Guest Blogger: Linda Nightingale

The winner of Linda's book is: Razlover's Book Blog! Congratulations! Send me your contact information and I'll pass it along to Linda. Thanks to everyone who participated.

Linda Nightingale is joined today by Tristan McLaghlin and Lord Morgan D'Arcy, both musicians and both vampires.

Linda: What does it feel like to be a vampire?

Morgan: Linda, if one more person asks me that question, I shall bite them, quite literally. Why not ask what it feels like to be a concert pianist?
Linda: Morgan, put a cork in it.

Tristan: Shall we call you Mum as your pen gave us entry into this life?

Linda: Perhaps, then Tristan, you would like to answer.

Tristan: At the certainty of sounding condescending, what it feels like to be a vampire is beyond mortal comprehension. You've heard it all, heightened senses, physical and metaphysical abilities and, of course, sensuality.

Linda: I think that being a vampire would be—

Morgan: Everything that you have led these people to believe. And more.

Linda: I did give you the ability to read thoughts but I don't appreciate it when they are mine.

Whisper of movement and Tristan has taken her hand.

Tristan: You were broadcasting loud enough for any of us to hear your thoughts. There are ways to block the transmission. I could teach you.

Linda: Both of you had better mind your manners. I have an eraser in my hand.

Both men sit back, eyes unfocused, listening not to their creator but to the sound of footsteps in the hall. An attractive woman, long dark hair swinging at her waist, enters the room. She gives Morgan a smile, winks at Linda and sits beside Tristan, linking her arm with his.

Carol: Go play your cello Tristan and your piano Morgan. Leave us girls alone for a few. Sorry, Mum, to rob you of the eye candy.

Linda: Carol, how long have you been a Black Swan?

Carol: For about a year now. I met Lucien and Morgan at a totally elegant party at an even more elegant estate just south of London.

Girls: now that the fellows are not underfoot, from the trailer, you'll see that Black Swans are rather special people and treated to intense, addictive pleasures. We willingly submit to the vampire in order to experience the sensual and sexual euphoria of the kiss. A girl can get spoiled to the best! Our story is available from The Wild Rose Press. Please join me in falling in both the L-words.

Linda: Shall be give a brief excerpt of Black Swan?

EXCERPT:

Most of the Swan Songs they’d attended were in London. Tonight, they’d driven south to a fabulous country estate of manicured lawns and gardens that once belonged to a famous actor. A uniformed valet parked Lisa's car. A servant in frock coat and hose motioned them toward the manor's broad stairs.

At just such a party, she’d met Tristan. Black Irish, black-haired, blue-eyed, he looked like a young Pierce Brosnan. He was gifted with a devilish sense of humor, an artist's passion and zeal. They’d been an item—and true blue—for nearly a year before vampire wanderlust set in. Six months ago, he’d run away to America. If he’d asked her to go with him, she’d be listening to a rainy night in Seattle instead of England.

Carol had a gold medal in loving and losing.

BT—before Tristan—she’d never gotten the one she wanted. BT she'd never truly been in love. At least, he’d been a gorgeous improvement on her previous track record. Everyone dealt with heartbreak in a different way. Carol had tried to outrun it but a six-week parade of good-looking immortal lovers hadn’t filled the emptiness he’d left in her heart. Damn and double damn, she’d promised not to think of him tonight! She was here to have fun and perhaps other f-words.

Blonde Lisa, in blue sequins, leaned near to whisper, “Heads up, Carol.”

Carol looked up, halted, gripping the rail. She’d never seen the godlike creature standing regally at the top of the stairs, one long, elegant hand resting on the head of a stone lion. He radiated power—and arrogance. Black and soft as the country night, straight, thick hair washed over his shoulders. He was so intense, so handsome that the people greeting him faded to ghosts. Lisa captured her hand to pull her along. When they mounted the step beside him, black eyes captured Carol's and, in one fluttering heartbeat, the stranger had taken the measure of her soul. He didn’t smile or hold her gaze long enough to mesmerize, yet Carol felt wobbly on her feet—and enthralled. For a moment, she actually forgot Tristan.

Guests spilled from the ballroom into the marble-paved Great Hall. Lisa snagged Paul, a pretty dandy from the West End scene, by his tuxedoed arm.

“Who is Mr. Tall, Dark, Handsome and Arrogant?”

Paul spoke with the aristocracy’s natural lisp. “Lucien St. Albans, Chief Councilor of Les Elus, lovingly called the Dark Prince. He’s probably here to make sure no one breaks the rules.”

As they navigated the glittering crowd, Paul explained that Les Elus governed the Vampyre. “The Prime Directive, of course, is never to endanger the life of a Black Swan.”

www.lindanightingale.com

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Linda will be giving away a copy of Black Swan to one commenter. Her winner will be selected and posted on Tuesday evening. Stop back by to see if you won.

Ghost Rider Paranormal Blog Radio Interview

I was interviewed by Jon at Ghost Rider Blog Radio last weekend. Here's the link to listen:

http://tweetmeme.com/story/452304629/ghost-rider-paranormal-radio-interview-with-paranormal-author-lynda-hilburn-16012010-gri-paranormal-on-blog-talk-radio

Guest Blogger: Kate Austin

Kate's winner is: Becky. Congratulations, Becky! Thanks to everyone who participated.

Never say never…

I happen to love paranormal and I read it all the time – from vampires to witches to psychics and on to demons and ghosts. I love it all. But I’ve, over the years, thought of myself as a women’s fiction writer who writes a little magic realism into her books, the word realism being the key to the magic for me. So in Awakening, the heroine ends up in an alternate reality – kind of along the lines of the great old Gene Kelly movie, Brigadoon. In Seeing is Believing, the heroine has the gift (or curse) to see death in photographs. But these characters, and their worlds, are pretty normal in every other way. They live their lives in a way that you would recognize.

Paranormal, though, for me is a whole other ballgame. Werewolves don’t live their lives in a way that’s similar to our lives. Nor do vampires or demons or angels or even, for the most part, ghosts.

So I read paranormal writers for the same reason I read romantic suspense. I’m never going to write either of them – romantic suspense because you have to be able to plot a book and I can’t and paranormal because my characters basically live in this world – so my voice isn’t affected by the books I’m reading when I’m working on a book of my own.

Never say never.

If someone asked me (and they did, still do, because I read so much of it) what I would write if I wrote paranormal, I’d say if I wrote paranormal, I’d probably write about witches. Or maybe some kind of shapeshifter – though not a wolf for some reason. A cougar or a mountain lion. Definitely not demons. Too much Buffy, I think, for me to get into a demon as a romantic hero.

Never say never.

One day I was sitting with my partner on a deck next to the Pacific Ocean, the sun was shining and the water was as blue as the Pacific can get. And I asked him – he’s Persian – whether demons were something that showed up in Persian stories. Yes they do. So we started talking about demons and I wondered, out loud, what it would take to transform a demon into a good guy.

I added Ali and his story to a story a friend had told me a few days earlier about the boy who had once taken her to her high school prom and then disappeared from her life. He’d showed up after forty years, having followed her through friends and on Facebook and the Internet for almost five years before getting in touch with her.

Never say never.

I’m a writer who never brainstorms a book, never knows what’s going to happen in the next sentence, let alone the next paragraph. But after several hours and a few glasses of wine, I had the outline of the first Demon Next Door book. Ali, once Lord of all the demons, sprang into this world pretty much complete and all I had to do was write him down. Now Ali has a pretty active sex life – and his world demons don’t have sex – with the girl who lives next door to him and he needs to rescue her from – you guessed it – her high school prom date.

And for me the even weirder thing was this. I knew right from the start that there would be more than one book, that there would be many stories of demons following Ali into the human world. Morteza – a little bit of whose story shows up in the Pleasure Club series story called The Demon – is going to have a book of his own in the next couple of months.

So I’ve learned my lesson. Never say never. Because the world is just out there waiting to make you eat those words.

www.kateaustin.ca

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Kate will give away a copy of her e-book to one commenter. Her winner will be selected and posted on Tuesday evening. Check back to see if you won.

10 Questions Interview

Author Wendy Burt-Thomas asked me to answer 10 questions for her blog. You can find the answers here:
http://askwendy.wordpress.com/2009/12/28/10-questions-for-lynda-hilburn-author-of-the-vampire-shrink/