Posts Tagged ‘Dragons’

I’m so excited! Today is a release day for me. The third book in the Draven’s Crossing series is out. *Grins* I hope you like it. I have another book or two planned for this series.

Excerpt: Meeting With Draven
Out Now at Purple Sword Publications
Draven’s Crossing: Hidden Diversions
Genre: Paranormal/Interracial
ISBN: 9781612920603
Novella
Blurb:
With so many distractions, can they catch a killer before someone else dies?

Their passion may be the death of them…

Werewolf Chief of Police, Torger, is running into walls while tracking the Draven’s Crossing serial killer. No matter what he tries to do, he can’t find the clues needed to stop the terror that stalks the streets of his city. Things aren’t helped by his attraction to dragon shifter, Draven City News Reporter, Isadora Jones. With political pressure and bodies mounting, can he get through all these distractions to the truth before it’s too late?

Reporter, Isadora Jones wants to help with the investigation into the serial killer but Torger refuses to let her. She decides to do it on her own, but her world goes upside down when the killer sets his sights on her. Under Torger’s protection, they start to put the pieces together but will it be too late for them?

Things go from bad to worse when another killer appears. Draven’s Crossing just got a whole lot more dangerous.

Buy Links:
Purple Sword Publications:
http://purplesword.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=6&products_id=130&zenid=numkviqa0h5fkk6o4i6cqo6m06

ARe:
https://www.allromanceebooks.com/product-hiddendiversions-1018638-139.html

Amazon:
Coming Soon!

Nook:
Coming Soon!

Excerpt:
Torger tossed and turned in his bed. He could smell her on his covers. Her scent drifted around the room like an enticing trail he wanted to follow. His skin burned as his muscles contracted. Blood flowed straight to his cock, thickening the shaft. His balls hardened and throbbed with the need for release. With a groan, he rolled onto his stomach. His mind was split into two parts: one half didn’t think it was right to want sex much less have it with so many bodies piling up, and the other didn’t give a shit and needed to feel something good in a world full of crap. He didn’t want to think about anything. He had the All Packs meeting that was coming up after the full moon. His mind was abuzz with thoughts and lists. There were things he had to do and things he had to discuss. Torger hadn’t met with his Beta yet, nor had he met the new leader of the Branson pack after the old one had been ousted. Then he had to make sure that Draven would get the old ones to meet with him about the killer. There was Evanson to deal with, and he didn’t want to think about the shit storm that could come out of accusing him of anything, especially not with the man’s wife dead. Whether he had anything to do with it or not, the public wouldn’t be happy. Muffy Evanson was a beloved figure in the community. If the Representative had anything to do with her death, there would be chaos. He needed to be sure, to dig deeper. Torger knew he’d have to ask Isy to dive into the archives and see what she came up with.
The sweetest perfume drifted under his door. He snorted and sat up. She was near. His eyes had already adjusted to the darkness. He saw a shadow move in front of his door but it didn’t go to the guest room across the hall. He waited; the seconds ticked by. Each moment like a drip of water on his face, it seemed to last forever and there was no end in sight. He swallowed. His lips became dry as his heartbeat sped up. The jangle of a hand on the door handle rang in his ears. The delicate shells prickled at the musical sound. He waited. His heart stuttered and then crashed against his ribcage in a heavy drum beat. His body heat spiked as his wolf waited. Need coiled in the pit of his stomach. He licked his lips again, hoping, praying for what, he didn’t know. All he saw was that if she didn’t do something soon, he would. And then there would be no turning back. Everything would change for them, and he wasn’t sure how everyone would react or how everything would land.
As the seconds ticked by, her shadow remained at the door. The hand had stopped jiggling. Opening up his senses, he allowed her emotions to wash over him. He tasted the tang of hesitation with the sweetness of eagerness. All of it was tinged with the bright spice of lust. Underneath it all, there was Isy’s own unique natural scent. Not wanting to let the torture for both of them continue, he called out, “Isy, you can come in.”
There was a moment and then the door knob turned. Her perfume and emotions rushed into the room, driving away the stale trail she’d made before. It was as if someone had turned on the sun in his room. Heat poured over him in waves as she advanced into the space and shut the door behind her. Both of them were covered in darkness and yet he knew she stood between the door and his bed. So close and yet so far away as the cliché went. His fingers ached to hold her, to feel the silken warmth of her skin and bury his face in her neck and inhale deeply. Torger’s lips tingled with the need to kiss her, to feel her lips against his and slide his tongue into her mouth and taste her. He wondered what he’d find there. He didn’t want to think about it anymore.
“Isy? What’s wrong?” Torger knew what was wrong but didn’t want to come out and say it. His wolf on the other hand wanted him to get up off the bed, strip off her clothes, bury his face between her thighs and eat her out until she came. His cock jerked at that urge. Heat flared along his skin, flushing through is cheeks, down his throat, and crashing into his chest. Prickles danced along his flesh as his nerve endings came alive. His sense sharpened as his wolf came into play, pushing at its restraints, demanding that they finally get what they’d longed for after so much denial. And he couldn’t move. Frozen by his guilt as his responsibility pushed forward to the forefront of his mind. Pack. Duty. Draven’s Crossing. Those words screamed in his head, and he felt a tinge of shame.
No shame! His wolf cried out and growled at its master’s retreating libido. His skin cooled as his heart went back to its normal rhythm.
“Torger. Shut up. Stop thinking.” Isy’s voice came out as a low, husky command. Just like that, the fire inside burst to life. It went from simmer to all out firestorm as Isy advanced toward his bed. How she knew about the war going on in his head he didn’t know. Do dragons smell things the way other shifters do? The question pushed back some of his doubts.
The bed dipped under her weight, which served to shove back more of the pressure on his mind.
“Can you…” The question caught around a lump in his throat. It had formed when he wasn’t looking. A nervous sweat began on his forehead. He felt large and unsure of himself, like a teenager during his first experience. “Your stress and frustration reeks. It’s time to put an end to that. Your doubts and concerns won’t save the people of Draven’s Crossing and it sure as hell won’t help you catch the killer. Now didn’t I tell you to shut up?” Her hands closed around his ankles. He felt them slide up his legs. The cloth abraded his skin. Even though it was smooth cotton, it felt a thousand times rougher than before. He swallowed again, not used to this side of Isy. Rather than ask, he did as she said and stayed quiet. He didn’t move or even dare to breathe without her say so. His thoughts drifted away with her touch. She ran her hands over his thighs. The scrape of her nails over the cotton intensified his sense of touch. The blunted pain only enhanced his need. Desire crawled through his body as blood thickened in his veins. Her unique aroma became his air. Each gulp sent his head spinning and his mind drifting. He was lightheaded with her nearness.
“You’re going to let me take care of you. I’ll be handling your pleasure tonight. You do what I say and want without a single word, understand?” She placed a butterfly kiss on his stomach, so light it could have been the brush of the wind for all he knew. Her humid breath told him otherwise.
Torger nodded his acquiescence. He let out a yelp when he felt her teeth sink into one ridge of his abdominals. “No. Let me hear you say it. Tell me, yes, Isy, I understand.” She lapped at the pained flesh with quick licks of her tongue. Each lap pulled a soft groan from his throat as the pain turned to pleasure.
“Yes, Isy, I understand. Please.” He reached for her, wanting to bury his hands in her hair and pull her close but did nothing until told to. His alpha male self went to war over giving power to Isy. It had nothing to do with her being a woman or even a dragon. Everything in him was designed to take care of people, solve problems, and yet he was rescinding control to her. He was allowing her to take care of his problem, solve it for him and take care of him. He wasn’t sure how to respond so he did nothing. Curiosity peeked out from the wolf. It wondered how this would go, not in the least bothered by the shift in power.

My new cover for Dragon Ugly coming December 14th from Etopia Press!

Its part of the Dragon New Year Series.

What do you think?

Se

Right now I’m working on Dragon New Year: Dragon Ugly, the second story in the Dragon New Year series but it’s also the second story in a larger series that takes place in Shadow Bay which was introduced in Dragon New Year. So these are the songs as it stands that are driving me for this story:
Along the Watchtower- Bear McCleary
Paris Ooh La La- Grace Potter
Breakeven- The Script
Give Your Heart a Break- Demi Lovato
Bedroom Hymns- Florence and the Machine
Short Change Hero- The Heavy
Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing- Chris Isaak
Wicked Games- Thee Days Grace
Understand- Christina Aguilera
Moves Like Jagger- Maroon 5
Ball and Chain- Anouk
Turning Tables- Adele
The Great Divide- Emmy Rossum
Dark Side- Kelly Clarkson
Addicted- Kelly Clarkson
Voodoo- Godsmack
All I Want- Susie Suh
Petrified To Be God-Like- Susie Suh
Breathe Water- Anggun
Understand- Christina Aguilera
You Fight Me- Breaking Benjamin
Undress Me- Anggun
It’s All Your Fault- Pink
Orion- Gabriela y Rodrigo
Sinner’s Prayer- Sully Erna
Silver and Cold- AFI
Come to Me- Megan McCauley
I Am- Christina Aguilera
You Lose Me- Christina Aguilera
Milk- Garbage
#1 Crush- Garbage
You Look So Fine- Garbage
Animal I’ve Become- Three Days Grace
Stand Still, Look Pretty- The Wreckers
Rain- The Wreckers
Gravity- Sara Bareilles
Impossible- Christina Aguilera
Your Heart Is As Black As Night- Melody Gardot
I Bruise Easily- Natasha Beddingfield
My Sensual Mind- Anggun
Bad Boyfriend (Garbage Remix)- Garbage
Domino- Jessie J

It’s an interesting mix and I’m loving it. Some songs are mainstays for me when it comes to writing. So what do you think of the list?

Se

From Villain to Hero in One Easy Step
By Jennifer Ashley (aka Allyson James)
http://www.jennifersromances.com

Villains are tough for me to write, not because I don’t like them, but because I become so fascinated by them.

I dislike books with cardboard or unbelievably evil villains—poorly constructed villains can ruin an otherwise good story. On the other hand, really “good” villains can steal the show.

The villain is the hero of his own story. He thinks he’s good and right about everything he does. He might do really awful things (murder, assault, kidnapping, plotting to end the world), but he knows that whatever he decides to do is justified.

Writing a good villain means finding solid motivation for his actions. It’s not enough that the villain does what he does because he’s inherently evil (unless you’re writing broad comedy). He has to have a reason for kidnapping the heroine and putting her naked in chains in full view of the hero. A very good reason, and it can’t be “bad” to him.

The deeper I dig into the motivations of my villains, the more I like these guys. I like them so much, I decide to go ahead and make them heroes in their own books.

I’ve done this several times in my novels with success. My first hero-to-villain was James Ardmore, villain of The Pirate Next Door and hero of The Pirate Hunter.

James Ardmore as villain wanted to hunt down and kill the pirate hero of The Pirate Next Door. Why? Because not only was James a pirate hunter, but the hero was a pirate James blamed for the death of the woman he loved.

Good motivation. I really liked James! In The Pirate Hunter, James is still hunting pirates, but he works through his problems and runs across a heroine who challenges him.

In Dragon Heat, which I wrote as Allyson James, the villain, Malcolm, a black dragon, tries to kidnap the heroine to use her latent magic. Why? Because he’s trapped in the human world and wants desperately to go back to Dragonspace.

Malcolm is pretty bad—he coerces a young witch to help him, and the witch starts to fall in love with him. So much so, that when she’s attacked in The Black Dragon, she calls on Malcolm to help her. And he steps in and becomes a hero.

Penelope and Prince Charming introduced one of my favorite villains, Grand Duke Alexander. Alexander wants the charming prince (the hero) dead. Why? Because Alexander battled all his life to save his country from the tyranny of the hero’s father. Now he fears that the hero will come home and carry on the tyranny.

I loved writing Alexander. He acts not from personal ambition but for benefit of his countrymen (well, he that and his big ego). Alexander becomes the hero of The Mad, Bad Duke, where he meets a young Englishwoman who won’t let him get away with that big ego.

With my two current series (Shifters Unbound and The Mackenzies), the hero / villain delineation is a little more complicated.

In each series I have some bad guys who drive the plot, but the true villains in these series are more obscure. In the Shifters books, it’s the overall situation of humans vs. Shifters (Shifters are second-class citizens made to wear Collars and live in Shiftertowns). The Shifter heroes battle to keep the others Shifters in line in order to keep the peace and let Shifters get strong enough to end their situation. (The current book is the bestselling Primal Bonds, which came out this March.)

In the Mackenzies’ books, the villains are the Mackenzies themselves.

The entire world views them as “villains” (not criminals, but dangerous and powerful). The Mackenzies do as they please, uninhibited by society’s rules, because they don’t care about the rules. They have too many other things to deal with to worry about rules.

The youngest, Ian Mackenzie (The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie, re-releasing August 2011), has Asperger’s Syndrome. Ian fights that demon every day, and his choices aren’t understood by most of the world.

His oldest brother, Hart, has done what he had to do to keep his younger brothers safe, especially from their father who was obsessive, jealous, abusive, and probably a little Aspy himself.

Hart’s actions regarding his brothers (and his father), can’t always be seen as “nice,” but he sees them as necessary and justified. More of his motivations and exactly what he’s done and why will come out in the August release, The Many Sins of Lord Cameron (about the womanizing, horse-training Mackenzie brother), and Hart’s own book, which I’m working on now.

As you can tell, I love giving villains a chance to tell their own stories. I love these guys so much, I want to give them a chance to fall in love and be happy.

“Good” guys can bore me—I think I’ll keep writing my men bad!

Jennifer Ashley Bio:

Re-Release August 2011

New York Times and USA Today Bestselling author Jennifer Ashley has lived and traveled all over the world, and now lives in the Southwest. She writes historical, paranormal, and contemporary romance as Jennifer Ashley; mysteries as Ashley Gardner; and paranormal romance and urban fantasy as Allyson James.

Jennifer’s/Allyson’s/Ashley’s novels have won RWA’s RITA award, the Golden Quill, RT Reviewer’s Choice awards, and the Prism award, among others. Jennifer’s novels have been also been translated into nearly a dozen European and Asian languages.

Jennifer enjoys writing and reading above all else, but her hobbies include cooking, hiking, playing flute and guitar, painting, and building miniature rooms and dollhouses.

If you have any comments or questions,
e-mail Jennifer at
jenniferashley@cox.net.

Bad Boys vs Assholes

There are all kinds of heroes in books. I write just about every type you could think of from the good guy to the tormented hero. However, there’s a breed of hero out there that I think is gaining a lot of momentum with readers: the heroes who aren’t all that sterling. Of these not so wonderful heroes, the two I like most are the bad boy and the asshole (jerk.)

The bad boy is the guy who appears to be not squeaky clean, not the boy next door, and definitely not the sweet, good guy. The bad boy may not be all that bad in actuality. He may not have a criminal record or have done anything that could remotely be called bad. He may be a bad boy simply by virtue of the fact that he’s unconventional. He wears biker boots or work boots instead of wingtips. Faded, ripped Levis instead of a suit. He may ride a motorcycle or drive a beat up truck instead of a sports car or fancy sedan. These guys are bad boys by virtue of their appearance.

Then there are bad boys who actually aren’t all that nice. These guys could be suit wearing corporate raiders or leather jacketed ex-cons. Their commonality is that they do what they want and brush aside the feelings of others. In other words, they are arrogant assholes.

In my series Tales of the Darkworld, I have both bad boys and assholes. In Ride the Lightning, the hero Vahid Delrey is a total asshole. He spurns his destined mate in favor of moving in with his boss’s sister. He’s horribly rude to his mate, judgmental and uncaring of her feelings. Eventually, he begins to change his attitude and his feelings about her. In the end, he takes responsibility for his poor behavior and the detrimental affect it’s had on Emily. He realizes that he needs to put her and her needs first and his attitude does an about face.

Seth Dylan who first appears as a secondary character in Common Ground gets his turn as the bad boy hero in Sunstroked. He’s the boot and jeans wearing, scowling and dour Scots werewolf who doesn’t recognize his mate when he finds him. I think Sunstroked’s readers found Seth to be pretty much a classic bad boy. He admits that his sexual relationships with men aren’t relationships. He admits to using those men to get off with complete disregard for whether they might be interested in more from him. When the man who took his virginity appears in his life after nearly two years, Seth realizes he’s held himself distant from other men because it’s Corey he wants, needs and loves.

The penultimate bad boy in my series is black dragon Sean Antaeus who won’t have his own book until the very last book. Sean is both bad boy and asshole. The arrogant, take no prisoners head of the Antaeus family and the conglomerate Antaeus International can be ruthless when he needs to be with family, friends, and in business. But a good portion of his bad boy image is just that, an image. One that equals the leather, ripped jeans and motorcycles of other bad boys. Sean uses it to hide how much he loves his family and how much they mean to him.

Whether you’re a fan of the bad boy hero or not, you can’t be indifferent to them. They always bring out some sort of emotion in you even if it’s annoyance. But I see more and more readers of my series calling for Sean’s story and exclaiming over Vahid’s redemption. The asshole and bad boy heroes are gaining ground on the nice guys. I like to think it’s because we all admire a man who is strong and forceful but still caring and loving. We all want to believe that everyone has good qualities. And who wouldn’t want to be swept away by a primal man with a fiercely loving heart?

Coming Soon to Pink Petal Books

Bio:

An award winning, multi-published PAN author, Lex is a member of Romance Writers of America and EPIC. Her publishers include: Ellora’s Cave, Pink Petal Books, MLR Press, Liquid Silver Books, and Cobblestone Press. She is published in both ebook and print. The Tales of the Darkworld series can be found at Pink Petal Books.

Born and raised on California’s Central Coast, Lex moved to Southern California in 1992. She lives in Orange County with her daughter Nikki and Rott, her long haired, tattooed DH. She loves loud music, builds her own computers, and has very weird dreams about Nikki Sixx. Lex works full-time at a cemetery as the network administrator.

LINKS:
Website: http://lexvalentine.com
Blog: http://sunlightsucks.com
http://fivedarkrealms.com
http://talesofthedarkworld.com

Cat Marsters—The Original Sinner: Striker

When I first wrote Striker he was going to be a villain, plain and simple. He had one function: to tempt my heroine, Chalia, away from the man she loved. Striker had varous magical powers and he wasn’t above using them to get what he wanted. When he got angry he’d explode things. Like buildings. People. Cities.

I kinda liked him.

And that was the problem. I wanted him to be the bad guy. I even tried to kill him off. But I couldn’t do it. Well, I did, but no one stays dead for long in my books. At the last count, Striker had been declared legally dead three times. He’s still walking around.

But herein lies the rub. I can’t make him a romantic hero. He kills people for fun. He once cut someone in half, vertically, with a sword made out of fire. Got angry and flattened an entire city. He explodes pickpockets. Kills people for looking at him a bit funny. He’s a psychopath. A proper unhinged nutter. He’s a villain. So why do I like him? Why does everyone else?

Well, he’s hot for one thing. A giant walking pheromone. But we’re not that shallow, are we? He’s funny, for sure—he has a very nice line in sarcasm. He can do anything. I mean quite literally, anything. Travel through time (what, like it’s hard?). Kill immortal beings. Being people back to life. Make it snow, just because Chalia says she likes it.

Is that it? Do we like him because he loves his woman? He’ll quite literally do anything for her, up to and including mass homicide (she’s never asked, but he’s waiting for the opportunity). Making it snow is nothing: when she died he brought her back to life. When she decided she wanted a baby, despite the gods attempting to keep him from procreating by making it physically impossible for the only woman he loved to carry a child (okay, so he can’t do everything—cut the guy a break, he’s a homicidal maniac, not a fertility expert) he travelled in time to change the course of history and befuddled the gods out of noticing until the baby was born.

Or do we feel sympathy for the devil? Striker was, after all, once an ordinary person. A very good-looking, smart, rich, and mischeivous person, but with no more inclination to mass murder than you or me. And then a random accident got him stranded in an alien world for twelve years, all alone and with just a few magical powers lent to him in order to survive. Telling himself every day he’d get back to the woman he’d left behind. Thinking of the one and only night they spent together. Pickling in his own madness. By the time he returned he was lean and hard and strange and cold, and he might still have turned into something resembling a human being were it not for the fact that his One True Love had buggered off and got engaged to someone else, and told him in no uncertain terms that she wanted him out of her life.

So he flattened a city. As you do.

The thing is, he does love Chalia, but that’s about his only redeeming feature. And it’s not much of one. He loves her selfishly, like a child loves. He doesn’t want to share her. It’s kind of hard to figure out whether he really loves his daughter or not—even I’m not entirely sure if he does, or if he just takes care of her because Chalia wants him to. I wrote about Striker’s relationship with his daughter, Chance, in my first Ellora’s Cave book, Almost Human. She doesn’t know what to make of it, and neither does he.

She knows her father is the most evil man in history. That’s going to give a girl quite a complex.

Excerpt from Mad, Bad & Dangerous, available now ffrom Ellora’s Cave.

Was this how Striker had become so terrible, so powerful and so dangerous? Was this why he’d rampaged through Euskara twenty years ago, murdering Magi and stealing their power, flattening cities, roasting people alive—just to mirror his own pain?
What the hell could have hurt such an inhuman man so badly?
He found himself on the ground, back in his human body, staring at the scryer in his palm. It glowed red then the face resolved into Striker’s visage.
“Who the fuck are you?” he asked.
The same shock of fear and disgust ran through Bael, but far less powerfully than it had before. “Why did you do it?” he asked.
“Do what? Who are you?”
“Kett’s— I’m…a friend of Kett’s,” Bael said through the bad taste in his mouth.
“Oh yeah.” Striker’s mouth twisted cruelly. “You ran away.”
“You murdered hundreds of my people.”
Striker shrugged, as if he couldn’t see what the two things had to do with each other.
“Why did you do it? You flattened the city of Vaticano twenty years ago. You stole power and tortured innocent people. Why did you do it?”
Striker shrugged again. “What are you, a groupie? I did it ’cos I wanted to, kid. I enjoyed it. I’d do it again—”
“No, you bloody wouldn’t,” came a female voice, the voice of the brunette at Nuala’s house. Chalia. Chance’s mother…
Understanding stabbed Bael in the heart.
“You did it for her,” he said slowly. “Because she hurt you.” With every word he became more certain, the knowledge creeping into him like fog.
Striker’s face turned to granite.
“Because she did something to you,” Bael went on. “Because she hurt you so badly it screamed inside you, and all you wanted to do was make everyone else feel as much pain as you. To hurt and maim and burn and slash and kill, because that’s what she did to you. And she never stopped you. She stops you now but she didn’t then. And you went on sucking power out of people so you could destroy more and more, bigger and bigger, until you’d destroyed a city and killed thousands—”
A jolt of power suddenly surged through the scryer, like the shock from ungrounded metal, making Bael flinch and lose his thread.
The view on his scryer tilted, as if someone else had taken hold of the device, and Chalia’s face appeared, pale and shocked.
“It was you,” Bael said, and her lovely dark eyes swam with fear and guilt and pain.
“What did you do?” Bael asked her.
Her hand went to her throat, lovely and unlined even twenty years after Striker had burned and destroyed cities in her name.
“I got engaged to someone else,” she said distantly. “Who are you?”
“Baelvar.” The world had narrowed to the scryer in his hand and the anger pulsing through him.
Chalia regarded him through the scryer. “You’re Kett’s mate, yes? The Nasc. With power.”
Bael clenched his fist and looked away.
Striker laughed softly. “What did she do?”
“Someone else,” Bael said.

Bio:

Cat Marsters lives in Essex and belongs to a pride of adored cats. On occasion she can be persuaded to admit ownership of a demon puppy (but not if you suspect your flowers have been trampled). She enjoys watching TV and films that showcase the looks and talents of Richard Armitage, David Tennant and Hugh Jackman, reading books that make her laugh, dyeing her hair, and talking about herself in the third person.
Cat has been writing all her life, but in order to keep herself rich in shoes and chocolate, she’s also worked as an airline check-in agent, video rental clerk, stationery shop assistant, and laboratory technician. She’s still aiming for the fairytale cottage of her childhood dreams, and asks all potential Prince Charmings to apply in writing with pictures of themselves and their Aston Martins.

Buy link: http://www.jasminejade.com/p-8185-mad-bad-dangerous.aspx
Website: http://catmarsters.com
Blog: http://etaknosnhoj.blogspot.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/K8JohnsonAuthor
Facebook: http://facebook.com/catmarsters

Out Now!

Villains! I love the little devils. Not because I’m secretly a sadist who likes to see all her happy little characters tormented by some nasty villain…well, OK, maybe I do, but mostly I love villains because in them, I see the opportunity of redemption.

There’s nothing that chimes my bells more than a bad boy character, a person who at some point in his life, made a choice that led him into a path of no return. Mind you, I don’t like characters who were born bad—Magoth, a demon lord in my dragon books, is one of my favorite characters, but despite wishing I could turn him around and make him a hero, I know in my heart I can’t because he never truly was ever good to begin with—but give me a man who made some bad choices and was damned because of them, and I’m on the spot ready to bring him back to the fold.

That’s one reason why Baltic, one of my dragon heroes, is my favorite of all the dragons. He started out as the villain, a man who had committed acts so heinous, everyone feared him. So far as anyone knew, he was a psychopathic murderer bent on the destruction of everyone and everything. He remained that way through the three silver dragon books, with only a hint in the last one that perhaps there was more to him than was obvious.

Coming to NAL Signet May 3,2011

I knew the moment I first wrote the words “dread wyvern Baltic” that some day, I was going to take this uber-villain, and turn him into a hero. I couldn’t resist—he was just so bad, so apparently focused on everyone’s destruction, I had to find out what had made him that way, what forces had driven him to become the most hated character in all of dragon history, and spin him around.

It turned out the force that had sent him on a spiral of villainhood had been love. Baltic loved and lost, and that loss drove him more or less insane with grief. The depths of his love, the power it held over his mind, and how it forced him into choices that others would never have made is what intrigued me. I loved exploring just how far his vengeance would take him simply because I knew how much pain he suffered every single moment of his existence.

The joy, of course, was when it came time to write Baltic’s books. Redemption, how sweet thy name! I reveled in the opportunity of taking a villain that readers had despised for three books, and finding a way to not only make them love him, but more importantly, make him whole again. The answer was again love—what once destroyed him, now could make him a warm, funny, loving person, one who still had enough naughty quirks to satisfy my bad-boy lust, but who could now be free to conduct heroic acts…even if they were done with a villainous flair.

Heroes are well and fine, but give me an angsty, tormented villain, and I’ll happily plot his redemption, glorying in his badness every step of the way.

For an Excerpt from the upcoming The Unbearable Lightness of Dragons Click Here.

To Pre-Order (print): Amazon,B-A-M,  Barnes & Noble, Book Depository,  Borders, Chapters, Indie Bound, Penguin, Powell’s

To Pre-Order (eBook): Kindle,  Nook

Katie’s page: http://katiemacalister.com/

Bio:

For as long as she can remember, Katie MacAlister has loved reading. Growing up in a family where a weekly visit to the library was a given, Katie spent much of her time with her nose buried in a book. Despite her love for novels, she didn’t think of writing them until she was contracted to write a non-fiction book about software. Since her editor refused to allow her to include either witty dialogue or love scenes in the software book, Katie swiftly resolved to switch to fiction, where she could indulge in world building, tormenting characters, and falling madly in love with all her heroes.

Two years after she started writing novels, Katie sold her first romance, Noble Intentions. More than thirty books later, her novels have been translated into numerous languages, been recorded as audiobooks, received several awards, and are regulars on the New York Times, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists. She also writes for the young adult audience as Katie Maxwell.

Katie lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and dogs, and can often be found lurking around online.