Today’s the last day of the Something New, Something Naughty Blog Hop. There’s still time for one lucky winner to win the grand prize of a $60 gift certificate to EdenFantasys (adult store) and for two winners to win $25 gift certificates to their choice of the following book sites: Amazon, All Romance eBooks, Barnes & Noble, or Total-E-Bound
All the authors participanting in the hop are offering prizes. For this hop. Mine is a copy of my latest —
book 1 of The Witchy Wolf and the Wendigo.
Scroll back to my previous post to see the book trailer, or go to Amazon.com for a peek inside the book
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AFFFESI
My post can still be found in the Life section of the USA Today in the Happy Ever After Blog. There I explain how I came to write The Witchy Wolf and the Wendigo — a story inspired by the urban legend of the Wisconsin wolf man. Here’s the link for a quick peek:
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The theme for this Hop is naughty and/or new. With naughty in mind, I consulted Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com to gain some insight on the word. In case you hadn’t heard this before, the thesaurus declares naughty a pretty impressive word. So am offering peeks into my stories through the naughty lens. Yesterday was evil naughty (yes, the thesaurus says evil is a synonym of naughty), the day before unorthodox naughty, the we started with playful naughty. Today is errant naughty. Errant, as in straying from proper standards.
Today I’d like to introduce an errant naughty snippet from Hermes Online – the CataRomance Sensual Reads Reviewer’s Choice Award Winner of 2011. Hermes Online was deliberately crafted to capture a publisher’s attention, and it did. This is the novel that opened the door to my becoming a multi-published author. 🙂 Overcome by a broken heart and a confidence-shattering breakup, Vivienne tells the story in her perspective. But first, here’s the book trailer to explain the details —
S and Vivienne are enjoying their daily email exchanges. She’s lived the last several months in a drab haze of self-doubt, but S sets in motion an inner healing when he asks her to describe her self in full-colored, richly-worded, detail. At this point, the tenor of their conversation is beginning to change. There’s some wooing going on! In this scene, a good bit of conversation you’re not seeing here has taken place in S’s email.
…..And now I suspect there is far more to you than you realize, dearest V. Your sensual nature filled in where your paints left off, but is there more color to be had, I wonder?
Let’s take this further, shall we? For tomorrow… I enjoy kissing. Wield your pen. Describe a kiss from your luscious pink lips, and I shall do the same. Tell me, how do you sleep? Do your linens caress your bare skin? If not, allow yourself this treat tonight. For now, sweet dreams, lovely one.
S
I turned off the computer feeling that nature-driven lassitude that makes a woman drowsy after her climax. Smiling inside, I headed to bed. While I stood in my bathroom brushing my teeth, I eyed the hook that held my nightgown. I thought about his words. Never in my life did I recall deliberately sleeping nude. Yes, at various times after intimate exchanges in my past relationships, I fell asleep as naked as the body next to mine, but never did I set out to sleep without pajamas or nightgown at the end of the day. For some reason, the simple thought felt rather heady.
Being one of those people who actually takes the two minutes each morning to make my bed, for no other reason than not wanting to sleep in a jumble of sheets and blankets at the end of the day, I left the nightgown on the hook and turned down the sheets. My skin felt very hyper-aware as I stripped from the robe and snuggled in. The fabric softener scent lingered on my cotton sheets still, and the smooth flat surface of the fitted sheet felt cool against the remnant of my earlier sexual fever. I rolled over on my belly, one leg bent, one arm hugging the spare pillow that gave the illusion I didn’t sleep alone. I laid there assessing. My whole being felt lighter. For the first time in a year, I didn’t give Dan power over my dreams.
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I woke the following morning realizing I didn’t wake in the middle of the night as was my habit. In fact, I slept like the proverbial rock. It had been months since I slept through the three o’clock grief hour, that subconscious middle of the night wake-up call experienced by the grieving. As I took a languid stretch, I briefly contemplated revisiting last night’s date with the electric company. The corners of my mouth turned into a smile at the thought. Not now, I said to myself, tucking the option away and thinking I just might bring myself off later. The anticipation of another sensually charged email grabbed me. I found I relished the idea of writing…and reading…a kiss.
Later in the day I received a call from the county board president. It seemed my thoughts on creative reuse of the old Hornsby mansion had stirred more than one imagination on the board. In fact, so intrigued were they by my proposal that the house coming down was on hold for the time being. He wanted to let me know that my idea had become an agenda item on the special meeting he called this coming Thursday. Then to my ultimate surprise he paid me a compliment. “Honestly, Vivienne, I just have to tell you, I haven’t seen an idea come out of Planning and Development with this much potential in years. Your idea was inspired.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. For one, they’d suspended the tear-down, two, they’d called a special meeting, three, the board members I’d met with the other day had spoken favorably to their contemporaries, and four, I’d just gotten an extremely rare compliment from a guy who probably never even said “good boy” to the family dog. My idea was inspired!
Filled with possibility as I was, the ride home from work had my lips tingling as scenes from the world’s best movie kisses played over my head. To me the best were desperate I’ll-die-if-I-don’t-kiss-you kisses. My mind played with the concept for a mile or so.
Once in my life, and granted it had been nearly a half dozen years ago, I had been kissed just like that. The kind of kiss that throws your back to the wall and sends buttons flying from clothing in a fevered race to shed them just so your skin could make contact with his, to send that kiss to every nerve in your body.
Yes, I’d felt that once. My chest constricted with the memory of the architectural study tour one magical autumn in Greece and the amazing man assigned to my class. Wincing, I remembered the circumstance that ended the budding transcontinental relationship begun with such wonderful potential. My sensually handsome teacher had proposed to a woman he had been in a long relationship with just prior to leaving for Greece.
Neither of us planned to fall in love. It just happened when we found ourselves separated from the rest of the tour on the island of Delos. Waiting for the next ferry, we discovered a connection, one the entire pantheon of gods must have had a hand in, for it was incredibly beyond our control. But as blissful as that week had been, I knew from the onset there was no hope for anything else between us. His prior commitment was on the table. As surely as the seasons turn, my month-long class was over and with it came a return to cold reality. I felt his loss even now. As brief as our intense liaison had been, I had loved that man and he loved me and it was the kind of love you only got once in a lifetime. Broken-hearted, I left Greece without looking back and I didn’t leave my contact information for future study tours just in case I’d meet him again as a married man.
My tenuous emotional state couldn’t bear lingering here. In self-defense, I shook the bittersweet thought away and flipped on a talk radio station with its topic on how to get raccoons out from under your porch. Ignoring the rush hour traffic under my forced emotional silence, I got off at my exit and let my mind open to the conversation the experts were sharing with listeners. Twenty minutes went by as I learned about the nocturnal habits of raccoons. Who knew? The uninvited raccoons were exactly the distraction I hoped for as my sad thoughts of lost love sunk back into the dusty scrapbook of my memory. Three miles later, raccoons and opening deer season cleared my mind enough to think about the present. I turned the radio off and got to work crafting my perfect kiss, attempting to borrow from Hollywood rather than personal experience.
I settled on the fiddle-tempo kiss from Last of the Mohicans and combined it with the wave-crashing beach kiss between Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity. That was nice, intensely hot. I then superimposed the kiss in the rain from The Notebook, and a bit of the library-shelf-climbing kiss from Atonement. “Wow,” I said, feeling electrified from the image I had woven.
Taking only enough time to do all the odds and ends one must do, such as making dinner, changing into more comfortable clothing, seeing to a load of hand-wash-only laundry and other less pressing bits on my weekly to-do list, I kept my computer at arm’s length until I had enough of a kiss in mind to write about. Two hours later, my computer fired up and so did my mind. I had mail.
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Fun Fact: When I came up with the title for this novel, the only thought I had in mind was the Greek myth of Hermes delivering messages from the gods. Flash forward to today and emails magically appear in our inbox. Add to that the fact my character Vivienne went to Greece as a student and I was quite pleased with my unusual title. Notice I said was. The title has been a source of a few chuckles along the way. First off, just about everywhere I’d posted a guest blog post about this book in 2011, the host tells me they’ve had a tremendous amount of hits on their blog for that day. That was nice to learn.
I’m also signed up for Google Alerts which tells me when my title is mentioned on the internet. In theory that should work, right? To date I’ve never received notice of this book being anywhere, but I do get a DAILY notice of who’s selling Hermes handbags, purses, and clutches online! lol I suspect the uncharacteristically high volume of hits on all those blogs might have been from people hunting down handbags. 🙂 Every once in a while someone will ask where the Greek gods are in the story.
FYI: The gods are there, but it’s not their tale.
Rose Anderson – Love Waits in Unexpected Places
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The following links lead to terrific authors participating in the hop.
Be sure to comment and leave your email address to win their prizes too!
I’ll contact the winner of The Witchy Wolf and the Wendigo sometime this week. Thank you for joining me in the Something New, Something Naughty Blog Hop. Follow The blog hop link above to see who’s won the prizes.
Subscribe to my blog for updates, author and publishing insights, reviews, laurels and skinned knees, and just about anything that captures my fancy. And more Hops! I’m participating in two Valentines Day hops. I should have two new releases out by then too!
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calliopeswritingtablet.wordpress.com 
That is too funny about the Hermes bags. Sounds intriguing though. I javelin a soft spotfor the Greek gods so reading a story with inspiration from them has got to be good. This was and awesome blog hop. sbereza22 at gmail.com
Rose, aren’t you clever to come up with four different aspects of naughty! Wish I’d thought of it. 🙂
Adding this book to my buy list. i am finding so many new authors and books on this hop.
lauratroxelatyahoodotcom
I’m finally getting around to finishing the hop. Thanks for participating.
catherinelee100 at gmail dot com
Sounds like a great book! Best wishes and many blessings! Thank you for the awesome giveaway and hop! 🙂
shadowluvs2read(at)gmail(dot)com
This sounds like a good book, I’ve never heard of the Wisconsin wolf man. Thanks for the giveaway!
tiger-chick-1(at)hotmail(dot)com
Thank you, Rose, for participating in our blog hop! 🙂
~Jen