Stacia Kane

Which I hope you’ll like, though honestly it’s not a big deal or anything. I feel kind of silly saying it’s a gift, like “Oh look, I’m so great my mere words are presents to humanity,” or something, but I wanted to do something for you guys and this is what I came up with.

Back in October, if you recall (or if you don’t) I did a guest blog on the Paranormal Haven blog. And rather than do a “This is why I like Halloween,” I wrote a very short little story about the beginning of Haunted Week. Of course, not too long after I wrote it I thought of a new, better ending for it, so I’d always meant to change it.

Anyway, last night I got a little bee in my bonnet about it. I expanded the story and gave it a new ending (it’s about 2300 words now, so still very short). Then I went to stock.xchng and grabbed a free image, took it to Picnik, and made a cover, of which I’m hugely proud, to be honest. Check it out:

Isn’t that cool? I know it’s rude to brag, but considering how challenged I am in the visual arts–seriously, I’m not good at them–I’m totally impressed with myself.

So. I tried to load it to Amazon for the Kindle and Barnes & Noble for the Nook, but neither of them would allow me to offer it for free, and there was no way I was going to charge. For a present? Nonononono. Besides, it’s only 2300 words! Even 99 cents is too much to pay for that.

So I loaded it onto the site, on the Books page (it’s near the bottom, under “Other Titles”) as a PDF. You can download it there or here: The Brave Tale of Maddie Carver

I also put it up on Smashwords, which took hours. I mean, I got it up very quickly (heh heh, that’s what she said) but it took hours for Smashwords to get it converted. You can get it here, though.

Then I popped over to Scribd to offer it there, too.

(Incidentally, I also made a new cover for BE A SEX-WRITING STRUMPET, which I’m also pleased with; that’s on Scribd as well, and will be on the Nook, and I’ve changed the cover file in the Kindle store.)

So there you go, a free story for you. Merry Holidays! Thank you so much for everything!

Also, I’ve just discovered we have some more award nominations! Paranormal Haven is doing its Best of 2010, and if you click the Vote Now link it will take you to the actual voting, where Chess is nominated for Favorite Kick-Ass Heroine and the Downside series is nominated for Favorite New Series. So if you feel like voting, do! Heck, vote whether it’s for Chess and the Downside series or not; Paranormal Haven is a great blog, and you should take a look at it/participate! Voting ends tonight!

And of course, there are still the Goodreads Awards! Best Paranormal Fantasy and Best Goodreads Author.

…so I think that’s it for today! Enjoy the short, everyone, and of course feel free to let me know what you think!

**There are links at the bottom of this post; a few are to blogs where a DEMON POSSESSED blog tour is happening and copies of the book are being given away, so check them out!)

As is usually the case when a book is released, DEMON POSSESSED has been getting a pretty good number of reviews lately. And I’m extremely pleased to find they’ve been very positive; I mean, I suppose it’s entirely possible someone’s written a terrible review of it somewhere but I haven’t seen it.

But something struck me earlier, as I checked what came in from my Google alert and did a little link-following. Of the new reviews turned up today, two kind of stood out for me. Not because of the content of the reviews, exactly; well, yes, but not the way you think, maybe. Not because they were overwhelmingly positive or negative, either. But because of their disagreement on a specific issue.

The first was Mrs. Giggles’s totally fun review. The second was…well, I’m not going to say, because this person didn’t post their review on a personal blog or anything like that; it was on a share-your-opinion type site, where multiple people can post, and they don’t need to have me linking to them, as it’s not my place at all to be playing in the review pool for my own book over there or pointing fingers (good or bad, and this is not bad).