Kayelle Allen's BRINGER OF CHAOS Free Mar. 23-27!

Bringer of Chaos: Forged in Fire 

by Kayelle Allen

**FREE March 23, 2018  - March 27, 2018 ONLY **

About the Book: 

When the immortal Pietas is marooned on a barren world with no food and few survival tools, he knows it could be worse. He could be alone. But that's the problem. He's not.

Half a million of his people sleep in cryostasis, trapped inside their pods and it's up to Pietas to free them. He can't release one at a time. It's all or nothing. He's facing over five hundred thousand hungry, thirsty, homeless immortals who will call on him for rescue and he has no way to answer.

It's not all bad. The beautiful telepathic warrior he's loved for lifetimes is at his side. He's bonded with a sentient panther. He hates humans but the one dumped on this planet with him has become a trusted friend.

Before Pietas can build shelter, figure out how to grow food, or set up a government, he must take back command from a ruthless enemy he's fought for centuries. His brutal, merciless father.

Immortals may heal, but a wound of the heart lasts forever...

"WARNING"

Contains humor, sweet romance, betrayal, angst, vengeance... and a ginormous, sentient black panther who wants to be Pietas's "kitty."

Genre: science fiction, sci fi, scifi romance, action adventure, space opera, military science fiction

ASIN B077BRSRP4

ISBN 1981328327

Released: Dec 27, 2017

Publisher: Romance Lives Forever Books

Pages: 236

Print pages: 297

Wordcount: 75,831

Buy Links: 

Amazon https://amzn.to/2pzB0Dv

Amazon UK https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B077BRSRP4

Amazon CA https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B077BRSRP4

Amazon AU https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B077BRSRP4

Check out a great Excerpt Here:  https://kayelleallen.com/media/boc2-chapter1-sample.pdf

Book page: https://kayelleallen.com/chaos-origin

Secondary Mondays with Mary Patterson Thornburg

I love posts about secondary characters, and Mary Patterson Thornburg has a good one for us today. Mary and I both publish with Uncial Press, and I'm very happy to host her today. Please welcome Mary Patterson Thornburg!

Main characters in fiction, especially romantic fiction, are usually bound to certain rules. They may have faults – in fact, they'd better have some faults or we'd find them boring! – but for the most part they have to be people we like and can identify with. They have to be comfortable to be around, or we won't want to read about them.

Secondary characters have a little more freedom. All they have to be is interesting.

One of my own favorite characters, from my romantic adventure novel The Kura, is Lady Vinh Ke Saar, the kura of the nomadic village where my heroine Alyssha goes to live when she leaves our world and travels to the country of Bandor in the alternate world of Aerte.

A kura is a combination healer, teacher, and spiritual advisor, a traditional role in this society. Lady Vinh is unusual in this role – unlike some village kurau (the plural of kura), she's a formally educated and licensed physician and surgeon and also a well-known scholar and writer. Unlike any other of Bandor's kurau, she was born a member of the old ruling class/race, who rejected her wealthy family when she was twenty and was adopted into a native clan. She's very old – no one really knows how old – and very wise.

She's also demanding, arrogant, sharp-witted and sharp tongued. If she's ever had a warm and fuzzy impulse, she's kept it well hidden. To say she's respected is an understatement – most people are in awe of her, and some are frankly scared. She has a network of informants all over the country and beyond. She knows what's happening here, there, and everywhere, often before anyone else gets the news.

Some people think she employs magic – or witchcraft.

One of the things I love about secondary characters is how they can influence and bring out qualities in the other, more central characters. Alyssha met Lady Vinh when she was twelve, and the old woman was impressed with the girl's courage and her heart. She invited her to study with her, to learn to be a kura herself. So, when Alyssha returns at age eighteen, they continue with a relationship that's necessarily close. Little by little, it reveals – and changes – both of them. Alyssha learns from the old kura not only by following her orders and completing her assignments, but also by watching her closely and noticing things that others don't see. And Lady Vinh, despite herself, can't resist feeling Alyssha's influence.

Here's an excerpt from The Kura that shows something of that relationship, early in Alyssha's studies. The third character mentioned here, Shan, is Alyssha's fiancé, a young Stone Village man who's now a medical student in the city of Bandor Gan:

Vinh Ke Saar kept her almost every morning from sunrise until noon. They talked sometimes about subjects that seemed far removed from what Alyssha had been reading, although she soon began to see connections on many levels. Frequently these conversations and duties were interrupted by visits from villagers who sought Vinh Ke Saar's help or advice, and Alyssha stayed to observe and sometimes assist in small ways. In the afternoons she often went with Lady Vinh's assistant, Kla Manya, to visit patients or to gather herbs from plantings and wild areas surrounding the village.

On two occasions that summer the kura sent for surgeons, once to Bandor Gan and once to Salin Tor, a small city on the northwest coast, to deal with cases that couldn't be transported. She herself had not practiced surgery for several years, except in extreme emergencies. One of these occasions was a case of acute appendicitis, the patient being the ten-year-old son of a Bandor Gan woman visiting her sister with Stone Village. The other was a sel inso birth, what Alyssha would have termed a caesarian section, performed on a young woman too advanced in pregnancy to travel by the time Vinh Ke Saar realized that a normal birth would be impossible.

Both times Alyssha was allowed to observe, and she found the procedures fascinating. In the boy's case the outcome was a success. The surgeon, with Manya's aid, opened the abdomen, removed the inflamed organ, and closed the incision in minutes. The woman, too, survived without ill effect, but her babies turned out to be conjoined twins so unequally developed that one died within minutes of their birth and the other a few hours later, despite the surgeon's having separated them immediately after the death of the first.

Alyssha stayed all night beside the young mother, until her second baby girl died. The woman, whose husband was in Bandor Gan trading, was weakened by the surgery. She seemed without protection at all, for she refused more of the elu tea that had made her unconscious, and Vinh Ke Saar didn't press it on her. Until dawn Alyssha lay beside her, weeping with her, holding her and the dead babies in her arms.

"This is what I saw in you," said Vinh Ke Saar when Alyssha came to her, exhausted, an hour later. The kura was at her desk, her pen poised over a manuscript page. She seemed paler than usual, her white face in stark contrast with the elaborately dressed and improbably bright red hair, which Alyssha knew was a wig. "You've given her some of your heart. Now go and rest, my dear." She dipped the pen in ink and resumed writing.

Alyssha started to leave, then turned. "Will there be funerals for the babies?"

"Yes, of course, when the father returns. Two ceremonies. They were two human beings, after all, although they were not human for very long, and they were so nearly only one." The old woman blotted her page. "God tries out the spirit in strange ways, sometimes," she remarked dryly.

Back in her own bed, drifting in the oddly lucid space that sometimes preceded sleep when she was especially tired, Alyssha remembered that last remark.

Shan, she knew, hated death – any death, the very idea of death. Only extreme suffering with no remedy could resign him to it. His reaction to eleven-year-old Tenra's death, when he was fifteen, had been not so much grief for Tenra herself as anger at the village kura who hadn't recognized her symptoms in time.

On the other hand, Lady Vinh seemed to accept death, even in the very young, if not cheerfully, then at least without resentment. Almost heartlessly, Alyssha felt. To die was as integral a part of existence as to be born. She would fight to preserve life in her patients. Alyssha had seen her do it. But she seemed to view the frequent loss of such fights, as long as they were hard-fought, as inevitable. "We play this game with God," she'd said once. "God has given us the ability to win it for a while, but in the end God will always win."

Perhaps it was the wisdom of old age speaking. Maybe she'd come to such wisdom herself, in time. But for now she could much more readily share Shan's stubborn refusal to give in to death, and his bitter resentment when he met defeat.

Blurb:

When she was twelve, chased by strangers bent on violence, Alyssha Dodson hid in an eerie room under a bridge in her small Indiana city. Stunningly and suddenly, she found herself far from home – in Bandor, a country in an alternate universe, where Earth was Aerte, steam power had been in use for only a couple of decades, and a revolution was brewing – to be fought with swords and spears. Here Alyssha discovered the brother who'd disappeared from her life when she was seven, a homeland where she felt she truly belonged, and a young man she knew she'd hold in her heart forever.

She'd had to return to her own world, and for six years she's been torn between her longing for Bandor and her loyalty and love for her widowed father. But now, when a hit-and-run victim found dying on a Granville street says her name and gives a policeman a coin from that other place, Alyssha has no choice but to go back.

When she gets there, she finds that a lot has changed…

The Kura is a novel of political intrigue, love, and especially a young woman's journey toward self-discovery.

Buy Links:

Amazon ~ Kobo ~ Barnes and Noble

Mary Patterson Thornberg can reached through her Facebook Page or on Twitter at @MaryPThornburg.

Interviewing Kayelle Allen! #MFRWauthors

I'm very pleased to welcome Kayelle Allen to my blog. Kayelle is the founder of Marketing for Romance Writers, a Yahoo group dedicated to helping romance authors navigate the sometimes confusing world of book marketing. Kayelle is always willing to share her expertise with those of us not quite as savvy as she is. I've had the opportunity to guest on her blog Romance Lives Forever a few times, and it's a real treat to be able to invite her to hang out here on Journeys with Jana. Without further ado, please welcome Kayelle Allen!

What genre have you never written that you’d like to write?

Time travel. I think it would be fun to create a story based on traveling through time, but have never come up with a good enough plot to support one. Maybe some day. I've written scifi, scifi romance, non-fiction, contemporary holiday romances, and short works. So adding a new genre is something I'd like to try.

Did you always want to be a writer?

Yes. I wrote since I could make whole sentences. I finished my first novel at 18. Parts of it are in my Tarthian Empire series, but otherwise, it will never see the light of day. It was 400 pages of rambling. I am laser focused now.

Do you have any words of advice to beginning writers?

Don't quit. Don't let anyone steal your dream. Go for it. No one can write your story but you. There is a lot more advice I could give, but here's a place where you can get that just by asking a question. Marketing for Romance Writers https://groups.yahoo.com/groups/MarketingForRomanceWriters

Are you a plotter or a pantser?

I'm a plotser. I plot thoroughly, and then let the characters take over once I know the basics and the bones.

What do you hope readers gain from your stories?

I make a promise to every reader. I will give them a great roller coaster ride of a story that brings excitement, fun, and takes them in directions they didn't expect.

Do you write in the same place every day or do you like to change it up?

I write at my desk, but I come up with story ideas and scenes everywhere. I always carry something to write with or to record with.

What’s one thing that your readers would be surprised to learn about you?

I am terrified of heights. I let very little stop me, however, and try to overcome my fears. But I acknowledge that one, because it's so strong. I'm also afraid of water and can't swim, but on vacation last week, I rode the ferry twice across the bay in San Francisco. If I want to do something, I will find a way to do it.

Tell us a bit about you. Where do you live, and how long have you been writing?

I live in the metro Atlanta area. I've been here since 1987. I have been published since 2004 but I've written all my life.

What genre is your favorite to read?

Regency romance and also highlander stories. I love them even though I would never write historical. I don't have the research background for it, and that would be important for me. I prefer to write contemporary and scifi.

Share a photo of your writing space, your pet, a favorite book, or something else that’s important to you.

This shows my con-wall -- with badges from various conventions I've attended. I want to redo this because they are getting out of hand, but it has a lot of my goodies and also gifts from fans and other writers. The doll is my muse. His name is Pietas, after one of my major characters. It was handmade for me.

What are two (or more) of your all-time favorite books in any genre?

Two fave books are The Persian Boy by Mary Renault, and Teot's War by Heather Gladney. I have re-read both of these multiple times. I am a huge fan of both authors. One is historical (ancient Greek) and the other is fantasy.

What do you like best about your hero in A Romance for Christmas?

Scott is a cop who walks a beat downtown in a small city. He's a widower with a 4-year-old daughter who is getting by with help from his parents. When he hears about the heroine's misfortune, he jumps into action to help her. He's honorable, and is careful not to take advantage of her.

What do you like best about your heroine in  A Romance for Christmas?

Over the last year, Dara has lost everything but her daughter. Her husband died, she had to sell everything of value in order to survive, and although things are looking up, it's Christmas and she has next to nothing to give. She's at the bottom, with no way to go but up. Although she's tired and depressed, she has never given up.

How do you choose the names and physical characteristics of your characters? Do you base them on real people?

I did for this book. I prepared a giveaway for everyone that shows just where the names came from. Download Peek Inside A Romance for Christmas and find out.  http://bit.ly/rom4cmaspeek

How can readers reach you or find you online?

Homeworld https://kayelleallen.com

Twitter https://twitter.com/kayelleallen

Facebook https://facebook.com/kayelleallen.author

Pinterest https://pinterest.com/kayelleallen/

G+ https://plus.google.com/+KayelleAllen/

Tell us a little about your current work in progress.

I'm currently working on a scifi book called Bringer of Chaos, about Pietas. He's the villain of my Tarthian Empire series, but he is redeemable. Some day maybe I'll write his forever-love story.

What’s your tagline? Why did you choose it?

My tagline is Unstoppable heroes, Uncompromising love, Unforgettable passion. I chose it because it best illustrated my various genres. However, I also use "When you're immortal, Romance Lives Forever." That is because my immortal characters are such a huge part of my writing.

If I was a first time reader of your books, which one would you recommend I start with and why?

I'd suggest you grab Bro, the Story Behind the Antonello Brothers. It's a free book available on my website. It will give you a great peek at my style, and intro major characters in my Tarthian Empire series. To get a copy, go to https://kayelleallen.com/bro

Bio:

Kayelle Allen is a best-selling, award-winning author. Her unstoppable heroes and heroines include contemporary every day folk, role-playing immortal gamers, futuristic covert agents, and warriors who purr.

Here's blurb and excerpt for A Romance for Christmas:

It's Christmas Eve, and the end of a year in which everything Dara loves was lost. Everything but her little girl and a fierce determination to survive. When a cop brings Christmas to her door, he brings another gift she never expected to get.

Publisher: Romance Lives Forever Books

Genre: Sweet contemporary romance, holiday romance

Heat Rating: Sweet

"Mommy?" Christine's young voice broke in on her thoughts.

Dara put down the romance she'd been re-reading, the favorite she'd had since she was sixteen. She'd sold all her others at a yard sale the previous week. "What is it, sweetie?"

"Why don't we has a real tree for Chribmas?"

"Why don't we 'have'," she corrected. "Come sit by me." Dara patted the couch and tucked her chenille robe closer around her.

One arm around Matilda, her cloth doll, Christine climbed up and cuddled.

Matilda's going to need stuffing before long. Her head flopped forward, face against her flat chest. When did the lace on her dress get so ragged? Dara smoothed the doll's dress. "Remember when Daddy went home to heaven before Christmas last year?"

Christine knuckled her eyes and yawned. "I 'member."

"And then Mommy got hurt in the car accident and couldn't go to work?"

"Uh huh."

Dara took a deep breath. "Well, it meant there was no money for a real tree this year. But I'm sure Santa will still bring you presents." Gifts Dara bought by selling her entire collection of romance novels at a yard sale at her friend Sherilyn's house. "And we drew a tree, right?" She pointed at the crayon-bright drawing taped to the wall. Construction paper ornaments decorated each branch.

"But it doesn't smell like a Chribmas tree."

Dara hugged her. "I know, baby. I know."

"How will Santa leave his presents?" Christine pulled away and got on her knees. "He can't put them under the tree, Mommy."

"Oh, honey!" She ruffled her daughter's hair, swallowing the lump in her throat. "Santa will find a way." She leaned forward and kissed her little girl. "We should get you in bed so he can come. He can't leave presents while you're awake."

Buy links:

Amazon http://amzn.to/1wpW8qE

ARe http://bit.ly/christmas-are

Barnes and Noble http://bit.ly/christmas-bnn

CreateSpace (print) http://bit.ly/christmas-csp

Goodreads http://bit.ly/christmas-good

Kobo http://bit.ly/christmas-kobo

iBooks http://bit.ly/christmas-ibk

Smashwords http://bit.ly/christmas-smw