially sucks to be you if the army gets its hands on you. In one scene that was so horrifying I had to put the book away for a few days they take this poor mentally-challenged kid and dangle him from a helicopter over a horde of hungry zombies as they try to get their other captives to cooperate. This is just the first of many horrifying things what’s left of the military does to survivors of a zombie attack.
Next, After Lucifer / Daniel Rhodes
A writer and his wife retreat to a lovely villa to unwind and as expected Really Bad Shit happens. However, they were given some warning. At night, before the ghost of a knight and his demon familiar (in the form of a creepy little monk) arrive a low, eerie whistling can be heard from the forest. Even in daylight this gave me the heebie jeebies.
That's right, Emo Boy. She's saving all the love for me.
Black Magic: The Nun / Marjorie Bowen
Available for free from Horror Masters, I urge you to download this immediately. There’s so much good stuff here but to sum it up it’s a homoerotic tale of Satan worship. Early in the book our two heroes attempt to use Black Magic and are so successful one of them almost pisses his pants. Remember that scene from Poltergeist II when Craig T. Nelson pukes up that slithery monster? You get the picture.
The Monk / Matthew Gregory Lewis
Normally The Monk would fall under the OMG-Sexing-Monks!!!! category and start me off foaming at the mouth, but in this case there is something creepy I’d like to mention: at one point in this story a pair of heroes have gone to uncover the cruelty and corruption in the abbey and they find it in the form of an emaciated nun and her dead baby. The poor woman was put down there to give birth and then starve to death. Even the evil abbess who put her down there didn’t know the poor girl was still alive.
Ahem ... any time now.
Remember that Ninja cat video? Imagine that instead of a cat it’s a grubby old homeless guy, and whenever he disappears from your sight he comes back a little different until you realize you have a werewolf coming towards you. A real werewolf, not the sexy Hugh-Jackman-in-Van-Helsing kind. This may not be the most disturbing scene in Ravenous but it’s the one was scared the living hell out of me.
You can’t go wrong with ghost sex. Unless halfway through the ghost sex you open your eyes and realize you’re getting freaky with a rotting, maggoty corpse. Ew.
Aaaah, I see what you're doing. You're saving the best for last, aren't you? You little minx.
The Haunting of Hill House / Shirley Jackson
I first saw this movie when I was about ten years old and the scene in question scared the shit out of me. Even the crappy film version with Catherine Zeta-Jones got this one right. Eleanor & Theo are locked in Theo’s bedroom while outside a ghost is trying to get in. After thumping and banging the ghost of Hill House tries a different tactic -- the word Jackson uses to describe this is “wheedling,” like it’s running its fingers along the edge of the door looking for a way in. I still freak out a little when I watch the old black & white version of this scene.
This is a big reveal of the book, so unless you want to be spoiled you’d best stop reading right here. The sickest and most terrifying scene in this is the making of a snuff film – an evil doctor drugs his physically disabled patients and then lets one of his mutant creations rape them. It’s stomach-churning: he even has the women dressed up in trashy lingerie.
WHAT?!?!? I didn’t even get a mention?!?! I’m the freaking fanged granddaddy! Did you not read Dracula?!?! Did you not hear about what I did to Mrs. Harker?!? There wouldn’t even be an Eric Northman or a Damon Salvatore if it wasn’t for me!!! I have smouldering eyes, pouty lips, and look at my fabulous hair!!! I’m DREAMY and I don’t have to sparkle to achieve that!!! You know what? Screw you. Screw you all! Good luck finding someone else to be your bitch!
...
Well hello there ...
amhartnettWriter brain has completely taken over for the remainder of ‘09. It ate Reader brain and spit it out, leaving me with a TBR pile that was growing and growing until I put a cap on it. Seriously, I’ve been reading Lexi Ryan’s Stilettos, Inc. since June. I made the mistake of reading it while waiting for the ferry to the Island. All that sun & salt air set a mood I haven’t been able to recapture. That hasn’t stopped me from torturing her to death about a book featuring my favourite character so far. She’s promised Superhero invisi-sex in the sequel she’s working on, which makes Lexi my new best friend. Heh.
So what has been the reward for my insanity?
The Company of Fools, the short novella I wrote in May-June, has been picked up by Loose Id. It’s just gone through its first round of edits (I barely survived) and is currently scheduled for a January release.
*insert w00t!!! here*
What’s it about?
It’s about a waitress named Kate who’s having a crap day, (week, month, life). She’s working full time and trying to keep up with university studies on a part-time basis. She just kicked her boyfriend out of her apartment. The bar where she works, MacNab’s, is under construction and the constant noise is driving her bonkers. After a particularly stressful day at work is hauled into her boss’s office for a pep talk to cool her off, but Kate decides she needs more than a pep-talk. She needs to burn off that stress and Mike’s looking like an awfully good way to get the job done …
It seems like a good idea at the time. The problem is that once he’s got her Mike wants to not only keep her but he also wants to help her fix the parts of her life he thinks are broken.
I had a ball writing this, particularly since it's set in my hometown and I really got to play around with the setting as the plot moves along. Plus I got to play Bar Tycoon ;P
As I get more information I'll be posting it at my website. You can subscribe to the update website feed by going to the site and clicking on the orange feed icon in the address bar.
Disclaimer - not actual depiction of any character in the book,
but it was either this dude or a picture of Heath Ledger
(you try googling joker/jester and see what you get!)
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Lexi's new cover is sexaaaayamhartnettamhartnettamhartnett
My bitches.amhartnett
For all of last week I was in Cavendish, Prince Edward Island. Cavendish is the real-life name of Avonlea, setting to the Anne of Green Gables books and a few others written by Lucy Maud Montgomery. It’s here where L.M. Montgomery went after her mother’s death, to live with her grandparents in a perfect little place now far from where she’s now buried, and where she wrote Anne of Green Gables. I can finally understand how literary genius was bred in such a small, insignificant place, because there really is nowhere like it in the world. Those first scenes in AoGG in which Anne prattles in awe of everything she sees is spot on: Cavendish is like an emerald with flecks of amber and violet. You remember the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy opens the door and everything goes from sepia to Technicolor? This is Cavendish.
Of course, being in the Land o’ Anne, I walked away having spent far too much on books than I should have. All of the more obscure titles like A Tangled Web and Magic for Marigold were scooped up at various gift shops, and I even managed to snag a copy of Among the Shadows, which is a compilation of Montgomery’s supernatural-themed stories (actually, I drove across the island looking for Shadows only to find it in the used bookstore right next to my cottage …) There is also an abundance of escapist fiction in beach & cottage country. I had a suitcase loaded with old school romances and the complete Casteel series by V.C. Andrews when I came over the bridge. With all the sight-seeing and shopping the only time I did any reading was in the evening, and as it turned out I had brought with me some deliciously geeky boys.
I’d gushed over MJD’s Beggerman, Thief and so when I was loading up at the bookstore I had to add something with her name on it. I’m so glad I picked this. Derik, the Pack underling turned Alpha is sent to collect Sara Gunn, who is the reincarnation of Morgan Le Fay. She’s not aware of this fact until Derik enlightens her (after she kicks his ass and duct-tapes him to a chair, that is). Derik is just so doofy you can’t help but gush over him. His first few times scoring with Sara is cringe-worthy, adding to his doofiness, and he’s a Rachel Ray fangirl. Honestly, how can one not squee! over such geekiness? The part that had me spitting my tea across the deck was his hanging his head out the window as he and Sara drove cross-country. The mental image of this made the scalding nostrils worth it. My only problem with the book is that it refers to characters and events from Davidson’s e-books, which I think were all published by Red Sage, but the story was still easy to follow and I was left resisting the urge to buy her entire catalogue from RS as soon as I finished Derik’s Bane.
into Fluke.) A Dirty Job takes place in the same universe as Bloodsucking Fiends and You Suck. I honestly didn’t think another Moore hero could eclipse my love for Tommy Flood and Tucker Case, but Charlie Asher did it, and he brought his kid into the mix. Charlie is a pawn-shop owner and first time father, and with his wife’s death he discovers that he’s a Death Merchant, whose role is to collect souls from the recently departed and make sure they are passed on to a body in need of a soul. The book takes the reader through the first five years of fatherhood with Charlie and like all of Moore’s books, the underdog hero is supported by a cast of absurd characters including two hellhounds. Sophie Asher, Charlie’s five year old daughter, is adorable and funny and even though you can see her role in the grand scheme of things a mile away she’s the perfect complement to Charlie. Sadly, it looks like Moore is closing the book on this story arc that began with Bloodsucking Fiends. I hope it’s not permanent – I would love to see a third vampire story with Tommy and Jodi.
I had the creeps for the rest of the day and in spite of the serenity of my cottage locale had me yanking the covers over my head when the lights went out and my heart jumping into my throat when the fridge clicked on. Graven Image is a terrifying little story that’s going to rear its hideous head every single time I see a crucifix and the film version is probably going to get Garton burned at the stake.