Month: November 2014

Win A Free Copy Of Spell Of Vanishing!

Win A Free Copy Of Spell Of Vanishing!

Or, Join Me On My New Blog Tour

Enter to win a free ebook of my latest novel Spell of Vanishing here!

Click below to pop into my blog tour and say hello (all links updated/refined daily):

 

SOV quote 1400x2100

Mon., Nov. 10, 2014

Author Interview

Roxanne’s Realm

&

Guest Blog

SimpliSpeaking

Tues., Nov. 11, 2014

Author Spotlight

Penny Writes

Wed., Nov. 12, 2014

Guest Blog

Coffee Addicts Books

Thu., Nov. 13, 2014

Author Spotlight

SBM Book Obsession

&

Author Spotlight

Share My Destiny

&

Author Spotlight

Hope to Read

Fri., Nov 14, 2014

Freshly Baked Books

Mon., Nov. 17, 2014

Guest Blog

Fang-tastic Books

&

Author Interview

The Creatively Green Write-At-Home Mom

See you there!

<3 Anna

Mid-Month NaNoWriMo Update

Mid-Month NaNoWriMo Update

Or, My 1st 2 Weeks Of NaNo 2014

Current word count => 18,265.

nanowrimo

I love November more than any other month. It’s the one month I get to wildly obsess about writing and be cheered for it. (I love my job!)

If you’ve ever thought of writing a novel, I encourage you to sketch out an idea next year and then take the NaNoWriMo challenge in 2015. You won’t regret it. Because even if you don’t meet the 50,000 words in 30 days goal, you will write much more than you would in a normal month.

Last year I wrote the final book in the Red Plague trilogy–Panacea.

PanaceaFin

This year I’m writing the final book in the Dark Caster series. (Title to be determined.) The cover below is from the first book in the series.

Spell200x300

 

I work during the day and then am a mom and wife in the evenings. On top of that I write. What I learned right away is that I can’t procrastinate this month. Sometimes I wait to write until the time just “appears.” But that isn’t working right now. Not when I need a solid hour to complete 2000 words (my daily goal). With work, school, theater practice, violin lessons, dinner, etc., etc. I can’t squeeze in the time and go to sleep at a reasonable hour. So, I’m going to have to force myself to get up an hour early starting tomorrow morning, even though I’m not a morning person at all. But if I don’t get my word count in before I go to work I spend the entire day worrying about how to finish everything.

So, think of me bleary-eyed and pounding away on the keyboard tomorrow morning, slurping coffee by the quart as I try to do justice to Derek and Jessa’s story.

Thank goodness there’s December and National Editing Your Manuscript Month (If it doesn’t officially exist, it should!).

<3 Anna

Ghosts Drove Couple Away in 1959

Ghosts Drove Couple Away in 1959

Or, Explore A Haunted House In Iowa

Read the original article here.

Melville’s Haunted House: Unexplained Happenings Drove Couple Away in 1959

Written by Diane Langton in August 2014

EP-140829817 (1)

Was it haunted or not? The house, whose address was “End of Skip Level Road,” stood three miles west of Millville in Clayton County.

Bill Meyer was born on the property. He was 15 when he helped build the house that seemed to be haunted when he and his wife, Annie, moved out in December 1959.

Strange events began to occur around Thanksgiving that year.

Bill, bedridden with a broken hip at age 83, and Annie, 77, weren’t particularly superstitious and they didn’t believe in ghosts.

But when the ambulance came to take Bill away from the house on Dec. 17, he and Annie said they’d had enough.

“I don’t think it’s safe to go in there,” he said. “I don’t know whether there’s going to be anything left or not. It’s hard to tell. The whole house might fall down.”

“I’ll say I was scared,” Annie added. “Anybody would be scared.” But she still vowed, “There isn’t such a thing as a ghost.”

Just before Thanksgiving, black soot-like dirt started falling through the ceiling, coating everything. It started at about 11 p.m. and kept going until about 3 a.m. In the morning, the coverlet on Bill’s bed in the parlor was covered.

They looked for cracks or disturbances in the plaster. Nothing.

On Dec. 15, another incident: “I was sitting there in the dark by the heater,” Annie said, “when a flower pedestal at the side of the room fell over with a big fern crashing over. You know how that would sound. The house didn’t shake or anything either.”

For the next two days, strange things continued to happen.

“Once I was sitting there in the dark when a glass on the stand by his bed across the room came down on my head and broke in a thousand pieces,” Annie said.

And there were noises. A sound like a crew of men hammering started in the kitchen, moved up the stairs, then back down to the porch.

Pills from a bottle behind a closed cupboard door were found in a pile on the kitchen floor.

Annie and Bill decide to try an experiment. They put an egg in the neck of a milk bottle on a stand at one end of the living room. They found the egg broken against the door on the opposite side of the room.

The frightened pair reached their last straw when on the night of Dec. 17, a separator bowl on the porch crashed to the floor, breaking several jars. An icebox on the porch fell over, too. They called their son, Elmer, who told his parents they needed to get out of the house.

An ambulance was sent to pick up Bill and the couple went to stay with Annie’s sister and brother-in-law. They left Annie’s two cats at the house.

The night they left, a couple of men checked the house at about 10:30 and everything looked fine. The next morning, the sheriff decided to check and found the bed upside down. He straightened it. Later, he sent someone to check the place again and again the bed was upside down.

That night, the sheriff sealed the doors of the house and placed eggs around the house. An egg in the living room broke, but the sheriff blamed that on the cats.

The Meyers’ son, Elmer, and his wife lived in a smaller house up the road with their 16-year-old son, Gene. Elmer went back to the house with a divining rod and reported to his father that it behaved very strangely when it was close to the house.

Pat Livingston, a riverboat captain, was not a small man — he weighed 260 pounds — and he wasn’t afraid of much. He volunteered to stay at the house. As he was beginning to fall asleep in the bedroom he saw a chair glide across the room. He ignored it and went to sleep. “ … the next thing I knew, I was lying on the floor. I’ll take a lie detector test or anything,” he said. “I woke up kind of groggy. I wouldn’t have believed it for love or money.”

News of the haunted house spread across the nation, drawing scientists and other researchers to investigate, but their tests proved nothing. There were no faults detected, no unusual electrical activity, no radiation.

No other unusual things happened after the house was sealed until a photographer went to take pictures of the house. “He was in the basement when a brick fell from the cellar wall and broke a crock on the floor,” The Gazette reported.

The Meyers never returned to the house, selling it to their neighbors, the Finnegans, in May 1960. They moved into a two-room apartment in Millville. Fifty acres of the Meyers’ farm were added to the Finnegans’ 240 acres. Elmer retained eight acres.

By then hundreds of curiousity seekers had passed by, some even stopping to explore.

General consensus seemed to be that the spooky occurrences were the work of pranksters.

When asked about the house they now owned, Mrs. Finnegan said, “We don’t believe in spooks. We just laugh it off as a joke when anyone inquires about us living in the house. It will remain empty, unless someone wants to rent it.”

No one ever rented it, though. It became a target for vandals and trespassers, until finally the Finnegans filled the house with hay, turning it into a barn.

A quarter of a century later, it still stood empty with broken windows and a sagging roof. It had acquired the name “Ghost Hollow” along with a batch of theories about the so-called ghost that drove an elderly couple from their home.

<3 Anna

My Review of The Texas Lawman’s Woman

My Review of The Texas Lawman’s Woman

Or, What I Thought Of Cathy Gillen Thacker’s Novel

0413-9781460312674-bigw

Back Cover Blurb:

She’s no damsel in distress, but Shelley Meyerson may just need a white knight like deputy sheriff Colt McCabe. Thanks to her scheming ex-husband, Shelley’s about to lose her home. The last person she wants to turn to for help is Colt, the guy who broke her heart the night of the high school prom. But now that she’s back in Laramie, there’s no avoiding him—especially when they’re both serving in the same wedding party.

True, the handsome, gallant lawman is a valuable ally. And he seems genuinely interested in Shelley and her little boy. She could definitely use a friend…and maybe something more. Rekindling their romance is easy—but learning to trust again is hard. Especially when Shelley learns that Colt’s been keeping a secret that could cost him his badge….

My Thoughts:

I really enjoyed this book. The characters were well developed and the sexual tension was sizzling. The only critique I have is I felt Shelley waited way too long to take action against her no-good, thieving ex-husband. In my opinion, any halfway intelligent woman would have seen through his nonsense a lot sooner.

If you’re looking for a quick, sexy read set in rural Texas, pick up The Texas Lawman’s Woman.

<3 Anna

Britain’s Top 5 Most Haunted Sites

Britain’s Top 5 Most Haunted Sites

Or, Ever Want To Visit A Haunted House?

You can find the original article here.

Most Haunted: Yvette Fielding’s Top 5 Spooky Places in Britain

Written by Yvette Fielding August 2014

British paranormal reality series Most Haunted is back from the dead. The spooky show, which sees ghost hunter Yvette Fielding search eerie properties for signs of the undead, has returned to UKTV’s Really channel, this time the paranormal investigator and her team will visit the chilling Royal Court Theatre in Lancashire, Sheffield’s National Emergency Services Museum and Newton House in Wales, among others spooky spots.

England rugby player Ben Foden will also join them in the shadows, as will Welsh metal band Bullet for My Valentine. We catch up with Yvette ahead of the show to find out about the UK’s top haunted spots open to the public, so you too can do some investigations of your own (if you dare)…

1. Tatton Old Hall, Cheshire, England

It’s always freezing inside. It used to be the gamekeeper’s cottage from what I understand, but I’ve investigated it a couple of times, and I’m not joking, if someone offered me a million pounds to sleep there the night – no way, no way. However, it’s a great place to go and visit because it’s got the most amazing history. Inside, each individual room is themed for a different time. They’ve got dining sets from the 1930s, and upstairs it’s as it would have been in Saxon times. It’s just a really wonderful place to go. It’s one of the most haunted places that I’ve ever been in. As I say, I would never sleep the night there. It’s too creepy, and it’s very active indeed. I’m terrified, absolutely terrified for my life in that place. I heard everything thrown at us, but not just like ooh here’s a little stir, this was with absolute force and could have cut our heads. The knocking that we heard was like somebody had a mallet on the other side of the wall, and went bang, bang. It’s everything you actually imagine horror nightmares to be

2. Newton House, Llandeilo, Wales

The amount of poltergeist activity that we experienced in that place was just unbelievable. Even when I was sort of clearing up at the end of the investigation, the band [Bullet for My Valentine join Yvette during the investigation in episode two of the new series] had gone, it was just me. I was in the tearoom and the lights were going on and off. The door to the kitchen area was opening and closing and I thought  “oh good god, please please not now, I just want to go home”. Everywhere you went without a shadow of a doubt, something happened. Newton House is open to the public, it’s a beautiful building with a fantastic history and is up there for paranormal activity.

3. Edinburgh Vaults, Scotland

Underneath the city there’s Mary King’s Close, and there’s South Bridge Vaults –which we’ve investigated on numerous occasions. We did a live show once and Stuart Torvell [a paranormal investigator on Most Haunted] actually got scratched, he still has the scars on his back, in one of the corridors in the Edinburgh Vaults. It’s where a lot of the very poor people and homeless people lived. There were also villains living there and rapists. They were all bungled in together. Men, women, and children. They all had to live together in these terrible confined conditions. It’s just endless tunnels and you can’t even see your hand in front of your face sometimes – it’s terrifying, but worth visiting. They are genuinely haunted, and there are regular tour guides that take you around with a candle and give you a ghost tour. It’s absolutely brilliant.

4. Ye Olde King’s Head, Chester, England

We did a show at Ye Olde King’s Head in Chester for Really channel and the television there kept coming on and off on its own. Weirdly enough, every time we turned the tap on, the telly would come on, and any time we turned the tap off, the telly would come off. It was just really odd. There are so many ghosts in this pub. Just going for a pint, you’ll see things move. The people who work there often feel a presence, and the chef in the kitchen has had knives thrown at him. The horrible thing is if you’re staying in room six the bed covers may be pulled off you and then you see this horrible grotesque man leering over the top of you. Avoid room six in Ye Old King’s Head.

5. Drakelow Tunnels, Kidderminster, England

Also featured on Most Haunted for Really channel, it is four and a half miles of tunnels, which were used as a shadow factory during World War II. It was used to make Rover Cars – so if any of the main factories broke down, this particular factory would take over and manufacture cars. Later on, during the Cold War, it was a place where all the local government and local councillors and everybody would come and live. It had its own kitchens; it had its own dormitories and showers. There’s even a really weird BBC telecommunication radio centre to tell you that the world had ended. It’s really weird. I was nearly in tears because I got so disorientated and lost. There’s a ghost there that’s really violent and likes to push you around. The owner said he was on a ladder doing some refurbishments to one of the tunnels and something pushed him off. He broke his leg in two places, and he won’t go down there anymore on his own. He has to go down with his dogs because he’s so frightened or take somebody with him. I would never go down on my own. It’s the most terrifying place ever. But they do open it as a venue, you can have parties there, or just have a walk around, but it is a sight for sore eyes. It’s unbelievable, just unbelievable.

Top tips for ghost spotting: 

If you have a person in your group who’s a little bit negative or sceptical, nothing will happen. It’s like a bad fart at a party.  You need positive people that really want to experience it, that are really interested in it, and not necessarily believe but are just up for it. If you use the same group of people and you travel, you’re more likely to get something happening.

<3 Anna

Just Announced! Spell of Vanishing Blog Tour Nov 10-17

Just Announced! Spell of Vanishing Blog Tour Nov 10-17

Or, Join Me For A Blog Tour Nov. 10-17 In Honor Of My New Release, Spell of Vanishing

SOV quote 1400x2100Stop by and say hello anytime on the following sites:

Mon., Nov. 10, 2014

Author Interview

Roxanne’s Realm

&

Guest Blog

SimpliSpeaking

Tues., Nov. 11, 2014

Author Spotlight

Penny Writes

Wed., Nov. 12, 2014

Guest Blog

Coffee Addicts Books

Thu., Nov. 13, 2014

Author Spotlight

SBM Book Obsession

&

Author Spotlight

Share My Destiny

Fri., Nov 14, 2014

Freshly Baked Books

Mon., Nov. 17, 2014

Guest Blog

Fang-tastic Books

&

Author Interview

The Creatively Green Write-At-Home Mom

See you there!

<3 Anna

Theme: Overlay by Kaira