Haunted Halloween Spooktacular: A Prophecy Awakened by Angie Barton + giveaway

The Velvet Coffin

Black are his eyes,
His lips stained red,
This sinister creature
We know as undead

Born of the night
A soul without mercy
An evil incarnate
Immortal and thirsty

He dreams of blood,
His fangs sharp and baring,
His desire awakens
As he lays there staring

The lid to his coffin
Creaks as it raises
Its velvety lining
His hand lightly grazes

Moving to the shadows
He expels a hiss
He catches her scent
And disappears into mist

A Prophecy Awakened (Immortal Wounds Series Book Two)
by Angie Barton
June 13, 2024
Genre: Fantasy Fiction/Magical Realism
Publisher: Angie Barton
ISBN: 979-8990647220
ASIN: BOD73FHPSH
Number of pages: 448
Word Count: 104,000
Cover Artist: Donnell McKenzie
The time has come for the two worlds to collide the prophecy has spoken.

Family. Destiny. Magic. Lore.

Forced to leave behind her only known family, on the night of her eighteenth birthday Charlotte Delgado flees through the invisible veil that has granted her safety since birth, with only an age-old diary to guide her. Given less than a day to read the four-hundred year-old tales scripted amongst its pages, she barely understands the predetermined path her ancestor writes of, let alone believes it.

However, despite the dangers the journal warns of—supernatural creatures that will hunt her along her journey—it’s the ominous twist of fate that surrounds the last bloodline witch in her family that fills Charlotte with the most fear.

Is she that witch or merely a pawn moving the prophecy forward?

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About the Author:
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Award winning author, Angie Barton, published her first novel, Immortal Wounds, in 2022. Angie’s love for writing centers around the fantasy genre, but she also enjoys writing thriller and romance. Her passion for reading, which led to her love of writing, began in elementary school with the Scholastic Book program. Her parents, who are life-long avid readers, have been a huge influence on her reading. Therefore anything and everything Angie could get her hands on she read.


Angie has been an early childhood educator since 1986 and hold a B.S. in Child Development. Her love for literacy has continued throughout her career, not only for herself, but also with the children she has cared for and taught. What Angie is most passionate about is helping others discover the excitement that reading brings. Her greatest desire in writing is to create and bring joy and entertainment to everyone she touches.


Currently, if Angie isn't reading at least three books at a time or working on a rough draft for her next book, she can be found outdoors gardening, woodworking, or relaxing by her pond. She shares that she's a Capricorn, tried and true, drinks way too much tea, and that her "to be read" pile of books can spike at any time.

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Twelve Nights of Halloween!

Haunted Halloween Spectacular: YA Paranormal Mystery Author Raye T. Watson + giveaway

To the review person: I don't understand how this is considered SPAM. Our blog has been posting for 12 years and this is the first time this has happened. What specifically on this post is considered SPAM?

Blood Poem by a Murderous Vampire

Of all my character, Morsa is by far, the most villainous and violent. She is the main antagonist in my new novel, Bloodlink. I tried not to show a lot of her because her nature tends to lead some rather gory and graphic scenes, which I generally tend to avoid all together. But it does make her an interesting character to write. Not much is known about her past, but some of the other vampires suspect she was never human. She often speaks in a soft silky voice, trying to seduce others to follow after her, but as much as she seems to want followers, she will not hesitate to kill another vampire and drink their blood to make herself stronger. If she wrote a poem, I imagine it would be something like this:

Through boarded windows, moonlight peeps

In fractured light, the night life creeps

In the chamber of death, I make my home

Until I snatch it

If only it had known.

Silly thing, let us play

While the sunlight flees away.

There is such fun to be had.

Let me kill you

And make you sad.

Why should I let you live

When sweet blood you do give

Me? But oh, what tastes! Delicious! Divine!

When your blood

And life are mine.

You say I’ve lost my humanity.

You say I’ve lost my sanity.

But what is life lived on a lead?

To be kept in check

And to a sole master heed.

Weakness is found in foolish men

Who think they can bind me in this fox’s den.

But fools know not want power is

Or isn’t.

No man can make me his.

I’m a power beyond control

Beyond age, beyond all.

I do as I like and take what I see.

But if it’s a game you want,

Cat and mouse, you and me.

I’ll hide, and you find me.

Death will follow,

And all life will wilt and turn hollow.

I’m much better than that insolent whelp.

Someday, you’ll see, I’m trying to help.

But you’ll lock me away. Say that I’m dangerous.

No, Sir.

I’m just that spontaneous.

I just want to play with my bite and their blood.

Does that make me too hard to be loved?

Hope you enjoyed this little glimpse into the maddened mind of my most wicked vampire. I loved being able to take this opportunity to guest blog today. Thank you so much, and happy hauntings!

Bloodlink
by Raye T. Watson
August 2, 2022
Genre: YA Vampire and Paranormal Mystery
Publisher: Knighted Phoenix Publishing
ASIN: 1958797049
Number of pages: 421
Word Count: 188,536
Cover Artist: Raye T. Watson
Sometimes, in a world of darkness, it’s the secrets that keep you sane.

Katelyn Phillips hates the Greatlee Wood, the small forest near her home in Effingham, England. She just wants to forget the uncomfortable feeling of being watched whenever she sees that line of trees and move on with her life like a normal person. But when she wakes up one night numb and dead, the forest becomes the least of her worries.

Now she’s lost all connection with the outside world as she fights for control of her mind and the lust for blood. But she’s not alone.

Aidan O’Conner, the superstitious Irish fellow with centuries of experience, is willing to help. Together, with his family and friends, they teach Kate what it means to be a vampire and how to manage her newfound powers, but there are some secrets they are not so willing to share. Like why the door at the end of the hallway is always locked? Or why the manor they live in was half burned down 20 years ago? And how does it all tie into the ghost tale of the Armuary Phantom?

Can Kate uncover the truth and protect her new surrogate family, or will these secrets and deceit cause her to lose trust in everything, including herself?

Book Trailer: https://youtu.be/R12G-TVsRQs

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Something is wrong. I’m finally waking up. I can almost feel my consciousness slip into focus, but I still feel like I am floating.

I pry my eyes open, and I can see I am lying in a bed, but I can’t remember how I got there or when I’d gone to bed. Had I been hallucinating? Is Ryan okay?
I put my hand to my head, or I think I did. I can’t feel it. I can hear movement, but I can’t feel anything. I frown, realizing the floating feeling hasn’t gone away. It isn’t really like floating; it isn’t as soothing. It’s just... nothing.

That scares me.

My eyes pop open, and I sit up, feeling like my heart should have shot to my throat. This isn’t my bed. This isn’t my room.

It is dark in this room, but I can see it fine. Moonlight filters in through the window to my left and helps define the room. I am in a four-poster bed in a renaissance style room. It’s as big as my living room. It is beautiful, but how did I get here?

I hear the rustle of the bed covers and look down. I can see my hands on the covers, but as I grip them, twist them, and throw them away from me, I still have no sense of their weight or texture. I rub my fingers and hands together, but nothing.

I can’t feel... anything!

Alarmed and panicked, I take in air through shallow and quick breaths as I kick away from the things I can’t touch. In the process, I fall backward over the side of the bed and hit the floor with a thud. I wish I could say that it hurt. But without the bang that resonated in the room as I hit the ground, I may not have known I’d fallen at all.

What is wrong with me? Tears of fear fill my eyes. Fear as intoxicating as poison burns inside me, and I begin to cry, too scared to think. I crab crawl quickly away from the bed, as if it was the thing that made me this way. I crunch against the far bedroom wall, which stops me from going any further. I turn and run my hands along the wall, but it’s the same as the bed. Without my sight, I wouldn’t even know it was there. Terror grips me, and I curl up in the corner and hug myself, but it doesn’t help. It’s as if my whole body is filled with novocaine.

Before too long, I can hear footsteps outside the room I’m in. They sound like they’re coming toward me. They are going to find me. I don’t know if I want them to or not.

About the Author:

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Raye T. Watson grew up in Northern California near the capital of Sacramento where she continues to live with her family. She is the only girl and second oldest of four children. She graduated Brigham Young University – Idaho with a bachelor's degree and a minor in English. She enjoys learning and being a jack-of-all-trades.

As a kid, she actually did not like reading as a kid because her reading level was slight below average compared to other kids in her grade, but she loves most anything with a story: movies, TV shows, video games. But books were too boring to bother with. When she was 11 years old, her older brother tried to get her in a newer series about a young boy who learns he is a wizard and had to take an invisible train to go to wizarding school. She was not interested. But this book had a movie coming out, which he was very excited to see, so their parents took them to see the first Harry Potter movie. Watson was so enthralled with this magical world, she read books 1-4 before the second film was released in theaters. And thus, her love of reading was born.

Watson had always loved creating her own stories, whether it was creating new characters to fix the TV show plotlines during the commercials or playing games of make believe with her younger brother, but once she started reading, she began to write. None of her written stories ever got far, but she dreamed it all in her mind.

In early 2010, she got her first glimpse of what would become her debut novel, Bloodlink. She’d always loved vampires and the spooky thrills of Halloween, and having finished the Twilight Series and Dracula, she began to define her own kind of vampire.

In the summer of 2012, she met the lady who would become her best friend and fellow author, Charity Mae. Watson and Mae swamped stories during their first meeting and have encouraged each other’s writing ever since.

Watson continues to write to this day and enjoys drawing and painting in her free time. She created the cover art and title page art for her book and hope to publish more art and books in the years to come.

Giveaway

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12 Nights of Halloween

Happy Halloween!

I wrote this last year and sharing it again :)

 

Poem: Editing by Ursula Vernon

Editing

by  Ursula Vernon/T. Kingfisher

December 18th, 2013

found here

I must remind myself—

they can’t tell that I didn’t write this bit immediately after that one

the six months where I ignored the manuscript are not visible to the naked eye

the bit where I put my head in my hands and muttered “I have no idea what I’m doing” takes place in the single space between the period and the next capital letter.

As soon as I shove that character in, she has always been there

and someone will probably say that she’s the emotional center

and the book couldn’t have been written without her

and nobody will know that I thought of her three thousand words from the end and scrolled up and shoehorned in a couple of paragraphs near the beginning because, for whatever reason, the story needed an elderly nun

she was almost the cook

and for about ten minutes she was the earnest young village priest

and now she has been there since you started reading.

I am sanding down the places where my editor found splinters

kicking up a fine dust of adjectives and dropped phrases

(Wear a breath mask. Work in a well-ventilated area. Have you seen what excess commas can do to your lungs?)

and eventually it will all be polished to a high shine

and hopefully when someone looks into it

they’ll see their own face reflected back

instead of mine.

About the Author:

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Ursula Vernon/T. Kingfisher

I write & illustrate books, garden, take photos, and blather about myriad things. I have very strong feelings about potatoes.

T. Kingfisher is the vaguely absurd pen-name of Ursula Vernon, an author from North Carolina. In another life, she writes children's books and weird comics. She has been nominated for the World Fantasy and the Eisner, and has won the Hugo, Sequoyah, Nebula, Alfie, WSFA, Coyotl and Ursa Major awards, as well as a half-dozen Junior Library Guild selections.

This is the name she uses when writing things for grown-ups. Her work includes multiple fairy-tale retellings and odd little stories about elves and goblins.

When she is not writing, she is probably out in the garden, trying to make eye contact with butterflies.

Twelve Nights of Halloween

Photo by Sašo Tušar on Unsplash