Monday, October 8, 2012

FrightFall Read-a-Thon--Post your Wrap-Ups!


Well, another read-a-thon comes to an end.  I hope everyone enjoyed it! I'd like to thank everyone who participated.  I'd also like to thank everyone who donated prizes and Melissa and Nova for hosting their mini-challenges.  Unfortunately, the Twitter chats were not much of a success.  I had a suggestion in today's chat that I liked which was to have a chat at the beginning to talk about goals and then one at the end to talk about accomplishments.  Let me know what you think about that idea in the comments and if I get a lot of positives, I'll implement it for Winter's Respite in January (21 - 27).  I'm hoping to host another write-a-thon in November over at Stories Inside (yes, I changed the name of my writing blog).  It's all going to depend on what's going on in my personal life.  I may be moving again and, if I do, everything else will take a back seat.  If I do host Sit Down and Write 2, I'm going to make it two weeks instead of one because of suggestions I received from some participants last time.

My wrap-up post will be over at Castle Macabre.  I didn't really do that great, but I did finish one book!

Add the link to your wrap-up post in the linky below by 10am CST (U.S. time) on Tuesday.  I will start drawing giveaway winners Tuesday afternoon.

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Monday, October 1, 2012

FrightFall Read-a-Thon: Prize Promotion Page


This is the prize promotion page for all the prizes being given away for the read-a-thon.  At the end of this post, you will find details regarding how the prizes will be awarded at the end of the read-a-thon.


The Arrow Chest by Robert Parry (One print copy--International) WINNER--RAE
London, 1876. The painter Amos Roselli is in love with his life-long friend and model, the beautiful Daphne - and she with him - until one day she is discovered by another man, a powerful and wealthy industrialist. What will happen when Daphne realises she has sacrificed her happiness to a loveless marriage? What will happen when the artist realises he has lost his most cherished source of inspiration? And how will they negotiate the ever-increasing frequency of strange and bizarre events that seem to be driving them inexorably towards self-destruction. Here, amid the extravagant Neo-Gothic culture of Victorian England, the iconic poem ‘The Lady of Shalott’ blends with mysterious and ghostly glimpses of Tudor history. Romantic, atmospheric and deeply dark.



About the author:
Robert Parry is a UK writer of historical fiction with special interests in Tudor and Elizabethan history, Victorian Gothic and Pre-Raphaelite art. His debut novel, ‘Virgin and the Crab’ appeared in 2009, and his 2nd, ‘The Arrow Chest,’ in 2011. He is currently working on a story set in the 18th century – entitled 'Wildish' - which, all being well, should arrive in February of 2013. His work spans the Tudor, Georgian and Victorian eras, and combines reality, dreams and the unconscious within a well-researched and vivid historical setting.
Details, plus news, competitions and more can be found at http://robertparry.wordpress.com
Also, various articles by Robert Parry can be found at http://endymion-at-night.blogspot.com


Tales from the Mist--Various Authors (One eBook copy--International)  WINNER--LISA (LIT & LIFE)
TALES FROM THE MIST will take you on a journey into the dark world of the paranormal. These twelve stories vary in their degree of horror, yet all reach across the boundaries of their genres into the chilling realms of the macabre. Witches, ghosts, shape-shifters and vampire rats are some of the creatures that reign within these pages.

TFTM is a collection of short stories put together by the WG2E Street Team. Our website is: http://beachbookblast.blogspot.com/ and we're on facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/BeachBookBlast?ref=ts&fref=ts

There are 11 original stories plus a reprint from Scott Nicholson.

Officially releases 10/17/2012.  You can join the newsletter at the BBB site, to get notice once it's available.

Two Prize Packs--Two Winners (US only)--thank you, Kai from Fiction State of Mind, for donating  WINNER--CHRISTINA
Prize Pack #1--Adult



Carnival of Souls by Melissa Marr
In a city of daimons, rigid class lines separate the powerful from the power-hungry. And at the heart of The City is the Carnival of Souls, where both murder and pleasure are offered up for sale. Once in a generation, the carnival hosts a deadly competition that allows every daimon a chance to join the ruling elite. Without the competition, Aya and Kaleb would both face bleak futures--if for different reasons. For each of them, fighting to the death is the only way to try to live.

All Mallory knows of The City is that her father--and every other witch there--fled it for a life in exile in the human world. Instead of a typical teenage life full of friends and maybe even a little romance, Mallory scans quiet streets for threats, hides herself away, and trains to be lethal. She knows it's only a matter of time until a daimon finds her and her father, so she readies herself for the inevitable. While Mallory possesses little knowledge of The City, every inhabitant of The City knows of her. There are plans for Mallory, and soon she, too, will be drawn into the decadence and danger that is the Carnival of Souls.

From Melissa Marr, bestselling author of the Wicked Lovely series and "Graveminder," comes a brand-new tale of lush secrets, dark love, and the struggle to forge one's own destiny.


Your House is on Fire, Your Children All Gone by  Stefan Kiesbye
Shirley Jackson meets The X-Files in this riveting novel of supernatural horror

The village of Hemmersmoor is a place untouched by time and shrouded in superstition: There is the grand manor house whose occupants despise the villagers, the small pub whose regulars talk of revenants, the old mill no one dares to mention. This is where four young friends come of age—in an atmosphere thick with fear and suspicion. Their innocent games soon bring them face-toface with the village's darkest secrets in this eerily dispassionate, astonishingly assured novel, evocative of Stephen King's classic short story "Children of the Corn" and infused with the spirit of the Brothers Grimm.

Prize Pack #2--Young Adult/Middle Grade



Grandpa's Monster Movies by A.G. Cascone
Deadtime Stories #10
C.T. and his cousin Lea are staying at their grandparents' old farmhouse. The home movies they found in the attic give them a piece of family history that nobody talked about.


Professor Gargoyle by Charles Gilman
Every volume in the Lovecraft Middle School series is fully illustrated and features an original lenticular portrait on the cover. Display them on bookshelves—and then watch the cover characters morph into monsters as you pass by!

In Professor Gargoyle, we’re introduced to 11-year-old Robert Ashton and the strange world of Lovecraft Middle School. It’s a brand-new state-of-the-art facility—so why do so many creepy things keep happening? Why is the science teacher acting so strangely? And where are all the rats coming from?

As Robert explores with his new friends Glenn and Carina, he discovers that the school may be a portal to another world.

Winner's choice from Three Books (below)  WINNER--PATRICIA (chose Interview with the Vampire)
One winner will get their choice of three of my favorite scary/supernatural books.  I will have the book shipped from Better World Books so this prize is International.  Please note:  the book will be a used copy.

18 Stories by Edgar Allan Poe (and it's edited and has a foreword by Vincent Price--the man himself!)
A chilling compilation of some of Edgar Allen Poe's best-loved stories, edited by Vincent Price and Chandler Brossard and with an introduction by Vincent Price, including:
"The Black Cat - The Fall of the House of Usher - The Masque of the Red Death - The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar - The Premature Burial - Ms. Found in a Bottle - A Tale of the Ragged Mountains - The Sphinx - The Murders in the Rue Morgue - The Tell-Tale Heart - The Gold-Bug - The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether - The Man That Was Used Up - The Balloon Hoax - A Descent Into the Maelstrom - The Purloined Letter - The Pit and The Pendulum - The Cask of Amontillado"


Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice 
'In a darkened room a young man sits telling the macabre and eerie story of his life - the story of a vampire, gifted with eternal life, cursed with an exquisite craving for human blood. Anne Rice's compulsively readable novel is arguably the most celebrated work of vampire fiction since Bram Stoker's Dracula was published in 1897. As the Washington Post said on its first publication, it is a 'thrilling, strikingly original work of the imagination ...sometimes horrible, sometimes beautiful, always unforgettable'. 

We are in a small room with the vampire, face to face, as he speaks--as he pours out the hypnotic, shocking, moving, and erotically charged confessions of his first two hundred years as one of the living dead.

He speaks quietly, plainly, even gently... carrying us back to the night when he departed human existence as heir--young, romantic, cultivated--to a great Louisiana plantation, and was inducted by the radiant and sinister Lestat into the other, the "endless," life, learning first to sustain himself on the blood of cocks and rats caught in the raffish streets of New Orleans, then on the blood of human beings... to the years when, moving away from his final human ties under the tutelage of the hated yet necessary Lestat, he gradually embraces the habits, hungers, feelings of vampirism: the detachment, the hardened will, the "superior" sensual pleasures. He carries us back to the crucial moment in a dark New Orleans street when he finds the exquisite lost young child Claudia, wanting not to hurt but to comfort her, struggling against the last residue of human feeling within him. We follow them across Austria and Transylvania, encountering their kind in forms beyond their wildest imagining . . . to Paris, where footsteps behind them, in exact rhythm with their own, steer them to the doors of the Théâtre des Vampires--the beautiful, lewd, and febrile mime theatre whose posters of penny-dreadful vampires at once mask and reveal the horror within . . . to their meeting with the eerily magnetic Armand, who brings them, at last, into intimacy with a whole brilliant and decadent society of vampires, an intimacy that becomes sudden terror when they are compelled to confront what they have feared and fled... 

In its unceasing flow of spellbinding storytelling, of danger and flight, of loyalty and treachery, Interview with the Vampire bears witness of a literary imagination of the first order.


Dracula by Bram Stoker
There he lay looking as if youth had been half-renewed, for the white hair and moustache were changed to dark iron-grey, the cheeks were fuller, and the white skin seemed ruby-red underneath; the mouth was redder than ever, for on the lips were gouts of fresh blood, which trickled from the corners of the mouth and ran over the chin and neck. Even the deep, burning eyes seemed set amongst the swollen flesh, for the lids and pouches underneath were bloated. It seemed as if the whole awful creature were simply gorged with blood; he lay like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion.'

Giveaway Details:  This is a read-a-thon participant only giveaway.  To be eligible, you must sign in at the starting line post when you start to read and complete a wrap-up post at the end and link it here at the official read-a-thon wrap-up (I will give everyone until Tuesday morning, 10/9, at 10am CST to complete their wrap-up posts).  We have a total of 3 book prizes.  This means there will be 3 winners.  The first winner chosen will get first choice of all prizes listed and I will continue in this manner until all 3 winners are drawn.  Regarding the book won from me, I will get it sent out as soon as I can.  I know I still owe people books from last time (and before...ugh!).  I haven't forgotten and I greatly appreciate your bearing with me during my financial problems.  The eBook prize will be sent to winner via email and the print book will be shipped by the author.  Winners will be chosen after the wrap-up post deadline (see above).

I'd like to thank Robert Parry and Rhonda Hopkins, and all the generous authors, at Beach Book Blast for their generous donations!

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FrightFall Read-a-Thon: Starting Line #FrightFall


Welcome to the starting line! Be sure to sign in here, at the beginning or when you start reading.  Remember, you do not have to have a blog to join us.  You can sign in linking to Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads...wherever you will be updating from.  And you don't have to start at the beginning.  Start on any day this week, or if you're working all week, join us for the weekend.  People can sign in up until Friday night at 11:59pm CST.  I'll be stopping by and visiting you so I hope you will have your book piles/reading lists posted. *hint hint*  Make sure at least one book is a scary one.  Also, a reminder that I'm allowing children's books for those of you who have kids...with one condition...five picture books equal one novel.  Sound fair?  Middle grade novels can count as one book.

Join us on Twitter using the hashtag #FrightFall.  We are going to have four Twitter chats this week.  I had to tweak the times on the evening chats because I'm usually not home until around 5-5:30pm CST through the week.  I tried to have a good variance of time.  Hope one of the slots will work for everyone.  Here's the Twitter chat schedule:

Wednesday from 5:30 to 6:30pm CST
Friday from 6:30 to 7:30pm CST
Saturday from 10am to 11am CST
Sunday from 1 to 2pm CST

At other odd times on Twitter, we might even have some reading sprints throughout the week.  There won't be any prizes if/when we do, but you will get bragging rights.  Just remember to have fun this week.  Again, my read-a-thon credo is "a week of relaxed reading during which we can personally challenge ourselves and whittle away those ever looming TBR piles/shelves/libraries."  I have done away with mini-challenges so we can focus more on the reading, but please do stop by and visit your fellow read-a-thon-ers if you get a chance...and again, we will also be on Twitter for social interaction.  =O)

PRIZES/GIVEAWAYS
I will have the prize and giveaway page posted during the day on Monday so come back here to find it (sad to say, not as many prizes this time).  I will also have easy access links at the top of the blog.  There are going to be a couple of easy mini-challenges with prizes hosted by two of our participants.  I will indicate next to the blog below if the challenge is live or not.  Thanks, ladies!

Nova at My Seryniti  LIVE NOW!

Melissa at Must Read Faster  LIVE NOW!

Okay, I think that's about it.  I hope you all have fun this week.  If you have any questions, please leave me a comment below.  I will be posting my updates at my horror blog, Castle Macabre, so stop by and visit me.  Happy Reading!

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