Tag Archives: genre: contemporary fantasy
Shower of Destiny by Natasha Duncan-Drake #FreeFictionFriday #Fantasy
The Chronicles of Charlie Waterman – Now In Paperback
The Chronicles of Charlie Waterman – Now In Paperback
For those who love the feel of a holding a book, we are very pleased to announce that The Chronicles of Charlie Waterman by Natasha Duncan-Drake are now available in paperback as well as eBook.
Book 1 – Cat’s Call
Book 2 – Cat’s Creation
Book 3 – Cat’s Confidence
Charlie Waterman is eighteen and, until he is assaulted by a cat figurine and wakes up with a tail, he is boringly normal. Seven great Spirits guard the universal Balance against the forces of chaos and it is time for them to choose new Questors to wield their power and be their mortal advocates. Charlie is supposed to be the Questor of the Cat Spirit, but no one bothered to ask him about it.
Cat’s Call has been re-edited and is now a second edition, so if you already have the book in Kindle or other eBook format, now is the time to download the new version as well.
We know that the lure of print is irresistible to some and that eBooks just don’t quite hit the mark, so we’re working to convert all our eBook (in some form) for our readers who are paperback lovers. Thank you so much for sticking with us, and look out for new titles in the new year.
~*~
Excerpt:
Cat’s Call
1 AN INAUSPICIOUS BEGINNING
It was a beautiful summer’s day. The sun was shining, there was the slightest breeze to keep the air moving and the park was calling Charlie’s name. He hadn’t said he’d definitely be there, but several of his friends had planned to meet up and kick a ball around.
He’d been helping his mum with some things in the morning, like the dutiful son he was, but now he planned to kick back and relax. It was his last summer before university. It was time to have fun. Glancing both ways up the road and seeing a gap in the traffic, he jogged across. The quickest route to the park was behind the Black Bull pub and down Baker’s Lane, but, as he went to turn left, something caught his eye.
The old magic shop that had been there for years, but always seemed to be closed, had a sign in the window that actually read ‘open’ for once. There were many silly rumours about the shop: it was owned by a famous magician who only sold to invited guests; it was haunted by the ghost of a spurned magician’s assistant which was why it could never be sold or let people in; it was a front for the local mafia. They got more ridiculous from there.
On impulse Charlie turned and headed for the door. He had almost worked there once, but circumstances had been against him. Of course, he, like everyone under twenty in the area, had always wanted to see inside.
The windows were full of brightly coloured scarves that gave an air of gayety, but the paint was peeling on the window frame, letting down the whole image. He peered in. It was dim beyond the scarves and he couldn’t see anything. All a bit ominous. He hesitated and then laughed at how absurd he was being. He didn’t believe in ghosts or eccentric magicians and he reached for the door handle.
After the brightness of outside, the interior of the shop was very dark. The first thing he had to do was stop to let his eyes adjust. The door shut behind him with a click and a final thunk. It made his heart beat a little bit faster for no reason he was willing to admit. Only after blinking a couple of times could he finally make out what was around him.
“You are not what I was expecting,” a voice said from the other end of the shop.
Charlie could relate. The shop was nothing like he had thought. There were no tricks, just shelves and shelves of things that some people might think were actually magic. Charlie didn’t believe in magic.
“You are too old,” the voice continued.
Peering through the gloom and slight haze of incense that was tickling his nose, he finally made out an older woman standing at the other end of the shop behind a counter.
“Sorry,” he said, “I thought you were open.”
He was sure the sign had said ‘open’, but now he was second guessing himself. The urge to flee was high. For some reason the woman made him nervous. It probably had something to do with the penetrating stare she had aimed right at him.
“I’ve always meant to come in,” he said, and he knew he was babbling, it was a bad habit. “I almost worked here once, when I was sixteen. Had a letter, but my bus broke down and I missed my interview. Um … I’ll be going then, sorry to have disturbed you.”
The woman narrowed her eyes and made an odd humming sound. It was unsettling.
“No matter,” she said just as he was about to turn away, “come in, look around, explore where your heart leads you.”
The whole situation was getting weirder by the second. Clearly the woman had mysterious and eccentric down to a tee. Of course, now she had invited him in, Charlie couldn’t just run away anymore. It would be rude.
He smiled awkwardly and escaped behind one of the shelving racks.
“How do you manage to get yourself into these situations, Waterman?” he muttered to himself.
The shelves were full of crystals and statues and all sorts of paraphernalia that held no interest for him whatsoever. Still, he looked around and did his best to pretend to browse. He didn’t want to offend anyone, even if they were peculiar and burned really strange smelling incense. Come to think of it, especially then, because he had seen enough horror movies to know who not to annoy.
His footsteps sounded far too loud in the almost silent shop, and the smell of the place was making him want to sneeze, but he kept it up for a good few minutes. How long was long enough for propriety’s sake? He had no idea. Wishing that there were rules to these things, he kept glancing at the door.
When he put his head round one of the shelves to see where the woman was, she was looking right at him. His heart skipped a beat. With yet another awkward smile he made his way to another set of shelves and prayed for deliverance.
He was slowly making his way back towards the door, past a floor to ceiling shelving unit, when something glinted at him. It made him stop because he was pretty sure there wasn’t enough light in that part of the shop to make anything glint. As he stared at the dark shelf, whatever it was did it again. This time he could tell it was green.
He stepped towards the shelf before he even thought about it. Only as he reached one hand into the darkness did he pause. It was probably just a fire detector or an incense burner with a flashy light. He almost pulled his hand back, but then the flash came again, twice.
As the saying went, curiosity killed the cat, and Charlie was definitely a curious sort. Now he needed to know what it was. He reached into the shelf the rest of the way, right to the back where he thought the tiny light had come from, and his hand closed around something. He pulled it out before he could change his mind.
It fitted neatly into his closed fist, so he didn’t think it was anyone’s lost phone or something like that. When he uncurled his fingers a stab of disappointment ran through him. He had to have grabbed the wrong thing. In his palm was a small cat figurine, sitting up smartly like it was on duty. It didn’t even look like it was painted, just made of brown clay.
Glancing back at the shelf he waited for the glint of light again.
A tickling in the palm of his hand made him look back down instead.
Shock lanced through his chest like cold fire, freezing him in place even as his heart beat madly. He swallowed hard.
The cat’s eyes, which had been closed, contented slits in the clay, were open. The little creature’s head was tilted up, looking at him, and its tail was gently twitching.
The cat gazed at him and he gazed back. It was all he could do.
Its eyes were hypnotic, even as a voice at the back of his brain screamed that this could not be real and something had to have happened to him. Those green orbs seemed to bore into his soul and freeze him solid.
Finally the cat blinked, but whatever held him did not release. He was left to watch as the tiny creature stood up and walked across his palm until its front paws were touching his wrist. A hysterical laugh was caught in his throat, because he could actually feel miniscule claws pricking at his skin.
His heart felt like it was trying to beat out of his chest. He had to gasp for tiny breaths that really weren’t helping. Still he could not move.
Had he been drugged? Was he having a seizure? Were some of the crazy rumours about the shop true? Were they modern day slavers trading in teenagers? Was that why the woman thought he was too old?
His mind hummed with questions as he point blank refused to believe that what he was seeing was real.
When the little cat dug its claws into the delicate flesh of his inner wrist the pain definitely felt real. All he could manage was a quiet whimper as his body refused to obey any of the instincts firing through it. That was nothing, however, to the agony that shot up his arm as the figurine began to dig its paws under the upper level of skin. Blood trickled down over his wrist and it was finally enough to break his paralysis.
He threw his arm sideways, hitting one of the shelves behind him in his wild flailing. But he could not stop the pain. It was as if the little cat was glued to his arm. He tried to brush it off with his other hand, but that just hurt more and he finally cried out.
“Help!”
He didn’t know what was happening, but he knew he needed assistance.
Stumbling backwards, he grabbed his arm with his other hand. His own flesh was betraying him.
The woman came round the end of the row and he held out his wrist desperately, but she did nothing. He wanted to yell at her, to demand she do something, but heat ran through his veins and took any breath he had away. His legs went weak and the room span as he shuddered from head to foot.
“Help,” was the best he could do in a tiny whisper as he fell to his knees.
His vision faded out, and then in, and then out again, even as he began to pitch forward. He never even knew when he hit the floor.
To read more please check out Cat’s Call at Amazon or your local online retailer.
Newsletter Exclusive: The Beast In Me by Natasha Duncan-Drake
Birthday Bargains! 50-100% OFF eBooks
Birthday Bargains! 50-100% OFF eBooks
It’s our birthday 🙂
We have decided to celebrate by giving back to our readers and having a 1 day sale on our eBooks.
Most of our 99c books are FREE today and our other books are all 50% off.
The links below will take you to Smashwords where you can use the code below each book at the checkout stage and it will give you the listed discount. Smashwords has formats for all eBook readers.
Instructions for those unfamiliar with uploading files to their eReader:
FREE
50% OFF
And of course there are still our permanently free books as well.
Permanently FREE
AtoZChallenge 2015: W is for Welcome
AtoZChallenge 2015: W is for Welcome
We’re galloping towards the end of the AtoZ Challenge now, and of our theme here at Wittegen Press, ‘why’, specifically, why have we, as authors, written the titles we have. And, each day, the book we’re talking about will be FREE.
Being welcoming is something my family has always prided themselves on, and Tash and I wanted to be just as welcoming to our readers. So, we decided to each write a story for our readers to welcome them when they joined our mailing list. That was how Curse of a Banshee, my title today, was born.
Tash and I wanted to write two stories that would be popular, so we asked our existing subscribers to vote on their choice of genres. I, thus, ended up with contemporary fantasy.
I’m a big contemporary fantasy fan, both reading and writing, and so I’ve already written a selection of stories in the modern world with a fantastic edge. So, I had to sit and have a think about where I wanted to take this genre. I decided on fae, because it’s a wide mythology for me to draw from, but I could also put my own stamp on the fairy world.
Even after I’d nailed my universe, I had so many ideas darting around in my head that it took me a while to close down on one. I wanted to mix technology and magical lore in a modern world, but I also wanted it to be a down-to-earth kind of setting. In the end, it was a dream that inspired me to create B. She popped out of my subconscious pretty well formed, and then the rest of the story settled down around her.
B’s a pragmatist, someone who has had to work around what (if they were translated into a human concept) might be called disabilities. She knows her limits and she operates very successfully within them. She’s a bit of a sucker for a hard-luck story and helps those whom others pass by, but she’s also canny and can have a hard edge. I like her, but I wouldn’t want to cross her.
This story is the first in the Darwell (Magical) Cleaning Services series. I don’t have another one formed in my brain, yet, but there will definitely be more titles featuring B and her team. So, I hope our readers like this little welcome to our mailing list.
What’s the best welcome anyone has given you?
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Curse of a Banshee by Sophie Duncan
B, a djinn/banshee low fae, runs Darwell Cleaning Services, a business that specializes in tidying up magical crime scenes. She’s managed her company with her friend and business partner, Jean, for over one hundred years without any complaints, or problems. She keeps her head down and offers a job to those whom higher fae look down on for their lack of personal magic.
B and her team are expecting an ordinary night of clean-up when they arrive at the aftermath of a spell battle in the middle of an English woodland. However, when a terrified djinn boy appears in the middle of their job, B finds the mix of her djinn and banshee instincts, which she normally keeps under strict control, beginning to rise. The boy is not alone, he is being chased by criminals intent on selling him to become a genie, the same gang who took B’s father a century earlier.
B must struggle with her own unsettled powers and fight the slavers for the boy’s freedom, risking her own life and those of her friends in the process.
Curse of a Banshee is fast-paced fantasy taking a fresh look at ancient powers in a contemporary British setting.
*We’ve cheated a little today, the title is totally free, but you have to join our mailing list to get it. We never spam and we never give away your details. Just scroll down to the form at the bottom and you’ll get both books shown for free.
Our other AtoZ blogs: Tasha’s Thinkings | Sophie’s Thoughts and Fumbles| FB3X (AC)
AtoZChallenge List 2015 click to see other participants.
If you enjoy our daily free books you’ll really love our permanently free books, including the two FREE ebooks we’ll give you just for joining our mailing list.
AtoZChallenge 2015: R is for Re-Imagining
AtoZChallenge 2015: R is for Re-Imagining
Welcome to our AtoZ Challenge. Our theme here at Wittegen Press this year is ‘why’, specifically, why have we, as authors, written the titles we have. And, each day, the book we’re talking about will be FREE.
Of all the titles I have released, Night Blood has been on the longest journey and has been re-imagined three times.
I began writing it when I was 15, shortly after I fell in love with the vampire genre through The Lost Boys. I thought the revamp (pun intended) of vampires in the 80’s was brilliant, and I adore these modern fangs. The Lost Boys showed me that vampires can have up-to-date style and still be deadly. Fright Night. on the other hand, showed how an old vampire must adapt to the modern world. These stories were so different from the likes of Dracula that they instantly inspired me to start my own tale of the supernatural.
Most of the vampire movies I loved then were American, and most of the TV shows I watched too, so, of course, naive writer that I was, I began to write my story set in America too. In fact, I finished three stories with Tom Franklin over the next couple of years. Then, like everything else I wrote back then, with no internet and only my sister to share my stories with, Tom was laid to rest in a filing cabinet.
It wasn’t until I got to university and started writing fanfic that I pulled Tom’s stories out of their box. That is when I began my first re-imagining. Working with friends on the internet on fanfic taught me that I did not really know enough about American culture to base my plot and my characters there, so I moved the stories to the UK, Cornwall to be precise. I pretty much just filed off the serial numbers in this rework, changing place names, but not much of the story. This time, though, Tom ended up relegated to a file on a harddrive when things like passing my exams got in the way.
I never forgot about Tom Franklin, my half-blood vampire, though, and when I finally took the leap into publishing, this was the second story I worked on. This time, I took my original story and, with skills I’d been honing in the fanfic arena for years, I ripped the story apart and put it back together into a more mature story. Thus, I published Death In The Family as I first called it.
My sales were slow, but what reviews I had were good. There was something wrong, but I didn’t think it was with the plot. So I looked at other things, and concluded that my chosen title and that of the series, Heritage is Deadly, might be putting people off. Final re-imagining was with the title, I changed it and the title of the series to Night Blood – punchier and hitting my market’s keywords.
So, that’s how I came to where I am today, and I am now working on the sequel, Witch Blood.
There have been a lot of re-imaginings of movies and TV shows of late – what do you think about them, do you have one you think really worked, or totally failed?
FREE Book Offer
Night Blood by Sophie Duncan
Code for FREE download at Smashwords*: RM76A
Leaving a good London school with solid prospects, Tom Franklin has the world at his feet. Yet one thing has always haunted his perfect life: his dreams. When Tom discovers that the nightmarish images of dark places and even darker instincts are in fact repressed memories from his early childhood, he must face the heritage from his birth-father, a savage vampire known only as Raxos.
Realising his memories are his only hope of controlling his awakening instincts, Tom returns to, Coombedown, the sleepy, Cornish village in which he was born, unknowing that the night-breed in his veins will lead him into danger.
“Night Blood” is a young adult, paranormal novel.
This is the first story in “The Night Blood Chronicles”.
*Click Smashwords to go to the book on their site. Click the buy option. Put the code in the Coupon Code box, click ‘apply coupon’ and the book will be free. Coupon is only guaranteed to be valid for 21st April so please use immediately.
Our other AtoZ blogs: Tasha’s Thinkings | Sophie’s Thoughts and Fumbles| FB3X (AC)
AtoZChallenge List 2015 click to see other participants.
If you enjoy our daily free books you’ll really love our permanently free books, including the two FREE ebooks we’ll give you just for joining our mailing list.
AtoZChallenge 2015: Q is for Quickie
AtoZChallenge 2015: Q is for Quickie
Our theme here at Wittegen Press for this year’s AtoZ is ‘why’, specifically, why have we, as authors, written the titles we have. And, each day, the book we’re talking about will be FREE. And today you have both of us talking about our Christmas short stories, Stockings.
Okay, so maybe we’re a bit out of season, but you can save these stories for a stormy December night if you want to :). These stories were written as another thank you to our readers and are quick dips into the universe of The Haward Mysteries.
[Sophie] Personally I find short stories much more difficult to write than novels. Packing a whole plot into a few thousand words challenges my natural verbosity and it’s good for me! Writing short helps me practice with words, makes me really concentrate on making sure I have the right ones in the right order, there’s not as much room for manoeuvre in a short story as there is in a novel. There is also a quicker payoff for me as a writer in a short story, since I’m not spending months crafting chapter after chapter, it can be a matter of a few days and I have something to share with others. So that’s why I like quickies 🙂 [Tasha’s Bit] I don’t have such a problem writing short stories as Soph does (side-eyes her twin), but I can see why they can be daunting. I love writing them, but it’s about packing everything in without information dumping or leaving too much out and it can be a fine balancing act.For short stories I like to write fast, edit slow, where as with novels sometimes I write slow and edit slow 😉 . Quickies as we have christened them, can actually be quite exciting to write. Sometimes I have no idea where the story will go until it gets there. That’s the fun part.
So you like to read/write short stories?
FREE Book Offer
Stockings by Sophie Duncan and Natasha Duncan-Drake
There’s no need for a code, this book is permanently FREE, so just follow the title link above for all the download options.
In one story meet Remy and Theo as six year olds trying to meet Father Christmas and in the other see them come to terms with being the guardians of Blackwood during their first Christmas as such.
The Haward Mysteries is a set of Contemporary Fantasy, short stories and bargain priced novels full of magic and mystery with a side of CSI thrown in. Follow the Agatha Christie style whodunits of the novels, delve into the artfully rendered sorcerous science of the magical crimes and explore the enchanted world of the Haward Twins as they face supernatural trials in both their professional and private lives.
Stockings was released in Dec 2011 as a Christmas gift for fans of the Haward Mysteries, check the tags for more in the series.
Our other AtoZ blogs: Tasha’s Thinkings | Sophie’s Thoughts and Fumbles| FB3X (AC)
If you enjoy our daily free books you’ll really love our permanently free books, including the two FREE ebooks we’ll give you just for joining our mailing list.
AtoZChallenge 2015: N is for New Adult
AtoZChallenge 2015: N is for New Adult
Hello and welcome to just past the halfway point of the A to Z. Our theme here at Wittegen Press this year is ‘why’, specifically, why have we, as authors, written the titles we have. And, each day, the book we’re talking about will be FREE.
So, N is for New Adult today, and that’s the classification for my book The End of the Journey. For those who don’t know what New Adult is, it’s a fairly recent classification for those darker, sexier, possibly more violent stories that fall over the top end of Young Adult and into the books aimed at adults only.
The End of the Journey is the first part of the contemporary paranormal Hidden War series. Demons and magic are real in the Britain in which this series is set, and war rages between those who raise demons for their own ends and those who are trying to protect their world from such dark infiltration. This war goes on unseen by most.
In this world of two very clear sides, my protagonists, young men Damon Wulfres and Zac Kithrall, one from each of the sides, are forced together, Zac finding himself very much at the mercy of his enemy. He should be fighting for his freedom, but he trusts Damon, relies on him and, when the story opens, he has done for quite some time.
It was this idea that hooked my muse onto the story.
I wanted to explore the relationship between Damon and Zac as it developed, first through necessity and then into something more complex as Zac tries to discover the truth behind his own and Damon’s actions. Two young men with totally different backgrounds, but who share the weight of the expectations of their people, expectations they have both destroyed.
The End of the Journey could probably have been classified simply as Young Adult, but as Zac and Damon’s connection arcs through the upcoming stories, I intend for the story to grow both darker and more intimate, thus deserving the New Adult Classification.
What do you think of the New Adult classification – do you think it’s a useful designation, or do you think we had enough subgenres already?
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The End of the Journey by Sophie Duncan
Code for FREE download at Smashwords*: BE93E
The Hidden War has been raging unseen my normal eyes for generations and Zac Kithrall, demon-seer, and Damon Wulfres, demon-raiser, have grown up on opposite sides of it.
Zac knows these truths, but when he finds himself mostly helpless and under Damon’s control, he can’t remember why he trusts his enemy, or why they are running from both sides in the war. Weak, and fighting a raging power that is threatening to tear him apart from the inside, Zac is forced to rely on Damon, friend or foe, and, together, they face a race against time to prevent Armageddon.
The End Of The Journey is the first story in The Hidden War Series.
*Click Smashwords to go to the book on their site. Click the buy option. Put the code in the Coupon Code box, click ‘apply coupon’ and the book will be free. Coupon is only guaranteed to be valid for 16th April so please use immediately.
Our other AtoZ blogs: Tasha’s Thinkings | Sophie’s Thoughts and Fumbles| FB3X (AC)
AtoZChallenge List 2015 click to see other participants.
If you enjoy our daily free books you’ll really love our permanently free books, including the two FREE ebooks we’ll give you just for joining our mailing list.
AtoZChallenge 2015: K is for Kick
AtoZChallenge 2015: K is for Kick
Our theme here at Wittegen Press this year is ‘why’, specifically, why have we, as authors, written the titles we have. And, each day, the book we’re talking about will be FREE.
Today isn’t about the kind of kick that is a ‘kick in the teeth’, or even one where a football is involved, it’s about the kick I get out of saying thank you, and that’s how The Diablo Ouija came about.
When someone does something nice for me, or is supportive, or friendly, I like to say thank you. Two simple little words, but they allow me to acknowledge my gratitude to another person. The Diablo Ouija is our way at Wittegen Press, of saying thank you to our readers. It’s a FREE short story for anyone to download, but its specifically aimed at our readers, to say thanks for being there, taking the time to download our books, reviewing them even.
Since the thank you is aimed at our readers, we decided it would be good to expand on existing characters, to given people another story linked into one of our series, and since it was from both of us at Wittegen Press, we chose The Haward Mysteries as the series.
I wrote this story for Hallowe’en 2011, so it has ghosts as well as magic and murder mystery. And I hope you enjoy my 11K thank you as well!
What’s the best way anyone has ever said thank you to you?
FREE Book Offer
The Diablo Ouija by Sophie Duncan
There’s no need for a code, this book is permanently FREE, so just follow the title link above for all the download options.
Theo and Remy Haward are drawn into a ghostly murder investigation on Hallowe’en when The Diablo Ouija, a dangerous magical item, is stolen from the SeCT evidence store. Theo turns to his old mentor, retired DCI Swanson, for more information about the one-time tool of serial killer, Raymond Holiday, and discovers Swanson has been keeping a secret about the deadly spirit board.
Our other AtoZ blogs: Tasha’s Thinkings | Sophie’s Thoughts and Fumbles| FB3X (AC)
AtoZChallenge List 2015 click to see other participants.
If you enjoy our daily free books you’ll really love our permanently free books, including the two FREE ebooks we’ll give you just for joining our mailing list.