When I’m not writing… with Jeaniene Frost

 

As you guys know, Jeaniene is one of my absolute favorite authors so I’m really excited to have her on the blog once again! It’s always a pleasure to have her around and I really hope you share my enthusiasm! She is indeed the author of The Night Huntress series and its spin-off and her next release, This Side of the Grave is due February 22nd, 2011 and I CAN’T WAIT to get my hands on it.

 

 

It should surprise no one that when I’m not writing, I like to read. I discovered romance novels at the age of twelve and even used to measure my allowance in terms of how many books it could buy. As a teen, I didn’t mind being sent to my room when I was bad because that’s where all my books were. It was love of reading that first made me want to write my own stories. One of the only downsides to writing is that I have less time for reading now, but I still make sure to squeeze some new reading in even when I’m on deadline. I’ve noticed that if I go too long without reading, I tend to get cranky (somewhere my husband is nodding in fervent agreement, lol). Romance may have been my first literary love, but I also enjoy horror, urban fantasy, supernatural mysteries, and the occasional non-fiction book.

 

Alas, over the course of about twenty years and over a dozen moves, I lost a lot of my books. At one early point in our marriage, my husband thought a huge cardboard box filled with novels was junk meant to be thrown away, and he did exactly that. It’s a testament to how much I love him that he lived through such an egregious mistake *wink*. On the top left shelf of the above photo, you can see all that’s left of my teenage romance collection. Some readers love the convenience of not needing shelves because all their books are now stored on an electronic device. I say more power to them, but I love having stacks of physical books around me. When I was little, my grandmother had a room with floor to ceiling shelves on two walls and a big comfy couch along the third, and it was my favorite room to spend time in when we visited her. My husband and I intend to move out of Florida next year and my one wish is to have floor to ceiling shelves in a room of our new home. Cross your fingers for me that it works out! 

 

As you can probably guess, I’m also a movie buff. My idea of a nice evening at home involves sitting on the couch with popcorn and watching a DVD. Even though it’s too large for our current living room (as you’ll see in the next photo), recently we bought one of those big sectional couches and words cannot express how much I love it. Both hubby and I can fully stretch out with our pillows and blankets while the movie plays. It’s one of my favorite ways to unwind. We also make sure to cover our couch with various throw blankets because somebody  - points to the spoiled doggie in the picture - thinks the couch is hers, not ours. We’re lucky she graciously allows us to use it as long as petting her is part of that use, heh.

 

I also love listening to music, but nowadays I listen to most of it while I write. My husband jokes that my laptop is really just an expensive radio, because it’s what I use to play songs while I write on another laptop that’s so old, it’s probably the original prototype (in my defense, I take the “radio” laptop with me when I go out of town because it has WiFi, so it DOES have other uses :). I create different soundtracks from iTunes for each book, with different artists depending on my  mood, but some of my favorite bands are Sarah McLachlan, Coldplay, The Fray, Smashing Pumpkins, Kings of Leon, Linkin Park, Carolina Liar, U2, White Lies, Lifehouse, and 44. Below is a photo of my writing space with the blue “dinosaur” laptop on the desk and the red “radio” laptop on the left of it. The desk itself is actually quite old. It belonged to my great-grandfather and my grandmother used to do her homework on it when she was a child.

 

If you’re wondering about the items on top of the desk, the pillow was a gift from my fan site moderator; the roses were from my sister when I first hit the New York Times; the unicorn was a gift from my niece when she was a child (and she was so proud to tell me that she’d bought it with her own money); the cat-o-nine tails was a gag gift from my critique partner in honor of my heroine, and the  pig and the bear were what my grandmother held the last two weeks of her life in the hospital. My grandmother was an amazing lady. To her last, she kept her sense of humor, joking that she’d get better only if the pig started to fly. My heroine’s middle name, Kathleen, is in honor of my grandmother.

The other thing I enjoy doing in my spare time is roaming through cemeteries. Yes, this sounds odd to a lot of people, but most cemeteries are very pretty, and the historic ones are like outdoor museums. The author photo in my books was taken by a friend while we were wandering through a cemetery in Baltimore, MD. I wanted to scale the fence to get to the blocked off, older section of the cemetery. She very sensibly noted that the fence had metal spikes, and getting impaled by one of them would ruin our plans for the day. Since I’m not very athletic (or graceful) and probably would have skewered myself if I tried to vault over those spikes, I settled for taking pictures of that section of the cemetery from inside the fence. You can just see the tips of the fence spikes at the bottom of this picture.

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Thank you so much Jeaniene for sharing with us, and it’s such a lovely attention to name Cat after your grandma’s name. Love it =)

Danger waits on both sides of the grave

Half-vampire Cat Crawfield and her vampire husband Bones have fought for their lives, as well as for their relationship. But just when they’ve triumphed over the latest battle, Cat’s new and unexpected abilities threaten to upset a long-standing balance…

With the mysterious disappearance of vampires, rumors abound that a species war is brewing.  A zealot is inciting tensions between the vampires and ghouls, and if these two powerful groups clash, innocent mortals could become collateral damage. Now Cat and Bones are forced to seek help from a dangerous “ally”—the ghoul queen of New Orleans herself. But the price of her assistance may prove more treacherous than even the threat of a supernatural war. …to say nothing of the repercussions Cat never imagined.

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Jeaniene very generously offered a signed copy of Eternal Kiss of Darkness (picture me jealous!) to one lucky reader!

It is open internationally (Thank you Jeaniene!)

All you have to do is leave a meaningful comment and FILL THE FORM

Giveaway ends  Dec 13th, 2010.

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Posted by Tynga at 00:04

 Harper Collins, Jeaniene Frost, When I'm not writing  62 People left their mark

Tynga is a 32 years old mom of two, from Montreal, working as a lab technician in an hospital specialized in heart disease. In her free time, she enjoys reading all things Paranormal and photography.

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