Aspen Mountain Press is excited to announce three releases this week:

Phlogiston by Jefferson Dane; Storykeeper by Jade Buchanan; and Julian’s Second Chance by Claire Thompson.

In Jefferson Dane’s debut fantasy, Phlogiston, someone wants to break the truce humans have had with the dragons by murdering a noblewoman.  Can an apprentice scholar and a merchant savant hiding a dark secret uncover the mystery in time to prevent a war?

While this is Jefferson Dane’s first fantasy with Aspen Mountain Press, it isn’t his first work.  If you enjoy horror you may also enjoy Dane’s Flyover.  What happens in the night in Afghanistan where there is more to worry about than the Taliban?

Storykeeper by Jade Buchanan features an immortal falling for a human.  The Storykeeper provides inspiration, gives dreams and acts as a muse to those who put words to paper whether they are singers or writers or storytellers.  Never before, has this storykeeper allowed himself to dream.  But that is about to change when Enitan meets Jason after hearing him read one of the stories Enitan had inspired.   Enitan has never dared to hope there could be something in the world such as love for him.  Never before has he known if the possibility existed to find happiness with a human.  Will Enitan be able to claim Jason’s heart and give his in return?  And if so, what will be the cost?  Pick up a copy of Storykeeper and find out what the future holds for Enitan and Jason.  

Our next story is a tale of self-denial and perhaps, love deferred.  In Julian’s Second Chance by Claire Thompson, one man, Julian denies the attraction he feels for a friend he’s met on a trip to Sri Lanka. 

Julian fears the cost of his attraction to Alex, including the repercussions from his family will be more than he can bear.  Yet, he can’t forget the time the two men spent together. 

When a meeting brings them together once more, six years later, Julian is older and wiser.  But Alex is no longer the same man he spurned and has moved on with his life, relegating Julian to the past.  Delve into the denial and self-deception two men use to protect themselves from emotional pain in this re-release by talented author, Claire Thompson.

Now that Bittersweet is out, I’ve had some questions about it and wanted to share what happened during the writing of Brand and David’s story. It taught me a few things, trust me.

When I signed up to write two stories for the Hot Comforts anthology from Manlove Romance Press, I pitched the ideas for Giving Thanks and Bittersweet. Several other authors also joined the anthology and it was scheduled for around Thanksgiving 2008. Aspen Mountain Press had agreed to release the stories as standalone ebooks as well.

Because these stories are part of an anthology, it means they really can’t be too long. 20,000 words is a LONG story to have in an anthology. So there’s a maximum reasonable size the editor and publisher expect.

Giving Thanks went pretty well and relatively quickly. I’m happy with it and it really told the whole story I wanted it to.

Bittersweet is a whole other case. I knew a bit about the conflict and the fact it’s very much based on not judging someone by their appearance or what you think they might be like. When I started writing the story, though, I really got into these characters. I sent the first chapter to my test readers and one of them immediately replied that this was NOT a short story.

But it had to be. It needed to be. I literally spent months fighting with this story and trying to force it into an appropriate size and structure. But it fought back. Every time I tried to force Brand and David to get in bed, it came out horribly. Every time I tried to gloss over their personalities and foibles, they seemed like plastic characters. I rewrote it so many times I delayed the whole damned anthology. My deadline was blown and I was so frustrated and in despair it was awful. There’s just no way these characters would behave that way.

Finally I had to step back for a bit from my attempts to force my will on the story and I wrote another chapter, letting myself write what was demanding to be written. There’s a lot of background. There’s a lot of detail and some scenes that don’t have to do with sex but let the readers learn more about who these two people are.

I liked it. It flowed again.

So I finally accepted I could not shoehorn a Happily Ever After into this story. I took it to the point of a Happily For Now but there’s a lot more of this story to come. I’m going to write the rest of their story and see if I can sell it because I want to tell it. There’s pain, misunderstanding, assumptions, sex and love to go.

I know I’ve seen one opinion so far that there wasn’t enough sex and I spent time on things that didn’t matter. I hope that’s not the majority opinion because I love these two characters and the have a compelling and beautiful story to finish. But I did want to share what happened to me while I wrote this story

Bittersweet can be purchased from Aspen Mountain Press!
Giving Thanks can be purchased as a standalone ebook from Aspen Mountain Press as well.

July 21st, 2009 was the 3rd anniversary of the opening of Aspen Mountain Press and The Romance Studio helped us celebrate with a drawing.

RoxAnn won five downloads of her choice, downloads that will go far in alleviating the dog days of summer.  What did RoxAnn select from over 220 stories?  She chose the following: (more…)

The Asphodel Cycle 4: Apostle of Asphodel

Author: Celina Summers

Artist: Renee George

BUY LINK: http://www.aspenmountainpress.com/apostle-of-asphodel/prod_263.html

Tamsen Ka’antira has grown into a woman of incredible power as the Virgin Huntress’ player in the game of the gods. After discovering the Hippolytes, a fabled race of women devoted to the arts of combat, she must lead them back to the plains of Ilia to fight the greatest war of antiquity again. The pantheon of gods awaits her in their Hall of Judgment, where the ultimate fate of the Elven Realm will be determined. (more…)

The shaman “Lizard” is one of the two-souled-ones, a Berdache. Lizard must convince his proud and stubborn childhood friend, Red Wolf, one of the finest warriors of his village, that he too is a Berdache and must take the shaman training, before he loses his mind.

A call for aid comes, so the Berdache, his friend Red Wolf, and the beautiful Chickasaw slave, Born In Moonlight, take the journey to hopefully avoid a war. Will these three give in to the closeness they feel or will they be forever separated by the dangers they face from both the Spirit World, and the world that surrounds them.

Excerpt:

With the swiftness of a badger, Red Wolf’s hands clamped down on Lizard’s arms. The dream-crazed warrior yanked the Berdache to his chest with total disregard for dignity. All Lizard managed was a gasp of surprise before Red Wolf’s lips clamped down on his.

Lizard’s mouth was open from his gasp, and Red Wolf forced it open further with his tongue. The violent kiss, full of an unspoken need, aroused in Lizard a burning heat. Tongues tangled and fought, each vying for supremacy. Some force in Lizard demanded he not submit, until he was sure it was truly a choice on Red Wolf’s part, and not the dream that made him act thus.

With a moan, Red Wolf broke the kiss. “You with your maiden’s hair and shaman’s skills. You call to me like no other. I don’t understand you or the battles you fight, but I know now that you make war with an unseen enemy. It is enough.” (more…)

If any of you are on Twitter, Twitter Search #RWAFAIL and/or #RWACHANGE. If you missed it, you should read RWA President Pershing’s comments about what a bunch of hacks e-published authors are:

http://espan-rwa.com/rwa-president-pershing-responds/

I’m usually one of the last to abandon ship, but I did so this year. This shows I made the right decision.

Although all of us here know what a fiasco Trisk was, it wasn’t because it was an electronic publisher. It was a publisher that made bad decisions and had a few other issues. E publishers do come and go, and guess what, so do NY Print publishers. I guess Ms. Pershing hasn’t been reading Publisher’s Weekly recently. Pubs out of business, pubs restructuring, pubs laying off, pubs “down-sizing” their editoral and promotional staffs.

I’ve never been ashamed or sad that I choose to e publish. A) it was my choice B) My conscious feels better about being kinder to our planet C) My writing buddies made here and at other e houses have been as supportive if not more so, than any of the “published” RWA recognized authors I’ve associated with.

E Publishers come in all sizes; EC being the biggest, companies like my Aspen being among the smaller. I’m pretty sure that it is also true of print publishers (ok, so I’m being sarcastic)…and if you were to compare similar tiers in big houses to indie houses you’d probably see the same slide in royalties.

The insistance of making e companies do business the print way is ludicrous. It is barely working for the print companies right now. I don’t know about anyone else, but I was taught to emulate SUCCESSFUL models not failures. Pershing wants epublishers to throw money at authors and thus use that standard as proof that a publishing company is really a publishing company and that an author is really an author.  Another business model that doesn’t apply to e-books and one that has outlived its usefulness (rather like returns).  This is truly a case of comparing apples to oranges. Okay, so both are fruits, and other than the seeds it is pretty much where the similarity ends. Why does RWA insist on comparing ebooks to print books?

They are not the same and it is about time RWA tried trying to make this square peg fit in their round hole.

Lucynda Storey
www.LucyndaStorey.com

Just this week, Publisher’s Daily announced the purchase by Amazon of the Stanza format for e-Books.  Stanza format is used to enable IPhone e-Book reading.   You can read the article at Publishers Daily by clicking on the link.

How good is e-Book reading on the IPhone?  Pretty darn.  There is a fair amount of scrolling, but the font size can be changed and so worries concerning the type being too small are addressed.  You can also read black on white, or white on black and the IPhone will display color images.

Several of our authors have made booktrailer videos for their stories at Aspen Mountain Press and we are excited to share that we are embedding these videos to give our readers more about what the stories are about.

Who is Offing the Collectors

Cougar Club: Barely Legal

The Reckoning of Asphodel

Breaking the Covenant

The Long Way Home

Del Fantasma: Virgin Special

Scarred

Stop by and take a look at the trailers and pick up an earth friendly e-Book!

I am pleased and honored to announce that the third book in my epic fantasy series The Asphodel Cycle 3:Tempation of Asphodel has been nominated for a Golden Rose Award for Best Sci Fi/Fantasy Novel of 2007 by Love Romances and More.  To say that I’m stunned is an understatement; to even be mentioned on the same nominee list as Christine Feehan is beyond anything I ever dreamed about when I first started to kill off Elves in The Reckoning of Asphodel.

The voting continues until April 15th. You can find the voting page here and can vote for your favorites in several categories under the Love Romances and More aegis. It’s a wonderful thing to see nominees from small presses like Aspen Mountain Press alongside well known authors from huge publishing companies. It says a lot about how e-presses and independent publishers are changing the face of the industry.

Thank you so much to all of the faithful readers of Aspen Mountain books and especially fans of Asphodel.  None of this would be possible without you. So you have my greatest love and appreciation for the support you’ve continuously shown to me and to my work. Now go vote!

Cheers and many hugs–

Celina Summers

Metamorphosis

Metamorphosis is a journey through the short stories of critically acclaimed author Celina Summers.  Every story deals with a transformation–from a world where the Church places the blame for original sin upon men to a New Orleans garden that brings a play to life. The collection culminates with a previously unpublished prequel to Summers’ best selling epic fantasy series The Asphodel Cycle. Sometimes funny, sometimes horrifying, Metamorphosis is a romp through the realms of speculative fiction–where anything can happen and nothing is quite as it seems.

Coming March 27, 2009 from Aspen Mountain Press

Edited by Lori Basiewicz

Cover art by Renee George

Metamorphosis is a collection of stories in the spirit of the original Metamorphoses, written by the Roman poet Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso 43 BC — 17 or 18 AD). His Metamorphoses  serves as the primary source material for many of the transformation myths in Greco-Roman mythology. He also wrote the scandalous Ars Amatoria, a treatise on love and seduction, that eventually led to his exile from Rome by the emperor Augustus. My Metamorphosis explores the transformations of speculative fiction–not necessarily literal transformations like Ovid’s, but changes that make modern speculative fiction the new and exciting genre-bending world that it is. 

Metamorphosis’ stories range from humorous to dark, from fantasy to horror and I had a lot of fun putting them all together.  Look for it on March 27.  Also, in honor of Read an Ebook Week, I’m giving away a set of my series The Asphodel Cycle!  Go to my blog Elf Killing and Other Hobbies and leave a comment in the thread and you’ll be eligible to win.  Enter by midnight on Sunday and I’ll announce a winner on Monday.  That way you can be ready for the final installment of the series Apostle of Asphodel when it’s released in May.