Dawn Bringer and Celebrating My Birthday and a Release with a Free Steampunk Novelette! (Lizzie)

 So today is supposed to be a Weekend Reads post, and this kinda is, but it's also a shameless self-promo and a birthday bash! In addition to my 37th birthday, today marks the release of Dusk Crier, the fifth and final book in my fun adventure-romance novelette- and novella-length steampunk collection, The Star Clock Chronicles. It's the release of the collection too and a $0.99 sale on my most popular book, Midnight for a Curse, a humorous fairytale retelling of Beauty and the Beast where Beast wants to keep his curse. In lieu of a party with banana pudding and homemade pizza and a hike, which was my childhood birthday hope, I'll just talk books and give away Dawn Bringer, the first book in The Star Clock Chronicles series.

I don't remember when I first heard about steampunk, but I quickly fell in love with the aesthetic of it. Gowns, corsets, airships, goggles, fancy guns. The look is so fun, so promising of adventure, that I couldn't help but write a steampunk series, and include a bit of fae trouble-making too. In the Star Clock Chronicles, we have a world where the sun has been hidden behind a fairy star veil. Stars, dawn, moonlight, all are lovely myths. No moving shadows tell you the time. No stars guide your path. Navigator automatons are the only way to travel more than three miles without a curse befuddling you. Clocks are forbidden. Iron is contraband. 

Into this tightly controlled world comes new hope when a brave airship captain and a clever teacher/smuggler find ancient books on navigation in an old fairy cave. If they can escape the cave and the Time Keepers after them, they and the friends they'll go to for help can change the world. Maybe even defeat the Time King and bring back the dawn.

With adventure, banter, and romance, these standalone short stories are delightful, quick reads, even if I do say so myself. ;) If you like steampunk or have been wanting to give if a try, I hope you'll accept a free copy of Dawn Bringer, available here. 

Dawn Bringer

In a world where the sun is a myth, dawn is coming.

Bertram Orren expected trouble with both the Time Keepers and faeries if he got caught in the faerie woods. He didn’t expect to get trapped in an abandoned faerie court deep underground while trying to save airship captain Marianna Bowditch from a will-o’-the-wisp. Nor did he expect he and Marianna to discover an ancient treasure that could help free the world from the Time King’s control, one that could bring back the people’s ability to navigate for themselves in a world where sun and moon, east and west are myths hidden by the faerie queen’s Star Veil. Even if Bertram and Marianna escape the caves, they’ve no way to navigate themselves to an airship port and safety, and if the Time Keepers find them, the world will never see the dawn.

Do you read steampunk? How do you celebrate your birthday now?

Weekend Reads: The Tethered World (Heather)

Are you ready to snuggle beside the fire with your coffee/tea/cocoa and enjoy a virtual adventure? This weekend's Weekend Reads recommendation (say that 5x fast) is close to my heart because it is my very own book baby!

Before you assume I'm self-promoting to pad the ol' bank account, let me put your mind at ease. The Tethered World ebook, the first book in my fantasy trilogy, is FREE on your favorite bookish website. Of course, if you love a 'real' book, to have and to hold, The Tethered World is also available in paperback at a not-so-free price ;) 

Since it would be a little tacky to tell you to "you'll love this book" I'll leave you with the back cover copy and a few of my favorite reviews to whet your curiosity. Of course, I do hope you'll download this clean, family-friendly fantasy and save it for one of your weekend reads, soon! And if you happen to have Kindle Unlimited, the other two books in The Tethered World Chronicles can be read for free, as well. Oh, and if you like audiobooks, I just might have some codes to LISTEN for FREE, if you email me @: heather@heatherllfitzgerald.com 

So, FREE is the buzzword here!

How to Hide a Prince and the Tales of Ever After Anthology (Lizzie)

Today's the big day! Tales of Ever After, a Fellowship of Fantasy anthology, has been released! It's available as an ebook and a print book on amazon and is available at several other stores through Books2Read. My contribution, the short story "How to Hide a Prince," is a Frog Prince retelling with a bit of a twist. It's a fun story and I'm excited to be able to share it with you. Here's a bit more about it and the anthology. Be sure to enter the blog tour giveaway through the links at the bottom of the post.

If you'd like to learn more about Tales of Ever After's authors, click the image above to go the blog tour schedule.

About my Story: How to Hide a Prince

She spends her days tossing a golden ball. Seriously? That was my reaction when I started reading the Grimm brothers' story “The Frog King.” It didn’t get better from there. There’s the mindless princess who soon becomes the selfish princess who doesn’t want to fulfill her end of the bargain with the talking frog who retrieves her golden ball from the water. Then there’s her father, the king, who hears a loud banging on the castle door and sees his daughter’s heart beating frantically and asks if there’s a giant come for her. And that fabled kiss? Not in the story. The frog is tossed against a wall. 

So the Grimm story wasn’t what I was expecting, but perhaps that’s part of the fun of fairy tales. They spark the imagination and invite us to contribute our own creations. We pull out the intriguing ideas--a prince cursed to be a frog and who must gain something from a princess, a world where a giant (or something else--like a dragon) might be at the door--and answer the challenge to create our own fairy tale. Like E.D. Baker did with her adorable story of a princess who kisses a frog and then becomes a one herself. Baker's The Frog Princess inspired Disney’s The Princess and the Frog.

So there’s the classic frog prince story where a princess meets a frog in a garden, kisses him, and the frog becomes a prince; and the Baker/Disney version where the girl kisses the frog who claims to be a prince and is turned into a frog. The frog prince story revolves around the kiss and a curse. But when considering how to make my own version, I had to ask, what if the girl is prevented from kissing the frog? What if a man appears claiming she’ll be cursed if she kisses the frog? That the frog isn’t the kind of prince she thinks he is. What if the man and a sorcerer are both after this frog? If you were a princess, who would you believe--a frog with the power to speak or a man who’d sneaked into your castle and drew a sorcerer there? That’s Princess Fiona’s dilemma in “How to Hide a Prince.” If she makes the wrong choice, more than just she and the frog will suffer. It's a bit different from a girl mindless tossing a golden ball all day, when she's not tossing frogs against walls. Hopefully, you'll enjoy this rendition and its twists and surprise ending.

Princess Fiona enjoys being a healer, but she doesn’t expect those gifts to have anything to do with the prophecy declaring she’ll save a prince. Or either to have anything to do with a frog who claims to be said prince. But now she finds herself shut away in her own castle, hiding from a sorcerer and looking after both a frog and a wounded young man who insists she’ll be cursed if she kisses the frog. Who’s she to believe?

Enjoy "How to Hide a Prince" and fifteen other fairy tales in Tales of Ever After.

Rescue a princess, meet a mermaid, win your reward. 

The authors of the Fellowship of Fantasy tackle fairy tales from once upon a time to happily ever after. Explore twists on old tales and brand new magical stories. Meet feisty mermaids, friendly lampposts, and heroes who just might be monsters themselves. 

This fourth anthology from the Fellowship of Fantasy will lead you on a quest for entertainment and storm the castle of your imagination. So make a wish and enter the deep dark woods to find stories that will make you laugh, shiver, and maybe even fall in love. 

Don’t forget to enter these great giveaways:

US ONLY
(All books are paperbacks, and possibly signed.)
a Rafflecopter giveaway

INTERNATIONAL (All books are ebooks of the winner’s file format of choice) a Rafflecopter giveaway

Also, be sure to comment on all the blog posts in the blog tour this week. The person who comments the most times will win a small collection of sneak peeks from some of the authors upcoming works.

To get you started, here are two questions you can answer for me. What's your favorite fairy tale and do you have a favorite Frog Prince retelling?