Excerptstravaganza! The Final Chapter & new contest!

Ah, it's finally here, the last excerpt day! And the book itself should be shipping and in stores within the next week. Sorry about the delay there. :-(

Let's do the 'cerpt, and then we'll get to the contest.

Brian glanced over his shoulder to make sure Dante wasn’t lurking behind him. “Why didn’t you tell me, Megan?”

“What do you mean?”

“I know you aren’t crazy about this whole interview thing. But I’m a good journalist, and something like this was sure to come out. You should have told me.”

“Told you what?” Her eyes shifted towards the living room.

Brian followed her gaze, then looked back at her. “I got a email this evening, from an address I didn’t recognize. Normally I’d delete it as spam, but the subject line was your name, so I opened it.”

“And?”

He reached into his back pocket and pulled out two folded sheets of paper. Opening them, he handed her one.

Dear Mr. Stone,
I know you are writting about Megan Chase. Megan is a murderor. She don’t deserve your story.
A Concerned Friend

“Oh my God.” The words left her lips before she realized it. She leaned against the countertop. The marble lip made a cool stripe across her back and soothed her. It felt real. Nothing else did.

She cleared her throat and started to hand the paper back to him. “Some crazy, I guess.”

He didn’t reply. Instead he handed her the other sheet.

She took it with unsteady hands. It was a scan of a photocopy, she guessed from the slightly out-of-focus look of the page, but it was clear enough to read the headline: Teen Will Not Face Charges.

Megan closed her eyes.

“Read the article.”

“I don’t need to read it,” she said. “You know I don’t.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

The TV went on in the other room. Dante was channel-surfing. Each time the sound changed she cringed. Brian loomed over her in front, Dante made himself right at home in her living room. Even her house wasn’t private.

Her life certainly didn’t seem to be.

“I try not to think of it. It was a long time ago, I was innocent and the story never made the bigger papers. I thought it was forgotten."

She’d thought she’d left it behind. Left it in Grant Falls along with everything else. That’s why she hadn’t said anything. She wanted to kick herself. How arrogant she’d been, to think she could move on.

“We talked about your childhood,” Brian said. “About small-town life, remember? Just today, in fact. But you kept this hidden.” He put the papers back in his pocket. “Don’t you see the position you put me in by hiding this from me?”

“You’re writing a puff piece. Why do you need to know that when I was sixteen I was a suspect in the murder of a local homeless man? A murder I did not commit?”

“Not just a murder, Megan, a violent, ritualistic murder, and I need to know because my editor got a copy of this, too, and wanted to know why I hadn’t discovered it on my own. There was nothing about this in the papers in Redwoods City. Which makes sense, since it turns out you lied about where you grew up.” His anger throbbed around her. “I’m used to reticence. I can even understand why you didn’t mention this. But I would have found out anyway, you know. Like I said, I’m a good journalist.”

She crossed her arms over her chest. “What are you going to do about it?”

“I’m going to do what I have to do.” Tears sprang to her eyes, but he wasn’t done talking. “If you’ll help me, if you’ll be open and honest about this, I can turn it into nothing—a brief mention in an otherwise glowing article. If not—if you keep lying and hiding things from me, and ditching me so you can go on dates like you did tonight—”

“I wasn’t on a date. Dante picked me up. My—car wouldn’t start. I called him.” What the hell was his problem with her anyway? So she’d lied about her past. She couldn’t imagine she was the first of his interviewees ever to do so. Did every local socialite tell the truth about her age and upbringing?

Something deeper hid behind Brian’s anger, but the thought of reading him and finding out what it was filled her with exhaustion. Tomorrow she’d do it. Tomorrow she’d take care of all of this.

“Sure.” He didn’t meet her gaze. “Anyway. Tomorrow we have a lot of talking to do. Just promise you’ll tell the truth.”

Megan bit back a sharp reply and nodded. “I promise.”

“Great.” He reached out and took her arm, his hand cold through the fabric of her shirt. “I like you, Megan. But I’m not going to pretend a story doesn’t exist if there is a story. So play fair with me and stop trying to make me look like an idiot.”

New Reviews!

Woo-hoo! My idol, Mrs. Giggles, gave Personal Demons an 88!

"Personal Demons is a nice change from the usual tales of vampires and werewolves running around shrieking about mates and soulmates. It is also a fun-filled read that I find so enjoyable from the first page to last."

Read the whole thing here. As usual, she made me laugh out loud, especially the part about Dante.

Moonfire Thoughts posted a nice review here, saying:

"Thought, when I picked it up, I figured I’d spent a few minutes while the pork chops grilled and read a few pages. Sixty pages later, I realized I really needed to get them off the grill before they started to burn. I think it was about 23:30 at night when I announced I wasn’t going to sleep until I finished it."


And here's our big release-month contest!!

You can enter in one of several ways:

1. Take a picture of the book, on the shelves at your local store, and email it to me (Staciakane AT gmail.com)
2. Review the book on your blog, and email me the link. It doesn't have to be a positive review, just an honest one. (Yes, you'll still be entered if you hated the book, but really, why would you want to be?)
3. Mention the book on a forum or website (remember, spam doesn't count.)
4. Review the book at Amazon (or equivalent--B&N, Chapters, whatever site you use). Again, it doesn't have to be a glowingly positive review, just an honest one. Email me and tell me which review is yours.

An what can you win? One of five signed copies. Possibly more, depending on how many entries I get.


And a little final note: There's lots of talk about this big Amazon POD thing, and while I feel like I should really care about it, I don't. I find it odd that I don't, as this sort of thing would normally be right up my alley, but I just don't. Go figure.