We’re celebrating Saint Valentine’s Day by having our ebook, Legend Unleashed, free this weekend! Anyone who is interested can pop on over to Amazon and grab a copy. We truly hope you enjoy the read!
Spread the love this weekend and let everyone know 🙂
When an infamous criminal is unleashed from his prison, it has consequences for everyone in Carwick. Temperance Levinthal in particular…
Temperance is satisfied with her ordinary life. Dealing with her eccentric, childlike parents is all the excitement she needs. That changes when Alastair Byron returns home.
After a failed matchmaking attempt by her father, sparks fly between her and Alastair-just not the good kind.
They are forced together though, when they are implicated in a grisly murder. Their search for the truth leads them to a secret world beneath Carwick, filled with werewolves, wizards and other magical faey.
However, uncovering the truth is far more dangerous than they’d ever imagined.
There are secrets within secrets.
Even Alastair may be more than he seems…
Ridley: There are often things that don’t live up to your imagination, one in particular down through the years (for me) happens to be exercise. I’ve never been sporty, I was the book type, the girl who when given money for her birthday spent it on numerous books, much to the exasperation of my mother who always insisted I needed clothes rather than more books. It’s not that I don’t love the idea of doing a sport, but the theory has always been so much easier than the practice.
Running, in particular, is one I’ve tried and would love to master. Particularly on a beach somewhere hot, I bet that would probably be nice. For two seconds, then I’d like to return to my yellow parasol with a cool iced drink.
I have attempted that ‘couch to 5K’, which was good for the first few weeks, I gradually built up my running time and decreased my walking minutes. As I did it, I pictured myself as one of those stylish runners, dressed in sleek black three quarter length trousers, a tank top and swishy blonde ponytail, with The Black Eyed Peas, ‘Push It’ urging me on to success. Then I passed a shop window, where my delusions shattered into thousands of sharp shiny shards, and I saw Bridget Jones, well her uglier sister; Ms Tomato-Head herself puffing as she limped by in a baggy t-shirt and tracksuit bottoms that should have been burned centuries ago. Rather than a small perfect droplet of sweat on my graceful neck and the imagined artful swig of an energy drink, the reality is really more flaying arms and claw-like hands grasping for both my tap water in an old coca cola bottle and my iPod as it randomly shuffles onto classical music-can anyone exercise to that?
I really do have an active imagination. Even being on a bike or horse, I have very similar rampant images, where I’ve picture myself as a majestic Tour de France type or dressage rider, in all the flashy gear, where really I just look like a miserable sack of spuds someone’s abandoned on the seat by accident.
Now everyone knows that at the moment, it’s too cold (well here in Ireland) to be exercising outside-though I have seen a few mad people attempting it in the cold driving rain *shudder* It may be spring, but it seems Mother Nature hasn’t gotten the memo yet. In my mind, going to the gym is the only option. I’m a serial gym membership buyer, not goer. I never seem to learn my lesson, despite sometimes having some horrific upfront steep membership fees, I always seem to find a gym to join and then never go. The reasons I use to persuade myself that this time will be different always change. It could be a gym which is closer to where I work than the last one, or it could have no pool, or a larger pool, have lots of classes, or better machines or all male instructors. It doesn’t matter, my record has only been ten visits and then the excuses begin-I’m not a morning person I’ll go in the afternoon, I’m so tired after work I’ll go tomorrow, it’s been a few days I need to work up the nerve to go back. Weeks go by and I become convinced that they’ll laugh at me if I return. Then like a bad embarrassing smell, the guilt and the gym membership fee linger on for a bit, as I try to convince myself that I’ll definitely go on Saturday, or Sunday, or next Wednesday, so I don’t cancel it yet! But soon, I realise I need to plug this particular drain on my finances (my book fund is getting low after all). So I trek down to the gym with downcast eyes and with inaudible mumbling I cancel the membership. They give me the once over and just nod with little resistance, I imagine in the back office somewhere there are a few buff gym types passing fiver notes around as they chuckle over their bets of me not lasting longer than a week.
For now, I’ll continue to try to be as healthy as I can be, it’s in my interest after all and I’ll feel better for it, or at least this is what I’ll continue to mutter to the bright orange carrot sticks sitting in my fridge. I’ll leave the gym memberships alone for a bit and one day I will transform into a graceful lyrca-covered princess, or so the little voice in my head reassures me, though perhaps it’s as crazy as I am!
We just want to say a massive thank you to everyone who entered our Rafflecopter Giveaway!! Also, thank you to ‘I Am A Reader, Not A Writer’ and ‘BookLove101’ for holding the hop in the first place and letting us take part, I hope everyone got a chance to visit the different blogs!
Now drum roll please….
Congratulations to our winner of the Young Adult Blog Hop:
Casi will be receiving a signed paperback version of Legend Unleashed! 😀
When an infamous criminal is unleashed from his prison, it has consequences for everyone in Carwick. Temperance Levinthal in particular…
Temperance is satisfied with her ordinary life. Dealing with her eccentric, childlike parents is all the excitement she needs. That changes when Alastair Byron returns home.
After a failed matchmaking attempt by her father, sparks fly between her and Alastair-just not the good kind.
They are forced together though, when they are implicated in a grisly murder. Their search for the truth leads them to a secret world beneath Carwick, filled with werewolves, wizards and other magical faey.
However, uncovering the truth is far more dangerous than they’d ever imagined.
Latimer: I watched the Golden Globes this week; I don’t know why really, maybe the universe was trying to tell me about Silver Linings Playbook?
I was sitting with a cup of tea, chatting and complaining to my flatmate, Orbie (typical behaviour when watching awards ceremonies). The camera panned the room and stopped briefly on Jennifer Lawrence sitting with Bradley Cooper.
I paused.
“What’s going on here?” I said, intrigued (firstly I thought they had gone together so I was confused, thinking… what… what about Peeta?! Haha). Orbie, shrugged and went back to messing on her phone.
As the ceremony went on, I learned why Jennifer Lawrence was sitting beside Bradley Cooper… Silver Linings Playbook! But what was that exactly?
Well from the brief trailers I saw, I decided to see the movie and find out!
And… I am in love with it! It’s one of those things whereby I’m overtaken by a desire to scream from a cyber-rooftop – “This is great!”
I texted Ridley –“ Watch this! You gotta watch this!”
It’s such a good story line, the characters are fun and quirky and, wow, all the actors are amazing.
Bradley Cooper’s acting is absolutely jaw-dropping. He’s gorgeous of course, but in this film he isn’t playing the good looking character, he’s playing this broken, delusional, bi-polar person, who’s manic and funny and sad all at the same time. He does such an amazing job.
For definite, Silver Linings Playbook is going in my favourite’s pile; with the books and the movies and all the sparkly things I have collected over the years.
When they dig me out from under the pile (when I’ve gone feral and incoherent; “my preciousssesss!”); they’ll be scraping Lord of the Rings DVDs and old Doctor Who episodes off me, and I’ll struggle out of their hands, dressed in clothes I’ve fashioned from the pages of Harry Potter books, clutching a DVD of Silver Lining’s Playbook, screaming:
One of our favourite artists on deviantart, mseregon, is current creating a new series of drawings which we’ve been following! We pop over often to see what new image has been uploaded. What is this series I hear you ask? It’s a brilliant idea, she’s drawing women who are main characters in various fantastic novels that she’s read. Fan art is such a fantastic way to express and share your feelings with others about a particular book and to extend your time in the world of the characters. So this series is fan art at it’s finest.
Ridley: I just love the way mseregon picks one colour per character and implements it in various parts of the picture, simplistic but very beautiful and effective! It’s also given me more of an appreciate for how many brilliant, strong female main characters there are now in literature. I don’t know why, but when I was much younger, I seemed to find it hard to find books without male leads. Not so now!!
Latimer: I’ve really been enjoying this series so much! mseregon has such a wealth of book knowledge behind her; she’s always picking such great characters to draw! Every time she uploads a new image I’m over in her gallery 🙂 The one colour per character really works so well, very graphic (I can’t wait for the next images!!).
Here we’ve been given permission to share her pictures with you. Each image has a link to it’s place on her gallery so if you’d like to you can pop over to see more, leave a comment or just tell her how great she is! 🙂
First up we’ve Katniss from the Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. If you haven’t read these books, definitely check them out! A great series and the reason behind the new popularity in dystopian novels at the moment!
Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Our favourite novel with one of the best independent, smart female main characters ever, and not to mention the ultimate fictional crush that can be found in the swoon-worthy Mr Darcy! Elizabeth’s dress is adorable in this and the colour is so pretty.
Jane Eyre from Jane Eyre 🙂 by Charlotte Bronte. There is something very beautiful about Jane’s plainness. The grey-blue really suits the character of Jane. This picture conjures up a great image of such a strong character. Makes us want to delve back into Charlotte’s world!
Karou from Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor. With her dramatic blue hair in the book, it is the absolutely perfect colour to have picked for her picture. Her laid back pose in this is just brilliant. The book by Laini is a real page turner, some really magical world building to be found in it too.
Tris from Divergent by Veronica Roth. Now we are both ashamed to say we haven’t read these books yet! They are on our list!! This picture definitely peeks our interest, if we hadn’t already bought the books, we would be a-buying after this. Tris looks like one kick-ass character!
Sookie from The Southern Vampire Mysteries by Charlaine Harris. Everyone knows Sookie by now, even if you haven’t read the books you’ve surely seen True Blood, with the handsome Eric Northman?
Tessa from The Infernal Devices series by Cassandra Clare. If you are currently clueless as to who this is and have never heard of Cassandra Clare, for shame! Get thee to a bookshop, or Amazon! I would recommend City of Bones as your first venture into the Shadowhunter Chronicles.
The purple is really spectacular in this and it’s very similar to how I’ve pictured Tessa too!
Alina from Shadow and Bone of The Grisha series by Leigh Bardugo. Honestly can’t say too much about this yet, it’s one of the next books on the reading list… really can’t wait, it looks like a fantastic story!! Alina looks brilliant in her regal gown 🙂
Claire Fraser from the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon. The frills of her dress and her hair are brilliant. Again….Outlander is a series that we need to check out, mseregon is a fountain of knowledge when it comes to book ideas!
And finally, Temperance from Legend Unleashed by M. Latimer-Ridley…. yes, us! Wow. We were surprised and so happy when one of the next images in the series was our Temperance Levinthal! Look at her, the pose really captures her nonchalant personality!
This isn’t the end of the series, not yet! mseregon has a few more images up her sleeve, we’ll be certain to follow along until the end!
Look up at them all, they’re so pretty!
If you want to keep up-to-date on mseregon’s works or get some really brilliant book suggestions: you can follow her on twitter, tumblror deviantart!
Latimer: It’s very strange to think on this, but I have – sort of – a long history with Peter Jackson.
He made a movie called ‘Bad Taste’ many, many years ago. When I was a very, very small Latimer, I often saw the cover of this movie in an old video shop in our little town. It was back in the VHS days to put it in perspective.
I have the cover image of Bad Taste imprinted in my mind; really weird white alien-type creature in a black suit giving the finger.
This still scares me!!! WAHHHH!!!!
And… I remember watching it, a little, when my older siblings rented it. It’s a dark comedy; but not really when you are a kid; it’s actually a nightmare that plagued me for many nights afterward!
I never thought then that I would come to love Peter Jackson so much!
Myself and Ridley have a long tradition of going to see Lord of the Rings.
It was a sad thing to realise that the first movie is now 11yrs old! And I guess, so its Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
Honestly, I haven’t thought about Middle-Earth in a long time. I started to forget how much I loved it. I remembered I loved it, but I didn’t feel that love anymore. Time passed, obsessions came and went, as they do.
So, when they announced Hobbit; I wasn’t very interested.
When they released the trailer, I didn’t think much of it and when they said, it’ll be three movies, I rolled my eyes. It’s true. Sounds harsh, but don’t get me wrong, time had just passed, and well, I didn’t care so much anymore.
When I sat down in the cinema; which was more or less empty, I thought back on how myself and Ridley used to arrive early to a packed cinema in the Lord of the Rings days; we would queue;we would get jumpy, trying to organize everyone; myself and Ridley would race for the best seats, glancing back to make sure the rest of our fellowship had made it.
This time it was just me and Ridley and the cinema was pretty empty. And, we had 3D glasses (that’s new too, and not sure I’m sold on it at all).
Then it started. Then I started to remember…
The music; the props; New Zealand… I smiled; I had missed middle-earth! It was wonderful to be back.
So although I was apathetic before, I’m now really happy to be back in Middle-Earth and I’m looking forward to travelling more with Thorin Oakenshield’s company! 🙂
Our Giveaway is almost at an end! Don’t forget to click and enter the LEGEND UNLEASHED GIVEAWAY! It ends on the 22nd!
Check out this great interview that we did with our twitter buddy, James T Kelly. We answer all the questions you could ever have been wondering about us (or not, perhaps you want to know our favourite food or colour or the shampoo we use to wash our hair…we don’t answer that, it would have been slightly creepy….sorry…. but just comment and we will tell you!! 😛 )
You may not know this, but it is a truth, universally acknowledged, that we are fan-girls of the highest order! We search high and low for the ‘squee’; which can be defined as
“The battle-cry of a rabid fan-girl” or more specifically; “To express joy of something”. It’s a happy fuzzy feeling 🙂
The thing that makes us ‘squee’ the most are little relationship moments in stories 🙂
We love, well… love!
For us, love is key to young adult (YA) and urban fantasy (UF) stories. The development of characters and their relationships, a string of moments, is what makes our hearts soar as readers.
When it came to writingLegend Unleashed, we took what we had learned and tried our hardest to develop character relationships that would make our fan-girl selves happy!
Relationship moments are magnificent really; in reality and fiction! They can make you sigh with happiness, recoil in fear or sob with disappointment. And they are the wonderful, glittery glue that sticks a YA story together.
We wanted to share some of our favourite ‘book relationship’ moments!
1.) Power; the men usually have too much of it (physically, magically or intellectually)! They’re dangerous. But their great power comes at a price; fear. If the girl is afraid, it unsettles the men. We realise they would never hurt her but the fact that the girl believes they could, upsets the men! 🙂
The Awakening: Book 2 in The Darkest Power Trilogy by Kelley Armstrong
A favourite example of ours comes from Kelley Armstrong’s YA series, The Darkest Powers. The werewolf character, Derek, saves the girl, Chloe, when she is attacked by several knife-wielding youths. His display of strength is so intense that it leaves Chloe afraid of him. He is left mumbling that she must know he would never hurt her. It matters that she shouldn’t be afraid of him.
2.) Jealousy; there is always a rival for the girl’s attention. And there is no reason for the men to be jealous, unless they care for the girl! That’s how we know 🙂
Cybeles Secret by Juliet Marillier
This can be wonderfully seen in Juliet Marillier’s YA book, Cybele’s Secret. Got to say we really love Wildwood Dancing and Cybele’s Secret (two really lovely books).
Set in Istanbul (which is a very exotic location for a story, really adds atmosphere); there are two men vying for Paula’s hand; Stoyan, the warrior and Duarte, the dashing, intelligent, pirate. Stoyan is jealous of Duarte’s ability to arouse Paula’s passion for reading and learning, to talk to her about the things she loves most. Stoyan, by comparison, cannot read or write. It causes him to become easily embarrassed, frustrated and angry.
3.) Tenderness; even when spurned the men can show great kindness to the girl that makes us all swoon. Who better to inspire, than Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Mr Darcy is surely the best literary man!
Even when Elizabeth Bennet has completely rejected him (and basically told him off, in a great, and terrible, way… we often wonder, could we have said no to Mr Darcy in the first place? Miss Bennet you are a stronger woman than Latimer or Ridley!!); Mr Darcy does everything in his power to make sure Mr Wickham marries Lydia Bennet (saving the Bennet family honour). His love for Elizabeth makes him compassionate (and we realise how much he cares for her!).
4.) Urgency; as the relationship hits its highest points, there is a sense of urgency. Some terrible thing has happen to the characters and there is a struggle, which might endanger the girl.
The Realms of the Gods, Book 4 in The Immortals Series by Tamora Pierce
This is beautifully shown in Tamora Pierce’s YA series, The Immortals Series, after Numair and Daine are torn apart from each other by magical stone monsters. When Numair fights his way back to the cliff edge, where they were separated, he is completely inconsolable. He destroys everything in his path to get to her.
It’s the moments that make the story – they are wonderful to read and create! We hope you can find favourite moments in Legend Unleashed too and that it makes your inner (or outer!) fan-girl or boy smile!
If you have any favourite moments let us know!! The hunt for magical moments is never-ending for a fan-girl :)!!
Don’t forget to click and enter the LEGEND UNLEASHED GIVEAWAY, It’s still on! Ends a few days before Christmas!
When an infamous criminal is unleashed from his prison, it has consequences for everyone in Carwick. Temperance Levinthal in particular…
Carwicky 