Fresh FIction Box Not To Miss
Nina Croft | I Need a Hero
Author Guest / August 28, 2014

I was out running this morning trying to think of subjects to blog about when Bonnie Tyler came on my shuffle with “I Need a Hero.” I love the song and it made me smile and run faster (no mean feat as I am not a very good runner) so I thought I’d write a little about my take on what I need in a hero. According to Bonnie, a hero needs to be strong, fast, fresh from the fight, and larger than life. According to the dictionary “he’s a man of distinguished courage or ability, admired for his brave deeds and noble qualities.” I agree with both to a certain extent. I write romance, and so, by “hero” I mean the male protagonist in my stories. And because I write romance, my heroes have to be romantically appealing. They have to be someone I can imagine myself falling in love with, making love with, wanting to spend eternity with. And I have to somehow inspire the same reaction in my readers. That’s not always easy. The type of man we find attractive, swoon-worthy… heroic, is a very personal thing. My preference, in both reading and writing, (because I’m a…

Maggie LaCroix | Not Your Average Zombie
Author Guest / August 28, 2014

Maggie LaCroix is here for the ZOMBIFIED blog tour to tell us about how and why her zombies are different than the usual kind of zombies. Welcome, Maggie! For ZOMBIFIED, it all started in a bar with a few girlfriends from work talking about Twilight and True Blood and what was so fascinating about vampires anyway? Sexy, yes. But kind of manipulative jerks. Not like the simple, honest zombie whose brain-eating intentions are clear. The zombie is a nice guy, really, if you get past the drooling, lumbering and brain eating… And yet, in the hierarchy of the undead, vampires get to be sexy jerks; zombies just decompose. This didn’t seem fair, we agreed, and went back to our Martinis. But I couldn’t get that inebriated conversation out of my head. What if we found a way to make zombies sexy? What if sexy zombies were the new vampires? For the next few days, I turned this puzzle inside my head. First, we’d have to find a way to stop their flesh from rotting and preserve their mental abilities. Only one thing could do the trick: Magic. My sexy zombies were people who had been killed and put under a…