Wishlist Wednesday #19

Every Wednesday, Dani at Pen To Paper features Wishlist Wednesday, a meme in which you can list a book that you really want to read or keep meaning to get. These are books that you want to add to your wishlist, and believe me there are plenty!  I've decided to use Dani's feature every Wednesday :)

So what do you need to do to join in?

• Follow Pen to Paper as host of the meme.
• Pick a book from your wishlist that you are dying to get to put on your shelves.
• Do a post telling your readers about the book and why it's on your wishlist.
• Add your blog to the linky at the bottom of her post.
• Put a link back to pen to paper (http://vogue-pentopaper.blogspot.com) somewhere in your post.
• Visit the other blogs and enjoy!

So here is my book for this weeks Wishlist Wednesday:

 

 

Incarnate by Jodi Meadows

Goodreads Synopsis:

NEWSOUL
Ana is new. For thousands of years in Range, a million souls have been reincarnated over and over, keeping their memories and experiences from previous lifetimes. When Ana was born, another soul vanished, and no one knows why.

NOSOUL
Even Ana’s own mother thinks she’s a nosoul, an omen of worse things to come, and has kept her away from society. To escape her seclusion and learn whether she’ll be reincarnated, Ana travels to the city of Heart, but its citizens are suspicious and afraid of what her presence means. When dragons and sylph attack the city, is Ana to blame?

HEART
Sam believes Ana’s new soul is good and worthwhile. When he stands up for her, their relationship blooms. But can he love someone who may live only once, and will Ana’s enemies—human and creature alike—let them be together? Ana needs to uncover the mistake that gave her someone else’s life, but will her quest threaten the peace of Heart and destroy the promise of reincarnation for all?

Jodi Meadows expertly weaves soul-deep romance, fantasy, and danger into an extraordinary tale of new life.

 I really fancy reading this one, the blurb sounds really interesting and different.  I've seen this book crop up a few times on other people's blogs, I have to say it was the cover that intially drew me to this book.  It's not out until the 31st January 2012, so not long now.  I can't wait to get my hands on a copy :D

Cursed By S A Archer: Blog Tour #2 Guest post & Giveaway

This is my second stop on the Cursed blog tour, I am really excited to reveal that on this tour stop I have a guest post from S A Archer author of Cursed.  Cursed is one of the many books that’s part of the Sidhe series.

You can see my review of Cursed – which was my first stop on the tour HERE.

I’m also excited to announce that there is a giveaway!!  One lucky winner will receive ebooks of the entire Touched mini- series, yes, the entire series :D

So firstly I would like to welcome S A Archer and thank you for guest posting here at Chocolate Chunky Munkie.

New Trends in Ebooks

By S.A. Archer

Time is a premium. As much as I love reading, there just isn’t time to sit down and read a massive novel. Like a lot of folks, I have an e-reader on my phone so I don’t have to tote a fat novel around to have something to read during those odd free moments, like standing in line at the store or while waiting for a table in a restaurant. But I don’t usually have more than a few minutes, so I am nibbling away at a story only a page or two at a time. At that rate even a moderate length novel can take me months to finish, and by then I have forgotten much of the early part of the story.

Short stories and novellas are more attractive lengths for readers like me. On my phone I have two full length novels and a whole slew of short stories and novellas. Knowing I can’t hack away much at those novels, whenever I have the time to goof around on my phone I grab one of the shorter length works instead.

I’m not the only one shoehorning reading into snippets of free time. I have friends who commute on a train every day. They know they have 20 minutes. They know they can get through a short story in that time; and get all the experience of character growth, wonderful settings and description, a nicely compact plot, and have the satisfaction of completing it before they arrive. So that’s what they pick, rather than a novel that might only be getting started by the time they have to put the story away.

And when you sift through most novels, how much fluffy and filler is there? Did we need the description of the character having interpersonal relationship issues with their neighbor, when the main focus of the story is about their career as a demon fighter? I am reading for the meat of the story anyway, and skim through the neighbor chit chat looking for the good stuff. Many novels are chocked full of descriptions of meals, random chit chat, working the day job, and ordinary happenings just to pack all around the main story. Chuck all that extra stuff. I don’t have time for it and I am just wading through it to get back to the main plot. Novellas skip all that extra stuff that just dilutes the power of the story.

This is one of the reasons I write short stories and novellas. I want to get to the heart of the story. The more fluff I expel, the tighter and more intense the story becomes. Recently I received an email time stamped 2am, from a reader who told me that she woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep, and even though she wanted to read to help her drift off, she didn’t want something that was going to take forever to get into. So she skipped all the other books in her to-be-read pile and read Cursed. She loved the excitement and intensity and could not wait to see the next story.

This is the second new trend with e-books: serialized fiction. Just like we enjoy half-hour or hour long television shows each week, serialized fiction brings the story to readers in bite-sized ‘episodes’. Serialized fiction builds on previous episodes which allows for the epic story, the large scale character growth, and the sense of a larger world which goes beyond a single book. While you have that complete reading experience of the short form, you are left with the excitement and curiosity to see what will happen next. And just like you tune in week after week for your fix of your favorite shows, the next episode of your favorite stories are right there every month or so, rather than having to wait a year or more for the next novel in a traditional series to be written and go through the publishing pipeline.

With the mini-series of The Sidhe (Touched, Rise of the Unseelie, and Champion of the Sidhe) we are hitting all of the marks that make serialized novellas so awesome. You get an intense read that grabs you right from the beginning and doesn’t let you go. You get the tight character focus that makes you feel like you are living inside their skin. You get the cliffhanger that drives you to read the next book. And you don’t have to wait more than a month to get your next fix. Those are the promises we make and have been keeping so far with the first five books of The Sidhe. With a fully realized and complex story world, headstrong characters who give everything to defend their beliefs, and intense action packed into every book, The Sidhe is on the cutting edge of the new era of e-books.

- S.A. Archer

www.SidheTouch.com

 About The Author:

Urban fantasy author. Chronicler of the fey. Addicted to Sidhe magic and vampire bites. 

The Sidhe Touch blog Free The Sidhe stories. Segments posted twice a week. 

Fey Cast The story behind the story and fun stuff. 

The Sidhe Touch website Character profiles, series reading order, and other goodies.
 
Sign up for the fan club newsletter and get a free The Sidhe ebook.

So here are the giveaway details:

• There will be 1 winner - The winner will get ebook copies of all the books in the Touched mini-series

·         Open to International Followers·      

• You must fill out the rafflecopter form below to enter
• Giveaway will end January 30th 2012 

Mail Box Sunday (IMM) - Weekly Round Up #14

Hi guys!!  It’s Sunday again :D time for another Mail Box Sunday.  I’m going to share with you what goodies I’ve had through the post this week.  I had a lovely  book shopping trip with Dani @ Pen to Paper this week.  I managed to come home with 9 new books from that visit :)

In My Mailbox (IMM) is hosted by The Story Siren -what a great way to see what everyone else has had in their mailbox over the week!

 
 
What I got over the past few weeks week:

From my book shopping trip with Dani & Julie.

~ Cinder by Marissa Meyer (bought)

~ Divergent by Veronica Roth (bought)

~ Lasting Damage by Sophie Hannah (bought)

~ Rosebush by Michele Jaffe (bought)

~ No Way Out by David Kessler (given to me by Dani)

~ The Moses Legacy by Adam Palmer (given to me by Dani)

~ Liesl & Po by Lauren Oliver (bought)

~ Texas Gothic by Rosemary Clement-Moore (bought)

~ The Hollow by Jessica Verday (bought)

E-books 

~ Straight To Hell by Michelle Scott (from the author to review)

~ The Darkening Dream by Andy Gavin (from the author to review)

~ Addicted by S A Archer (from the author to review)

~ In The Shadow Of The Moonlight by J J Bidell (From the author to review)

 

What books did you get in the mail this week? Leave a comment and a link and I will have a peek :)

Friday Recommends #7

Friday Recommends is a weekly meme hosted by Dani at Pen To Paper.  This is where we list a book we would highly recommend. 

I'm quite excited about this new feature as one of the things I love is being able to share the news about a great book.  We've all been there!  After reading a fab book you want to shout out to the world how great it is.


The rules for Friday Recommends are:

• Follow Pen to Paper as host of the meme.
• Please consider adding the blog hop button to your blog somewhere, so others can find it easily and join in too! Help spread the word! The code will be at the bottom of the post under the linky.
• Pick a book that you've read, and have enjoyed enough to recommend to other readers. It can be a book you've read recently, or a book you read years ago - it's up to you - but make sure you tell us why you love the book (like a mini review). You make the post as long or as short as you like.
• Add your blog to the linky at the bottom of this post after posting your blog post.
• Put a link back to pen to paper (http://vogue-pentopaper.blogspot.com) somewhere in your post.
• Visit the other blogs and enjoy!

My choice this week is:

 

 

Fracture by Megan Miranda 

Goodreads Synopsis:

Eleven minutes passed before Delaney Maxwell was pulled from the icy waters of a Maine lake by her best friend Decker Phillips. By then her heart had stopped beating. Her brain had stopped working. She was dead. And yet she somehow defied medical precedent to come back seemingly fine

—despite the scans that showed significant brain damage. Everyone wants Delaney to be all right, but she knows she's far from normal. Pulled by strange sensations she can't control or explain, Delaney finds herself drawn to the dying. Is her altered brain now predicting death, or causing it?

Then Delaney meets Troy Varga, who recently emerged from a coma with similar abilities. At first she's reassured to find someone who understands the strangeness of her new existence, but Delaney soon discovers that Troy's motives aren't quite what she thought. Is their gift a miracle, a freak of nature-or something much more frightening?

For fans of best-sellers like Before I Fall and If I Stay, this is a fascinating and heart-rending story about love and friendship and the fine line between life and death.

 

I've recently just read this and I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed it.  So I would highly recommend this unique book. Imagine someone falling through a frozen lake and being plunged into the icy depths, but somehow even though her heart stops beating and she stops breathing Delaney somehow survives. But with this miracle comes a dark side.........  It's also interesting to see how this accident has effects on all the people around Delaney. Great characters and a great story line.   You can see my full review HERE

 

 

Wishlist Wednesday #18

Every Wednesday, Dani at Pen To Paper features Wishlist Wednesday, a meme in which you can list a book that you really want to read or keep meaning to get. These are books that you want to add to your wishlist, and believe me there are plenty!  I've decided to use Dani's feature every Wednesday :)

So what do you need to do to join in?

• Follow Pen to Paper as host of the meme.
• Pick a book from your wishlist that you are dying to get to put on your shelves.
• Do a post telling your readers about the book and why it's on your wishlist.
• Add your blog to the linky at the bottom of her post.
• Put a link back to pen to paper (http://vogue-pentopaper.blogspot.com) somewhere in your post.
• Visit the other blogs and enjoy!

So here is my book for this weeks Wishlist Wednesday:

 Aftertime by Sophie Littlefield.

Goodreads Synopsis:

Awakening in a bleak landscape as scarred as her body, Cass Dollar vaguely recalls surviving something terrible. Having no idea how many weeks have passed, she slowly realizes the horrifying truth: Ruthie has vanished.

And with her, nearly all of civilization.

Where once-lush hills carried cars and commerce, the roads today see only cannibalistic Beaters—people turned hungry for human flesh by a government experiment gone wrong.

In a broken, barren California, Cass will undergo a harrowing quest to get Ruthie back. Few people trust an outsider, let alone a woman who became a zombie and somehow turned back, but she finds help from an enigmatic outlaw, Smoke. Smoke is her savior, and her safety.

For the Beaters are out there.

And the humans grip at survival with their trigger fingers. Especially when they learn that she and Ruthie have become the most feared, and desired, of weapons in a brave new world….

 This book has suddenly been zapped on my radar because I received book three in this series (Horizon) as a review book from Netgalley. Of course I would love to read the rest of the series so I can get a true feeling for this review book.  I think it sounds a great series and I'm really into the whole post-apocalypse zombie thing now. Thank you to The Forest of Hands and Teeth and Dearly Departed for whetting my appetite for these books.  I would love to get hold of a copy of this, maybe my book shopping trip tomorrow with Dani @ Pen to Paper and another good friend will prove fruitful.  I will keep you posted!!!