UPDATE: The winners are…Julie Andrade, Colleen C, and Debra Guyette!
*~*~*

IGNORE the “Pre-Order” message — it’s LIVE now!

Thank you, Delilah, for letting me come here today! Over a year ago, I was here whining, er, I mean, blogging about the saggy middle of my book “Tin Toy” (click here to read that blog post: https://www.delilahdevlin.com/blog/2021/08/30/ava-cuvay-flabby-middles-giveaway/).

At the time, I was struggling with the storyline and the characters… Nothing seemed to click in spite of my repeated attempts to outline a general direction for it all. I’d re-written the first five chapters half a dozen times; I’d re-outlined the story the same number of times (no small feat for someone who leans more toward pantsing than plotting).

I couldn’t pants this book. Not entirely. It’s the second book in my Silver Cyborg Series, so I couldn’t just let it wander toward an HEA for my two characters and be content. The overarching story from Book One had to continue and advance and get to a point Book Three can take it in for a goal (weak sports-reference here ;-).

Apparently, I couldn’t plot the book, either. So was mired and stagnant.

BUT, then everything finally clicked. The muse hit, the planets aligned…something happened. Honestly, I credit the savage approach I took to the story over this past summer. I shredded the thing. Mercilessly. I switched things around. I cut tens of thousands of words. I turned entire chapters into alternate POVs. I was ruthless: if it didn’t move the story or characters forward, no matter how pretty my prose, I dumped it.

The experience was a lot like a plumbing blockage, to use a crude analogy. Over a year of plugging away (plunging away) to get something moving rather than merely swirling and churning, but I now have a brand new, shiny book. Tin Toy is LIVE TODAY (tosses confetti and blows party horns)!! And I’m already a few chapters into the third book in this series, Tin Soldier. In fact, I have a prelude to Tin Soldier as an entry in Delilah’s upcoming anthology: Boys Behaving Badly: Silver Soldiers. And I’m also working on my second dragon shifter story.

Whatever blockage had my writing stuck, it’s gone, and my writing is finally flowing (and in the right direction)! I gotta admit: I’m very relieved. 😉

 Giveaway

Since I have a brand now shiny book today, I’m giving away three Kindle versions of Tin Toy to random winners that I’ll choose on Monday, December 19^th. Comment with something you struggled with that finally went right for you this past year.

I miss men. I miss the rich baritone of their voices, the sturdy brace of their chest and shoulders, the subtle salt of their skin. Men with their sardonic grins and cocked eyebrows, men with their wide smiles and bristled cheeks, their amused expressions. Their innocence in need they can’t quite acknowledge and yet it is there, written on their faces like the eager gleam in a boy’s eyes as he surveys a display of candy.

I miss the strength of men, their physical power to lift heavy slabs of firewood or slam a splitting maul into a length of oak. Men have an energy that warms me as they stride across the ground, as they wrestle an unruly tire onto the axle. Men can do things with their bodies that I cannot, and the difference thrills me.

I miss the force of their sexuality, their straightforward desire to sink into the wet depths of a woman’s body, their unbridled pleasure in fucking. I miss the heat of their soft skin, the roughness of their hands, the smoothness of muscle bunched at their shoulders and across their chests.

At 73, I don’t expect ever again to luxuriate in a man’s bed. I am bereft of the joy of lovemaking, grief-stricken that the wondrous beauty of his private anatomy will no longer be mine to admire or touch or lick. I miss the lovely sight of male buttocks, tight and round, flexing as he walks.

I miss those extended moments of mindless bliss that only a man can give me.

Men in general exert a calming influence on me, steady and solid, a familiar and reliable part of my life. Only lately have I noticed how many of those men are no longer here for me – two husbands, the plumber and electrician I counted on for years, the repairman. Even in cultivating working relationships with a new electrician, a new repairman, I miss the foundational presence of those who came before.

Much as I have sought independence and self-reliance through the years of my life, I have always recognized that men can do things I can’t. I treasure the skill and experience of men who know their trades, how to cut in a straight line with a paintbrush, how to change a light fixture, how to replace a broken pipe. I appreciate men seated in their heavy equipment, a backhoe leveling ground at my barn door, a bulldozer carving a new pond, a bucket truck where, lifted high above the ground, he cuts through massive trees limbs like butter and safely lowers them to the ground.

I miss the other half of my existence.

House of Rae

After sharing those personal thoughts with you, I will explain that this is why I read and write romance. For a time, immersed in a story, I am with a man. This is also why I conceived of a place and future time when women can go to a place and be with a man. That’s what the House of Rae series is all about.

Set in the mid-21st century when climate change has pushed world societies to unexpected extremes, the Houses of Rae stand as islands of refuge, peaceful centers of women’s pleasure. Now franchised around the world, the House becomes a staging ground for the fight between overweening patriarchy and women’s freedom, but also between progressive and reactionary forces amid food shortages, endless fire, and the joy and enlightenment gained through sexual adventuring. These four novels reveal the intimate stories of people willing to break the rules and put them back together in a style more suitable for a new age.

Come meet the men at the House of Rae.

Click on the covers to learn more about the stories!

What do you think the future will look like? We’ve had a lot of television shows and movies depicting different possible futures. The most well know would be the STAR TREK series. The series portrays humans in the future as explorers who have gone into space to see who and what is out there. The film BLADE RUNNER gives a dystopian view of the future. There are cartoon shows like FUTURAMA and THE JETSONS which give a different twist and serious programs like THE EXPANSE and ENDER’S GAME. The future is limited only to the imagination of the writer.

There are difficulties in imagining what things will be like in thirty or fifty years. In the 1985 movie, BACK TO THE FUTURE, the DeLorean travels thirty years forward in time where Doc Brown gives it a flying upgrade because all the cars thirty years in the future could fly. Well, 2015 has come and gone and we still don’t have flying cars. In 1987 my father passed away from a heart problem of a leaky valve. Last year my husband had robotic heart surgery to repair a leaky valve. We have made amazing advances in medicine in the last thirty years. What will the next thirty look like? In 1969, Apollo 11 landed on the moon using computers with less computing power than most people carry around in their pockets today, smart phones. What will the machines and computers of the future look like? Today we can buy devices for our homes that turn on and off lights, music, television and appliances. What new innovations will we have in the year 2050?

In my latest novel in the Love through Time series, A WAY BACK, my character, Jack Sinclair, is accidently sent eighty years into the future and has to deal with all the strange things he finds there while figuring out a way to get home.

I’ve had to think a lot about what the world will be like in eighty years. What changes and advancements do you think we’ll have by then?

A Way Back

Time travel only seemed like a good idea.

Like many before her, Sarah Anderson is determined to make her fortune in the Wild West. She loads up her skirts with twenty-first-century necessities, gives her fiancé a kiss, and takes the leap. Only to land in the wrong decade. She’s lucky. She finds a job. But until she can save enough pennies for the return trip, she must contend every day with the fear of discovery, slop buckets, and roving hands.

Jack Sinclair returns from yet another business trip only to learn that his fiancée has left him for another time. They are now many miles and two centuries apart. Jack is stunned. But only for a moment. He sets out to find Sarah and bring her back home. Or die trying. Jack’s only fear is that he might be too late to save the love of his life.

Buy Links
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Back-Love-Through-Time-Book-ebook/dp/B07QGQ5S4K/ref=sr_1_8?crid=1LAQO6U9NSFRZ&keywords=augustina+van+hoven&qid=1558639326&s=gateway&sprefix=Augustina
Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-way-back-augustina-van-hoven/1131176479?ean=2940156513673
ITunes: https://books.apple.com/us/book/id1459110731
Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/a-way-back-5

The other day I was watching Apollo 13. I love that movie. The signature line of the movie “Houston, we have a problem” is now a regular part of our slang vocabulary. My favorite scene in the movie is where the engineers enter a work room and place a lot of objects on the table. The lead engineer tells everyone that they need to make a square filter fit into a round filter holder using only the items on the table. The engineering and work that made our space program possible was amazing. I was a child when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. I remember sitting in the living room with my family and all of us glued to the television set. My love for space and science fiction stories dates back to that time.

As I got older I watched the STAR WARS movies and television shows like STAR TREK, BABYLON 5, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, and FARSCAPE. I love space stories and all the imagination it takes to create new worlds and non-human sentient beings. I often fantasized about traveling to different worlds and meeting their inhabitants.

In 2006, Stephen Hawking stated that humanity faces two options: either we colonize space within the next two hundred years and build residential units on other planets, or we will face the prospect of long term extinction. NASA has as its ultimate goal, space colonization. With this in mind, I have created my New Frontier series involving a group of people who are leaving earth to colonize a new world. The prequel to the series is THE LAST CHRISTMAS ON EARTH. The first book is THE SCATTERING OF SEEDS. The second book in the series is coming out in June.

Do you like to read and watch stories about space?

The Scattering of Seeds

Two worlds, one other-worldly adventure…

The handsome, Duncan McGregor believes the answers to the questions in his soul can be found by looking to those who have come before him. And just like his ancestors, he’s venturing into a new world to begin a life they could only have dreamed of—a life in outer space. And yet as he reaches this wild new frontier, he finds that his old-fashioned values are being tested by this hard-edged life.

And his first hurdle is no less than Ariel Lindstrom, the daughter of the governor, who may look like an aloof fairy princess but who acts with strength and courage. Thanks to her experiences inside the corrupt world of politics, she’s been forced to grow up fast and hard. She fears her life is about to grow more difficult if rumors of an alliance between the corporation she works for and an alien regime are true.

For them to survive, they must blend the lessons learned by experience with the freedom and bravery that lies in the hearts of an explorer. Can their two worlds come together, or will their adventures in outer space only end in disaster?

Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Scattering-Seeds-New-Frontier-Book-ebook/dp/B07BTFG5Y2/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1524717739&sr=8-3&keywords=augustina+van+hoven
Barnes and Noble
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-scattering-of-seeds-augustina-van-hoven/1128330207;jsessionid=69EB820E377D07864CBF87D654A8B165.prodny_store02-atgap11?ean=2940155573609
iBooks
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/id1366513065
Kobo
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-scattering-of-seeds

That’s what I envisioned when I first started writing my House of Rae series. Set forty years into the future, the stories dive off into a time where big changes are underway as humanity struggles to survive in a climate-changed world. But guess what! Sex is the answer.

Today, I’m sharing the first book, Salvation, for FREE with the coupon code CQ96Q at Smashwords, https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/491247. The coupon expires August 26, so don’t wait around to nab your copy.

Three people propel this intense story, two of them former lovers—Lu and Rae—who can’t get past their unhealed wounds and one of them—Josh—a young man programmed to kill.

Salvation

In the year 2056, Josh Carter sets out on his mission. The young terrorist’s assignment: destroy the Kansas City House of Rae, flagship establishment of a flourishing prostitution trade catering to women. Primary Brotherhood target? Rae Stewart herself.

In the decades since water sources began drying up, fire ravages the countryside and a mysterious ailment called Brown Death spreads its horror through the population. The nation’s strained resources have shifted away from war to focus on food, water, and healing energy centers supported by psions who channel energy from dance centers, sex houses, and meditation rooms.

Lu Hardin helped discover the healing power of sex energy and tries to protect Rae from her own worst instincts despite the failure of their long love affair. But he can’t stop her from welcoming Josh Carter who Rae hires as a pleasure partner. Lu’s gut tells him the kid is a plant.

Rae Stewart brushes off Lu’s warnings. A hardheaded business woman, she knows a good thing when she sees it. Josh Carter is just what her clients enjoy—young, virile, and angry. It’s her attention to such detail that has taken her successful franchise worldwide. Besides, she hasn’t been this excited about a man since, well, she’d rather not think about Lu.

Strict training has kept Josh pure, but he’s willing to sacrifice his virginity in order to fulfill the mission. Yet despite his revulsion as his body responds in overwhelming ways, a tiny voice starts to grow in Josh’s head questioning the mission.

Salvation takes the reader on a headlong rush through a future world not so distant from the present. Who will be saved?

About the Author

Lizzie Ashworth lives in the wilds of the Ozark Mountains with three cats, two hound dogs, and too many deer in her yard. She’s been writing her entire life and wants her readers to know how much she enjoys sharing her naughty stories.

Follow her for free erotic short works, hot photos, and the occasional rant on her blog at https://lizzieashworth.com/.

Visit Liz’s Amazon Author Page at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B00DJWDJHC for a list of all her books and blog posts.

Sign up for Liz’s free e-newsletter. Liz’s Hot News features special notices with excerpts, freebies, pre-release deals, and much more. Your address will not be shared, guaranteed! Sign up at https://eepurl.com/bHOyS9.

I’ve always loved science fiction and stories about traveling to different galaxies.  I remember the first time I saw Star Wars with all those interesting planets and the different life forms that occupied them.  I was fascinated and totally hooked.  Every time a new space show came on television I’d be planted right in front of my set to watch Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, Farscape, or Babylon 5.  Last spring I started laying the ground work for a futuristic romance series.  I had a pretty good idea of the different characters that will be in my stories; the hard part was creating the universe where they would all live.

Good world building is essential for any futuristic or paranormal story.  Every world has to have rules that govern how things work.  They can be different from the rules we have in real life, but they have to be established and in some way explained to the reader, as well as recognizable.  For example, if you have a world with magic, there has to be a limit to what it can do or what creates it, such as energy.

Populating a universe is another essential part of world building.  I had to figure out what sort of sentient beings live on the different planets?  What is their political system?  What are their religious beliefs?  Which species get along with each other and which ones don’t?  What do they eat?  What type of housing do they have?  Is it above ground or below?  In short, each civilization has to be constructed from scratch.

There is so much detail involved that creating a story bible is an absolute must.  You can never remember all the characters, creatures, places, settings, and other details necessary for the story.  It saves a lot of time to have it all written down and easily researchable.  I use excel spreadsheets for all the things I need to keep track of.

My first story in this new world was for the anthology, Pirates: A Boys Behaving Badly Anthology Book #3.  The prequel for the series is called The Last Christmas on Earth.  The first book will be out on April 24^th and it’s titled A Scattering of Seeds.

Do you like to read or watch science fiction?

The Last Christmas on Earth

What if you had to make a choice, your lifelong dream or your soul mate?
Scott Southerland has his dream job and his dream woman. What could go wrong? With his mother around, plenty. Scott’s on his guard, and his soon-to-be fiancé, Harper Castille, is, too. Scott has no interest in the other women his mother dangles in front of him, but can his relationship with Harper survive the destruction of his dream?

Amazon:https://www.amazon.com/Last-Christmas-Earth-Frontier-Book-ebook/dp/B07B9WJY1J/ref=sr_1_4?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1521404782&sr=1-4&keywords=augustina+van+hoven

Barnes & Noble:https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-last-christmas-on-earth-augustina-van-hoven/1128145828?ean=2940155037538

iTunes:https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/id1360478283

KOBO: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-last-christmas-on-earth

Augustina’s Social Media Links

https://augustinavanhoven.com
Twitter:  @augustinavhoven
FaceBook:  https://www.facebook.com/pages/Augustina-Van-Hoven-Author/336028986575129
Pinterest: Augustina Van Hoven, Author

Becoming a kickboxer with a second-degree black belt helped Susanna Rogers improve not only her martial arts skills, but also her writing skills so she can write the kick butt heroines she loves. Her first YA novel, Infiltration, is about an elite soldier from the future who travels back in time to stop a virus taking over the world. However on another level, the story is about a girl who finds first love, discovers everyone has been lying to her and then has to make her way in the world. It does sound a bit like Buffy meets The Terminator but just remember – anything Arnie can do, a girl can do better! As part of her research, Susanna visited Arnold Schwarzenegger’s birthplace in Austria (see the fabulous photo above), watched many episodes of Buffy and trained in kickboxing for many years.

Infiltration

2120: A world ravaged by a devastating virus. Those healthy enough to live in New Nation lead a sanitized, orderly life where everything is tightly guarded by a brutal government. Lives, thoughts, information and emotions are all strictly controlled. Now: Seventeen-year-old elite soldier Nicola Gray is sent back in time for an important assignment. She alone will stop the virus before it takes over the world – her mission, to gather intelligence, find the cause and stop the threat, whatever it takes. She is trained to kill. But the past is not what Nicola is expecting. Overwhelmed by an alien world, she discovers feelings she can’t handle and a world with immense personal freedom and people who care for each other. She wants to stay. She wants to live. She wants a lot of things she can’t have…

Get your copy here!

Places you can find Susanna:
Her website – www.susannarogers.com/
Facebook – www.facebook.com/Susanna-Rogers-Author-1142712475829701/
Twitter – twitter.com/SusannaRAuthor
Bookbub – www.bookbub.com/authors/susanna-rogers