I’m almost done with the pictures from my road trip. Promise! This one was too much fun not to share.

When we left Eureka Springs, Arkansas, heading for home the last day of our trip, we were barely out of town when we saw a sign for “Quigley’s Castle”—not something we’d heard of before, so naturally we had to stop! We followed a gravel road, all the while humming the theme to Deliverance.

We pulled into a small gravel lot and saw this sign. After about five minutes a very grumpy woman showed up at the gate. Again, I watch too many horror movies. I immediately saw her as a gatekeeper to a Hell Mouth, and wondered if we should worry about the fact no one knew where we were. However, I was too curious at this point and followed her anyway while she led us inside a secret garden and to a shaded area in front of the “castle”.

There we heard the story about the house, which she told in a monotone without a single expression. After she finished her little story, she told us to make our own way through the house and the gardens, and then she disappeared. I just knew she hurried off to sharpen her ax!
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Thank you to Delilah for having me as a guest on her blog today.

July 18 is the release date of my next book, Falling Hard, and I was thinking about all of the writing I’ve done this year. I realized that I really need a break!

But it’s so hard to think about going on a vacation when I still have deadlines looming over my head and the laptop is just so darn portable. On the other hand, the weather is so beautiful and where I’m from we don’t get long enough summers. My brain wants to turn off for a while, and my body wants to soak in the sunshine, lay out on the dock with the lake lapping and sparkling in front of me. I would watch kiddo splashing around and have hubby to bring me something refreshing to drink…all right, let’s not get carried away. 🙂

But you get the idea. My writing is important to me and I enjoy it very much (sometimes more than other times, depending on how the words are flowing), but I think everyone needs time to recharge every once in a while, and I not only owe it to myself, but also to my family to spend some time with them without anything else to get in the way.

This is why, although I’m writing this blog post for Delilah BEFORE my holiday, by the time it’s posted here, I’ll have returned, and I’ll be all refreshed and ready to get to work on the next book!

How is your summer coming along? What have you done to relax, or what do you plan to do? Give me some ideas for next year!

J.K. Coi is a multi-published, award winning author of contemporary and paranormal romance and urban fantasy. She makes her home in Ontario, Canada, with her husband and son and a feisty black cat who is the uncontested head of the household. While she spends her days immersed in the litigious world of insurance law, she is very happy to spend her nights writing dark and sexy characters that leap off the page and into readers’ hearts.

FALLING HARD is available from Carina Press on July 18!
Check it out: Carina Press
JK Coi’s website: https://www.jkcoi.com

After spending a very pleasant time in Des Moines (I’ll post tattoo pics another day!), we headed home again. Next destination: The Crescent Inn Hotel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. It’s one of the most haunted places in America. Ghosthunters episode #13 was filmed there.

Wierd things happened even before we arrived. The Crescent lies in the Ozark Mountains and sits on the crest of a hill. We had the address plugged into the Garmin. The GPS worked fine the whole trip, up until the point when it took us up a goat trail of a narrow, gravel road. Halfway up the rutted trail, we met a Hummer. There really was only room for the Hummer, so he had to climb a hill while we squeezed by with our wheels on the edge of the trail. It was a nail-biter staring down the long drop into the ravine.

This is the Crescent Inn Hotel. Built in the 1800’s, it’s had many lives—as a resort hotel for the rich, as a school for girls, a cancer treatment-torture facility, and again as a hotel.

This is our room and the very first picture where creepy things happened. I have a very good little Cannon camera that takes crisp, clear pictures. I took hundreds of pictures on this trip and this is the first one that’s blurred this way. But here, you can make out a shadow. Do you see the outline of a head and shoulder? As it turns out, our room has a ghost that plays outside the door. A child died from a fall and is “seen” playing and “heard” to say “It’s not fair!” when he sees people dressed comfortably because he hated his own fussy clothing.

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Where to begin?! I’ve just come off the most unproductive three months I’ve had in forever! My ability to shut out “the noise” around me has been compromised. Until this week, I seriously considered renting a cabin somewhere away from family and the Internet to get some work done. But things do change.

This week, I received acceptance for a short story I wrote entitled Drive Me Crazy for Cleis Press’s Best Erotic Romance of 2012.

I put together the After Midnight Authors Fantasies newsletter and published that.

I completed the draft of a new lesbian vampire story that will accompany a story by Paisley Smith for a two book anthology that Ellora’s Cave will publish! (Long enough sentence for you?!) I’ll be sending it to the editor today!

What else? My daughter was married in the swimming pool on a day where the weather crested 100 degrees. Most fun I’ve had in a while!

The Six-Year-Old turned seven, so she had her choice of favorite things to do that day. McDonald’s was part of the list. Bleh.

I spent a day painting a room for my grandmother’s newly converted garage suite.

And there you go—my week in a nut shell. I’m hoping things will continue to hum along this next week, writing-wise. I have a new book and a new short story to start. Do y’all have any ideas for a 1500-word lesbian short story? Yeah, I can’t come up with anything other than a coffee break in that short a space.

I’m soooooo wiped out. Too much happening on the homefront. Yesterday, it was the Red-Headed Hellion’s wedding. Today, it was painting grandma’s newly converted garage suite. I hurt all over and need a week’s sleep. So, you’re lucky I showed up to play at all. 😥

Here’s the question…

If you had to choose your own epitath of eight words
or fewer, what would it say?

I know I’m getting the photos of my trip up slowly, but my life’s crazy busy. The 6-year-old had a birthday party yesterday, so she’s no longer “the six-year-old”, and she had a list of favorite things she wanted to do: get a manicure with the girls, eat at McDonalds, and swim in the moonlight. Today, there’s the Red-Headed Hellion’s wedding to get through.

I still have pics to share, as well as some spooky happenings to relate. Wait until you see what my camera caught! But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, which I did when I posted about Powell Gardens and Joplin, Mo.

What makes a good journey?

Great travel companions who are as eager to explore as you are.

Coffee. Lots of it. We didn’t even make it out of our own home town without stopping for breakfast and getting two to-go cups to take with us!

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TAM LIN AND THE ORIGINS OF
THE SURRENDER OF LADY JANE

or “Where I Didn’t Get My Ideas From”

by Marissa Day

All things considered, traditional ballads and broadsheet songs are not a fertile source for good Romance. Seriously. If you are a hero or a heroine in, say, a Child ballad, your odds of successfully achieving the Happily Ever After are really, really small. You’re far more likely to be betrayed by your lady love over a very small misunderstanding, which will cause you to die of a broken heart (Barbara Allen). Better yet, she could kill you herself over a badly timed joke and have her servants throw you in the backyard well (Proud Lady Margaret). On the heroine’s side, you could be accidently shot because your lover turns out to have bad eyesight and you’ve got an unusually large apron (Polly Von), or the guy you thought was going to marry you could show up already married to another woman, after which she kills you, which causes him to kill her follows that up with his public suicide at the wedding feast (Fair Ellen). Alternately, you could elope with a guy who turns out to be a serial killer and have to chuck him in the ocean and then talk your parrot into not ratting you out (The Outlandish Knight).

Mothers are particularly hazardous to your Trad. Ballad couple. Your mother could leave your true love out in the cold (The Lass of Roch Royal), or you could get the double whammy where your mother curses you, and then the heroine’s mother leaves you out in the cold (The Drowned Lovers). Fathers aren’t any good either. They tend to do things like follow up the arrangement an advantageous marriage for you by trying to perform a public confirmation of your virginity, forcing you to either die of embarrassment or turn into a tree (The Arbutus). For an exciting variation, there’s the possibility that your husband will murder both your shapeshifting lover and your son (The Great Selkie of Sule Skerry), or you could just get murdered by your jealous brunette of a sister on general principles (The Twa Sisters).

Of course, this is not a problem limited to the Scottish and British ballads. Do not even get me started on the dope slap needed by all the players in the traditional Appalachian ballad “The Long, Black Veil.” I’m telling you, it is just not a grand ballroom of glamour and romance out there.

And yet, it was a traditional Ballad that furnished me with the basics for THE SURRENDER OF LADY JANE. The ballad was “Tam Lin.”
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