Fresh FIction Box Not To Miss
Nancy Coco | Exclusive Excerpt: FUDGE BITES
Author Guest / September 23, 2019

CHAPTER 1 “You look amazing, Allie,” Frances said to me. “Like the scariest of the walking dead.” I laughed. I could feel the makeup cracking, and so I tried really hard to get it together. “At least I don’t look like a real dead person. I’ve got skin flapping off my cheek.” I pushed on the latex flap that concealed the gory makeup underneath. “Thankfully, zombies aren’t real.” “I love the idea of the zombie walk,” Frances said. “The fact that the profits all go to the Red Dress Foundation is fantastic.” “I like the idea that all the bars and restaurants pitched in to supply food for the hungry masses,” I said. “Fudge isn’t exactly food,” she pointed out. “I bet there are a lot of people who would argue with you on that,” I teased. Frances was my hotel manager. She’d worked at the Historic McMurphy Hotel and Fudge Shop since before she retired from teaching. Thankfully, she had stayed as an employee after my papa Liam McMurphy died and I inherited the family business. At this very moment, I was putting the finishing touches on my zombie pinup girl costume. I didn’t usually participate in late night…

Catherine Bybee | Excerpt: Say It Again
Author Guest / September 20, 2019

AJ gave her a head start and slowly made his way behind her. A small amount of traffic offered him some disguise. The fact that the sun had set aided him in his effort to go unnoticed. A lift in his chest filled him with a ray of hope when Sex Kitten stayed on the road leading to Richter. Maybe he should bug off now and follow her again on another night from a different starting point. Memories of his sister’s smile kept him moving forward. AJ peered out at the nearly deserted road and eased off the gas. Sex Kitten didn’t bother with a directional when she turned on one of the last twists in the road that would take her to the school. He should just drive past. Only as the turn drew closer, he knew he couldn’t. He rounded the corner and his heart skipped several beats. No taillights. None. Not hers. Not anyone else’s. There was at least a mile between this point and the turnoff to the school. “Where the hell did you go?” he asked himself as he sped up. He made it four hundred yards before his windshield was flooded by a single…

M.K. Schiller | My Favorite Time-Travel Movies
Author Guest / September 20, 2019

I love romance, but my second favorite genre has to be science fiction, specifically speculative fiction like time travel and alternate realities. In my new book, Lost Years, the hero travels many miles in search of the girl he loves. I love the paradox of these storylines. Here are my top five favorite time travel movies. Have I forgotten any? Do you agree with my list? Do you love or love to hate these movies? 5) Back to the Future: who can resist a classic? In this eighty’s comedy, Michael J Fox accidently travels back to the fifties in a custom time machine. He happens to run into his teenage mother, who ends up crushing on him. Once you get over the ick factor, it’s a really cute story. 4) Time Cop: Another oldie but goodie. A police officer who travels through time to stop a shady politician? Yep, I said it. I imagine one of the biggest issues with time travel is the money-making opportunities. If only I’d known how huge Apple or Microsoft were going to be and I’d invested a few thousand. If you could go back in time would you risk it? 3) About Time: this…

Lynn H. Blackburn | Author-Reader Match: ONE FINAL BREATH
Author Guest / September 20, 2019

Instead of trying to find your perfect match in a dating app, we bring you the “Author-Reader Match” where we introduce you to authors as a reader you may fall in love with. It’s our great pleasure to present Lynn H. Blackburn! Writes: Lynn writes romantic suspense novels set in the south. Her latest, One Final Breath, is the final book in the Dive Team Investigations series. All of Lynn’s novels explore the intersection of faith and fear with relatable heroes and heroines who happen to have some of the most interesting, and dangerous, jobs out there. About: Lynn writes romantic suspense because her childhood fantasy was to become a spy–but her grown-up reality is that she’s a huge chicken and would have been caught on her first mission. She prefers to live vicariously through her characters and loves putting them into all kinds of terrifying situations–while she’s sitting at home safely and sound in her pajamas! When she’s not writing, Lynn loves to entertain friends and family with healthy doses of southern hospitality and that desire for connection and community is evident in the close relationships shared by the characters in her stories. What I’m looking for in my…

Tari Faris | 10 Reasons I Love to Write Small Town Romance
Author Guest / September 20, 2019

My debut novel, YOU BELONG WITH ME, is set in the small fictional town of Heritage, Michigan. Over and over, readers have asked why did I choose to place it in a small town? What can I say–I love small towns. And the only thing better than living in a small town is writing about one. Here are my top ten reasons why I love writing about small towns: 10. Community is everywhere. Where I live now, I can go to the store, a restaurant, or to the library and never see a person I know. But when I visit my hometown, I have to plan extra time to stop and talk. 9. The town gossip chain. It may not be fun to live through but it sure is fun to write about. Everyone is in everyone else’s business. All the ‘he said’ and ‘I heard’ moments create fun additions to any story. 8. Full of people who knew your character back when. . . Much like town gossip, older friends can provide insight and sweet memories of our characters before we had the opportunity to know them. 7. Neighbors. Many of the characters in my series live in a…

Mia Carter | Five Things Internet Fandom Taught Me
Author Guest / September 19, 2019

For good or for ill, we live in a connected, online society. And I’m old enough to remember how nuts it was, clustered around one of the gumdrop-bright iMacs in the physics lab, Sophomore year, watching the Super Bowl commercials someone had put online. They each took about 45 years to download, but we all watched them in awe and amazement. Can you imagine? A place on the computer to watch videos? Crazy! Well, fourteen thousand cat videos later, here we are. Apart from the amusement of vines, memes, and cute kittens, the internet has brought me a very specific experience that I think many of us might share: Being in an online fandom. To me, there’s literally nothing better than finishing a book, walking out of a theater, or waiting on a season finale of a show, then going online and finding Your People. People who love the thing you love, who want to keep talking about it, engaging with it, and theorizing about it. I’ve now been involved in online fandoms and fan communities for a variety of things for over half my life, and although there’s the usual strangeness that happens whenever any group of people comes…

Gena Showalter | Exclusive Interview: FROST AND FLAME
Author Guest / September 19, 2019

Welcome back to Fresh Fiction! Can you tell us about your new release, FROST AND FLAME, the second book in the Gods of War series? Frost and Flame is Bane and Nola’s story.  Bane is an ice-cold warrior with a bloodthirsty dragon-like beast trapped inside him.  He’s determined to win the war, so he can kill his queen–the woman who murdered his wife.  Nola is a Korean-American mortal woman who suffers with fibromyalgia and doesn’t know she has ties to Bane’s world. . . or that she’s an up-and-coming queen with the ability to control Bane’s beast.  Needless to say, he isn’t happy about it.  But, the two must work together if they are to survive the war.  If only they could stop lusting for each other. . . (Narrator: They can’t!) Nola Lee is destined to rule, but she doesn’t know it at the beginning of the novel. That being said, she’s hardworking and kick-ass, as well as vulnerable and sensitive. She has spent most of her life unwell, having dreams of a golden god. Now, that god is here, and her illnesses are under control. What went into creating this multifaceted character?  I wrote Frost and Flame while…

Carol J. Perry | Exclusive Excerpt: LATE CHECKOUT
Author Guest / September 19, 2019

CHAPTER 1 It was a cool, pretty October Friday morning in my home town of Salem, Massachusetts. My beautiful Laguna blue 2014 Chevrolet Stingray Corvette convertible was in the shop because some inconsiderate dope had run a shopping cart down one side of it, leaving a significant gouge in the passenger door. My aunt Ibby was in Boston at a librarians’ convention, so her vintage but trustworthy Buick wasn’t available either. My hours as a field reporter at WICH-TV had just been cut nearly in half because the station manager’s wife’s nephew had just graduated from broadcasting school and “needs some experience.” I’m Lee Barrett, nee Maralee Kowalski, thirty-three, red-haired, Salem born, orphaned early, married once, and widowed young. My aunt Isobel Russell and I share the fine old family home on Winter Street, along with our big yellow-striped gentleman cat, O’Ryan. “Might as well walk to work,” I grumbled to the cat, who watched with apparent interest as I pulled on cordovan boots over faded jeans, then tossed my NASCAR jacket over a white turtleneck shirt. “With the new schedule I don’t have to get there until noon anyway.” O’Ryan gave a sympathetic “Mmrrow,” and followed me to my…

Bradley Harper | You Don’t Say?
Author Guest / September 18, 2019

Dialogue is an ancient Greek stage direction, meaning “action through words.” One of the first critiques I got from an agent, looking at my neatly printed manuscript was “There’s not enough white space,” meaning there was too much narrative description, and not enough dialogue. Dialogue opens up the tightknit block of words we are accustomed to in textbooks and allows your story to breathe through verbal exchanges between your characters. Frequent doses of white space make your work less intimidating and helps your reader speed along through your story. Dialogue is used to accomplish three things: Exposition, to reveal character, and to provoke an action. Let’s look at these in turn. Exposition. I write historical fiction, so putting my reader into an unknown universe and making them quickly comfortable there requires that I give them a sense of time and place, but without the dreaded “Info Dump.”  So how do I do that? I incorporate the information transfer into as graphic a manner as possible. In my first novel, A Knife in the Fog, my heroine, Margaret Harkness, is a female author from a proper middle-class British family temporarily living in Whitechapel to do research on her novels. As she…

Julia Justiss | History ReFreshed: Into the Sunset with Westerns
Author Guest / September 18, 2019

With summer already headed into the sunset in most locales, we’ll take a look at fiction set in the most famous of “into the sunset” areas–American-set and Western novels.  After decades of tremendous popularity, with the exception of a few movies and books–the “Lonesome Dove” series and remakes of “True Grit”–the genre has been out of favor recently.  But a few new and notable novels would like to reverse that trend. Proceeding chronologically, we begin with 355: THE WOMEN OF WASHINGTON’S SPY RING by Kit Sergeant.  Following the lead of the popular AMC TV show “Turn,” Sergeant presents the intertwining stories of three women who might have belonged to the secret spy ring referred to in Washington’s notebooks.  Meg Moncrieffe returned from boarding school in Ireland to find a colony in revolt.  Though her sympathies were initially with the British, her love for Aaron Burr persuaded her to look at another solution.  Elizabeth Burgin’s loyalties lay strongly with the colonists’ side after her husband died aboard one of the notorious British prison ships.  When a Culper Ring member approaches her, she’s ready to put herself–and her family–at risk to bring down the men who caused her husband’s death.  Initially furious…