Hey all, thanks so much to Cynthia for having me here today during her super cool month of monsters! I have to admit, I’m a scardy cat. Horror movies send me running the other way, and Halloween? Well, monsters of any kind give me the heebie-jeebies and make me want to hide under my bed for a year.

So what the heck am I doing writing paranormals? Good question. I don’t really know. It’s one of those things you never plan, it just…happened. Sometimes when I’m writing I scare myself, which probably isn’t a good thing. Especially since I write late at night with most of the lights off. And this time of year, when the wind is howling through the trees and limbs are smacking the side of the house, making me jump and yelp like a heroine in a B-rated horror movie flick, you can only imagine where my imagination wanders.

I’m increasingly surprised at how dark paranormal romances can be. Sure, we know there’s the promise of a happily-ever-after at the end, but scary monsters abound these days, even in my own books. I keep asking myself, Where’s your limit, Elisabeth? But so far I haven’t found it. I have nasty-ass, seething demons running amuck in my books, doing some pretty awful things, but for some reason it works.

How about you. Do you have a dark limit? At what point would you put a paranormal romance down because it was just too scary?

My first paranormal romance, MARKED, releases May 2010. Here’s the info about my new Eternal Guardians Series:

THERON – Dark haired, duty bound and deceptively deadly. He’s the leader of the Argonauts, an elite group of guardians that defends the immortal realm from threats of the Underworld.

From the moment he walked into the club, Casey knew this guy was different. Men like that just didn’t exist in real life—silky shoulder-length hair, chest impossibly broad, and a predatory manner that just screamed dark and dangerous. He was looking for something.  Her.

She was the one. She had the mark. Casey had to die so his kind could live, and it was Theron’s duty to bring her in. But even as a 200-year-old descendent of Hercules, he wasn’t strong enough to resist the pull in her fathomless eyes, to tear himself away from the heat of her body.

As war with the Underworld nears, someone will have to make the ultimate sacrifice.

Since I don’t have copies of MARKED to distribute yet, how about some adventure? I also write romantic adventure and am giving away a copy of STOLEN HEAT to one commenter today. Simply answer the question above to be entered into the drawing.

Elisabeth Naughton

www.elisabethnaughton.com

Hi everyone!  Thanks so much to Cynthia for having me on her awesome Month of Monsters.   Fall and Halloween are so much fun.  I love decorating for Halloween and buying my kiddos costumes.  However, there’s something about the month of October that brings out the monsters.  Or maybe we just see more of them? 🙂

There’s always some type of villain in books.  In my upcoming Dark Sword series from St. Martin’s Press this December, my villain is not just a bad person.  She is the epitome of evil.  She is a Druid who wants power.  Lots of it actually.  So, she willingly gives herself over to black magic by doing a forbidden ceremony where Satan takes part of her soul in exchange for that power.

There are a lot of bad people out in the world, but how many of them would have the guts to willingly make that kind of deal with the devil?  I’m not sure I’d want to meet up with that person. 🙂  However, my Highland heroes in this series have no choice but to battle against my villainess or watch her evil spread over the land.

Want a chance to win Mutual Desire?  All you have to do is answer this: What would you do to battle evil?

Here’s hoping you don’t meet any real monsters this October!

hugs,
D
www.donnagrant.com
DANGEROUS HIGHLANDER – December 2009
FORBIDDEN HIGHLANDER – June 2010
WICKED HIGHLANDER – Fall 2010

People are always curious as to why I write about vampires.  I’m an ordinary, average Jo with two teenage boys, a cat, two dogs and a loving husband.  I am not gothic (although in high school I was a borderline punker), and I dress pretty conservative.   I blame Buffy the Vampire Slayer and her Angel.  Well, actually, I first have to blame Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  My high school senior paper focused on the sexual aspects of the Stoker’s fictional vamp.  As far as writing about them, I have to back up even further to when I was five and wrote about a witch.  That story gave me nightmares.  Go figure … I suppose I have always been drawn to the supernatural.

So I inevitably penned my first vampire novel, Forever Yours.  It took me five years to write it, and about five more to find a publisher.  I submitted many times and re-wrote many times, but finally, Wings ePress took a chance on it.  I am (pardon the pun) forever grateful.  My vampires can now see the light of day without bursting into flames!  Hooray!

For those of you interested in Forever Yours, here’s the blurb …

Two lovers torn apart through eternity …

Katherine’s world is forever changed when her husband’s friend turns her into a vampire.  Blinded by her new found blood thirst, she accidentally kills her soul mate.  Thus begin the cataclysmic events that keep her and her hunky hubby, Vincent, forever apart.

As their souls are reunited century after century, will they ever be able to vanquish the jealous tormentor who always manages to tear them apart?  Katherine is determined to make it so.

Get your copy of Forever Yours at www.WingsePress.com and visit my website at http://josephinetempleton.tripod.com.

Happy Halloween, and keep it spooky!
Josephine Templeton

P.S.
While I realize it’s not writing related, I also have some really cool kid news to share.  My oldest son, Mike Templeton, scored the winning touchdown.  His team, Live Oak High School, played Baton Rouge’s Scotlandville High School on Thursday, October 15th, and with 2.3 seconds left on the clock, the quarterback threw it to the end zone where two of the opposing players tipped the ball.  Mike slid underneath them and caught the ball to make the game-winning touchdown.  They walked away 19-14, and now he can say he beat his mom’s old alma mater.  Although when I graduated from Scotlandville, it was a magnet school, and there wasn’t a football team.  Geaux, Mike!  I’m proud of you!

This is a story. Maybe it’s even true.

My brother once told me I’m insane. He wasn’t spouting off the way bothers will with their sisters. He meant it. We don’t talk much anymore. Could be he’s right.  If he is, I’m not the best judge, I suppose.

The problem is that there’s always been something pressing in on me. Even when I was a girl, when I sat quietly, completely motionless— it’s not an easy thing to do, to sit without moving  —I’d feel a weight on my chest and back.

The same thing happens now and I wonder if there isn’t something inside me trying to get out, and that’s why I notice the pressure at all.  Once or twice I’ve asked friends if they feel that way too. But they just look at me the way my brother did that time. I’m careful about what I say anymore.

The thing is, what if they don’t notice because they’re never still enough to feel the chaos beating all around them?

My bedroom has a sliding glass door and there are nights when there’s no moon to be seen. Once when I was in bed, warm under the covers with the cat sleeping on my legs, I looked out the window and there was something looking back at me. I saw its eyes blink, and for half a heartbeat I felt like I was falling into a hurricane.

The county where I live is slowly, and sadly, becoming less rural. Every year, the city bumps up against the country with harsher insistence. Look at pictures from thirty or forty years ago, and there’s nothing but open space where now there are houses.

Old-timers notice the change, but newcomers don’t. How could they? They have a different picture fixed in their heads. They move here and the pressure is normal for them. They don’t see.

Those eyes I saw, they weren’t human eyes. The human eye doesn’t throw back light. The eyes weren’t close to the ground, and they were too high up to be a coyote. Besides, the coyotes and foxes don’t come that near the house. There aren’t any wolves around here and the eyes were too high up even for a mountain lion, which we do have.

When I saw them, the eyes, I mean, the pressure bore down on me like chaos. Trying to get out. Or maybe, I thought, as I lay there in bed, unable to move, maybe that sensation came from whatever was behind the eyes.

Later that night, I dreamed I saw a man turn into a wolf. If you think about it, that’s not so unusual. If you think you saw a monster, it makes sense you’d dream about it afterward.

At night, if there’s no clouds or fog, I can turn off all the interior and exterior lights and go outside, bundled up against the cold if it’s winter, to see a sky so filled with stars it takes my breath. I have to be careful to stand away from the nearest neighbor because they have exterior lights that dim the sky.

I look up at that sky and think about all the people who can’t see the world the way it used to be for every soul on earth. If you’d been alive a thousand years ago, you’d have seen too.

In the city, though, the sky is never really dark. But that doesn’t mean the stars aren’t there.

When you live in the country, you do see wildlife from time to time, but it’s important to remember that there are animals you shouldn’t see, and if you do see them, it means they’re sick. Rabies is endemic out here.

I was out one night watching Polaris, Casseopia and Orion, and since I’m human and see about as well in the dark as you, I didn’t see the dog until it was too late. Five hours in the ER waiting for the shot.

There’s this boundary, an invisible limit all of us bump up against, and we’re on the side that obscures what else is there. Too much light. Not enough of the dark. At the boundary the leading edge of chaos presses in.

You can’t see it, touch it or taste it or hear it, but if you stand still you can feel it. The chaos is all around us, pressing against us and trying get just a little more space. I wonder, sometimes, what’s going on beyond that light that blinds us to what’s bumping up against our lives.

On nights when the moon is full, for several hours silver light shines in my bedroom window and keeps me up, it’s so bright. Most city people don’t notice the sheer power of that cycle of light. You fall asleep with the moonlight shining in your window and when you wake up, the moon is in the western sky instead of the east.

Last night was the first night of the full moon, and I tossed and turned for a while with the light in my eyes. Eventually, I gave up and went outside. The chaos was there. Waiting for me, and I embraced that wide, dark sky of stars and moon.

Carolyn Jewel is the author of this story (which you may or may not have liked. It was a risk, I totally understand that. I had a professor once who said he preferred his students to take risks, and that if we did and crashed and burned, that was OK. So here I am, at Month of Monsters wondering if I’ve crashed and burned. If you got this far, maybe not.) She writes paranormal romance for Grand Central’s Forever line. My Forbidden Desire (June 2009) is book two of a series Ms. Jewel supposed to be naming pretty soon. (Got any good ideas?) She is working on finishing up the third book now. Or, she would be if she wasn’t doing this blog. Demons and witches! Get your demons and witches here.

Carolyn (okay, me! it’s me!) also writes historical romance. Indiscreet is an October 2009 release from Berkley Sensation. (In stores now!) I got a very pretty cover and I hope it’s not too jarring to see that kind of cover on this kind of blog. With this story, you get a Regency hunk, a unusually educated young lady and the Ottoman Empire. Plus England. All in the same book. How can you resist? (Please don’t.)

Third novel in the DEEP IS THE NIGHT trilogy by Denise A. Agnew

Thanks so much to Cynthia for inviting me to spend some spooky time with all of you. 🙂  Like her, I love October and Halloween.

One thing that usually spurs me toward writing stories with a paranormal bent is the fall season. For some reason I seem to be at my best during the fall, when the leaves are crisp, the air is beginning to cool, and the sun goes down earlier and earlier as the days pass.

As a grade school student, I loved to dress up Halloween day and participate in the parade of costumes around the school. (Do they do that anywhere anymore?) Trick or treat was so much fun, and so was consuming all the candy. These days I celebrate Halloween by holing up with dim lighting (usually spooky candles), a heaping bowl of popcorn, and several spooky movies.

So, it stands to reason that I love to write novels of spine tingling romance, sex, and danger. When I wrote my vampire trilogy at Ellora’s Cave DEEP IS THE NIGHT (DARK FIRE, NIGHT WATCH and HAUNTED SOULS), I wanted to scare the beejeebers out of my readers, plus thrill them with steaming hot romance.

Though I’ve never seen a ghost that I know of, I believe hauntings, ghosts and other extraordinary phenomena do exist. I was allowed to read pretty much whatever I wanted from a young age, and I believe I was about eleven when I first read The Exorcist and Audrey Rose. Not to say I didn’t find them absolutely scary, but I also found myself wanting to write stories that gave people that same forbidden, scary thrill. Call me twisted, but the paranormal creeps into many of my stories with great regularity even when I don’t plan it.

I’ve written about ESP (Sins and Secrets is one such novel, as well as Dangerous Intentions and Treacherous Wishes), otherworldly dimensions (Clandestine and Hideaway are but two of my tales that deal with other dimensions), hauntings and ghosts. In my life I’ve had a few bizarre things happen.

Writing something that scares the reader’s pants off is my ultimate thrill. Why? Probably for the same reason any other writer must write what he or she loves. It is difficult for most writers of paranormal romance to pinpoint every facet of why they write romance with a twist. Perhaps it starts with what the writer experienced as a youth.

As a child, I loved to read Poe. My television preferences ran to Alfred Hitchcock, Dark Shadows, The Night Stalker and The Twilight Zone. Strange for a girl scared of so many things. While I appeared timid on the outside, my mind preferred a more adventurous realm. I could have the thrill without getting more than a chill, unlike the poor fools experiencing danger. Within the sphere of the paranormal is a belief that it can’t touch you if you caress it first. If you create the monster, you can control and kill the monster. If someone else writes the beast, then you’re in trouble.

Once I reached my teens, Gothic novels held my attention. From that point forward, I loved the combination of love and mystery and sometimes horror that these tales offered. Hence, my current enjoyment of Dean Koontz, Stephen King and Anne Rice.

These days I write stories that skirt the edge of gritty, nasty horror and the terrors of everyday life. I want my readers to fall in love and still be scared witless. I want pseudo reality to slither into the reader’s living room and bite them on the behind. As my audience, the reader should be gripped with a creeping sense of apprehension that gathers force until the frightful ending.

In my writing, I combat monsters. Monsters that have a form, no form, a name or no name. Most prominently they are ghosts or spirits, or an indefinable something that lurks just at the edge of the protagonist’s conscience…waiting to erupt onto the cinematic screen of my page. An awareness of danger, hiding or dormant but not dead, is enough to give anyone nightmares. If I can take that horror and attach it to the excitement, confusion, and heated sexuality of romance, then I have a story with beef. In my DEEP IS THE NIGHT vampire trilogy (Ellora’s Cave www.ellorascave.com), I made sure that vampires weren’t the only thing lurking in the night to scare the characters. I wanted a sense of dread, a fine edge of uncertainty in my fictional Colorado mountain town of Pine Forest.

In a pure horror tale, I might let the protagonist be eaten by the monster. In paranormal romance, I want the hero and heroine to battle the monsters and still come out the victors. As a bonus, they find love with each other. Ahem…the hero and heroine…not the monsters. Love that can span the centuries, defy the space time continuum, or even the final shadow of death is love going the extra mile. Think about it. A romance story without barriers isn’t very exciting. Throw in some major conflict and the hero and heroine have to resolve their problems to come together at the end. Toss in something otherworldly and they have more to fight and their love will becomes stronger.

By letting myself experience the adrenaline of beating the evil, the ghost, or the monster, I have conquered. I have kicked the dragon’s butt, and I’m taking names. The icing on the cake is the love.

Meltdown, to be released October 12 at Liquid Silver Books.

Therefore, if you enjoy your romance with a paranormal twist, I suggest you stop by and check out my buffet of paranormal romance at www.deniseagnew.com. My next story with a hint of paranormal is MELTDOWN (Liquid Silver Books www.liquidsilverbooks.com October 12), which also features a hot firefighter! I have other stories coming up in 2010 that are sure to make your spine tingle.

Will I continue to write paranormal when it is no longer the toast of the town? The answer is simple: I have to write it. I have no other choice. I have so many spooky stories running around in my head that if I don’t write them I will simply explode. And that’s a whole ‘nother horror story, indeed.

So, because I’m in the mood to hear about haunts, tell me yours! I’m dyin’ to hear a good rip snorting scary or weird experience. I’ll pick the story I think is the scariest and you’ll win a paperback of my choosing from my backlist. I’ll announce the winner at the end of the day.

Uh…maybe you’d better sleep tonight with the light on, eh?