LET'S PARTY!

Welcome to my party for the release of my latest book, CARRY ME HOME! The book went on sale yesterday. I like to party so we're celebrating ALL WEEK! Below you'll find the links to all the places I'll be celebrating this week and what prizes I'll be sharing with lucky commenters! There will be a prize for each day!

Monday, June 3rd- We're celebrating here AND on the Decadent Tease blog. Come join me there for a quick and fun Q & A!

Tuesday, June 4th- We'll be right here for a special visit from one of my favorite characters. She'll give us the scoop on CARRY ME HOME from her perspective.

Wednesday, June 5th- We'll be right here, where I'll share an excerpt, some reviews, and my own feelings about release day. Ooooh, AND I'll be on the Daily Dose of Decadence blog talking about the main challenges my hero and heroine face. 

Thursday, June 6th- We'll be on the Get Lost in a Story blog, where I'll share the song that influenced and ultimately made me finish the story.

Friday, June 7th- We'll be back on the Get Lost in a Story blog, where I'll let you know what's happening next with me and the folks in my fictional Highland village. Oooh! I'll ALSO be on Elizabeth Morgan's blog for 20 questions! AND I'll be posting on Laurey Buckland's blog too!

Now make sure to visit several (or all!) of these places because one person will win a prize each day out of all the comments for that day. So the more comments you leave each day the more chances you have to win a prize that day! PLUS....if you tweet about the party and include me (@AlexaBourne) and #CMHReleaseParty, you'll gain even MORE chances to win! All of the prize winners will be announced on here on Saturday, June 8th. Some of the prizes you can win for commenting and tweeting are copies of my books, Amazon gift cards, books (by other people), and a few other British treats!

Come visit!

 

Today I'm hanging out with my friend Vivien Jackson at her blog. She's asked some questions about my latest release, Fractured Paradise, and even offered her review! Come on by!

Release Party Day 5- What's Next For Lexi?

First, thanks so much for celebrating all week with me. You've made my release so much more fun, and your presence means a lot. But, the party must end and I've got to get back to work.

At the moment, I'm busy writing a short story. Later in November, I plan to draft my next Honor Guard book. Also, I'm waiting to hear the official word so I can share some exciting news I've had to sit on for a while.

 BUT.....

In just a few weeks, you can meet another IPN Honor Guard. Well, Colin Munro wants to be an operative of International Protective Network, but one woman may get in the way.

Here's the unofficial blurb for Simple Treasures:

Take-charge bodyguard, Colin Munro believes working for the International Protective Network will be the perfect occupation for him. Unfortunately, his trial assignment is protecting a woman who has no intention of blindly following orders. Aye, he’ll bring the bonnie lass in line because there’s no way he’ll allow her to ruin his chance of securing his dream job.
 
Physically and emotionally scarred during her stint as a US soldier, Joanna Grainger wants nothing more than to enjoy life. New Year's Eve in Edinburgh marks the beginning of her transformation. But when she witnesses a crime no one believes occurred, her plans come to a screeching halt. To make matters worse, her sexy but headstrong bodyguard has no compassion for her or the victim.

As danger hunts them during one of the busiest time of the year, Joanna must convince Colin she's a worthy partner. But first, can she convince herself?

 

Want an unofficial peek? Shhhh. Don't tell, but here's the opening of Simple Treasures, which will be coming to you soon!

CHAPTER ONE

Colin Munro didn’t know which knife to worry about more, the one pointed at his throat or the one at his crotch.

“You’ve got ten seconds to tell me who the hell you are, or I start slicing,” the woman threatened.

He glanced into her stormy dark eyes. Joanna Grainger. The lass he’d been sent to keep safe.

Aye, but who would protect him?

“Take care where you move those blades.” Of course, he wasn’t terribly worried. If he needed to, he could easily disarm her. She stood about five-foot-six without the high heels she’d been wearing when she first entered her flat.

“I’m the one giving orders here.” The steel at his neck pushed a bit closer to his Adam’s apple.

“I don’t think so.” Colin smacked her arms at the same moment, snatched the blades from her fingers with one hand, and pushed her back to the wall. The picture frame close to her head shook, but he hadn’t shoved with nearly as much force as he could have. He pinned both her wrists to the wall above her head. “I’m Colin Munro, and I’m here to protect you.”

“I don’t remember asking anyone for help.” She brought her knee up for a perfect shot to his groin, but he shifted in time to get his family jewels out of the way.

“You didn’t, but Heather Winchester did.” He imagined she could be quite bonnie when she wasn’t scowling or threatening him.

The name of her university mate drew her big, brown eyes wide for a moment. “Heather?” She dropped her leg, leaving her navy skirt sitting crooked on her slim hips.

“Aye. Heather called Russell MacLeod of the International Protective Network this morning, explained you’d witnessed a crime, and she was worried about you. She thought you might need protection. They gave the job to me.”

She narrowed her gaze on him. “Why should I believe you?”

“Because if I were here to kill you, you’d already be dead.” Taking a step back, he tossed the blades to the coffee table. The sound of the metal scattering across the wood charged into the silence of the room. Her back, he noticed, stayed against the wall.

So what do you think? I have to admit, I didn't really love Colin at first, but he totally grew on me as I wrote the story! Be sure to keep in touch with me because I'll be doing another party when this story comes out as well.

Remember to leave your comments to be in the running for the last day of PRIZES AND the grand prize, which will both be announced tomorrow!

THANK YOU!!!


 

Release Party Day 4- What Did You Say????

Welcome back to the 2nd half of my Sunderland Dialect Game for the Fractured Paradise Release Party! Did you get a chance to play this morning? If so, have you checked the answers?

The directions are the same as before. I've given you words or phrases from my Sunderland relatives as they speak them. Your job is to "translate" them to American English. You can translate as many or as few as you wish. Just leave your guesses in the comments section. I'll give you the answers around midnight!
THANKS FOR PLAYING!

11. "Wee said that, like?"
WHO SAID THAT?

12. "Where yae gawn tee?"
WHERE ARE YOU GOING?

13. carnt- In American English, this word has an apostrophe in it and fewer letters
CAN'T

14. hinny- My grandfather often called my grandmother this.
SWEETHEART/LOVE/A TERM OF ENDEARMENT

15. canny lass- Girls, we'd all be happy with this description of us.
GOOD LASS

(This is Penshaw Monument, Sunderland)

16. chatties- A food I LOVE
POTATOES

17. "Shut your gob."
SHUT YOUR MOUTH

18. bullets- Most of the time you can't get these out of a little kid's hand.
SWEETS/HARD CANDY

19. lugholes- We all, men, women and children, have two of them.
EARS

20. claes- Most of us wouldn't be caught dead out in public without them.
CLOTHES

Okay, there you go! I look forward to your translations!

Remember to leave comments on any posts this week! Saturday I'll be choosing the winner from all the comments from the week. And tonight I'll choose today's winner from everyone who plays the game!

Release Party Day 4-What Did You Say????

Good morning! Welcome to Day 4 of my Fractured Paradise release party! Today, we're going to play a game using the dialect of my Sunderland relatives (past and present). I don't really use these words much in my stories, but I often hear this dialect in my head as I'm writing.

Okay! Are you ready?

DIRECTIONS: I'm going to give you a set of words this morning and then another this afternoon and it's your job to try to figure out what each one means. You can make a guess about as many of them as you wish. For this morning's words, I'll give you the answers around noon. For the afternoon's words, I'll leave the answers up after midnight!

So for example, if I were playing and writing answers:

1. "She could talk the head off a wooden donkey."
In the comments section, I would put
1. Someone who talks too much.
2. (Whatever you think it means)
And if I skipped 3 & 4
5. (Whatever you think it means)


THANKS TO AL WHO PLAYED THIS MORNING. I ENJOYED READING YOUR COMMENTS! HERE ARE THE ANSWERS:

1. "Me mam nicked me sweets."
MY MOM TOOK MY CANDY.

2. deed- None of us want to be this anytime soon!
DEAD

3. "Watch how you go."
BE CAREFUL/WATCH YOURSELF/TAKE CARE

(This is Roker Pier Lighthouse, Sunderland)

 

4. "I'm gannin yem."
I'M GOING HOME.

5. "Why aye, man!"
OF COURSE!

6. pet- And I don't mean the furry creatures we have as part of our families.
IT'S A TERM OF ENDEARMENT. MY ENGLISH AUNTS ALL CALLED ME THIS.

7. ower- A direction (a preposition)
OVER

8. lang- An amount of time.
LONG

All right, participants. Good luck!

Remember to leave your guesses (and comments for other days) to be in the running for the PRIZES!

Release Party Day 3- What Is The IPN?

 

And we're back for more partying! Fractured Paradise is the 2nd book that discusses the International Protective Network, or IPN. Because this fictional organization is so important to me and my Honor Guard stories, I thought I'd share a bit about it. 

(Released March, 2012)                                                       

 



HOW IT CAME ABOUT

I've always been interested in reading books and seeing TV shows and movies that deal with justice organizations such as the FBI, CIA, soldiers, police, detectives. I wrote a few stories before with characters in each of these organizations, but getting the details right is difficult if all you have to go on is Hollywood. So, when I had the opportunity to write for Decadent Publishing, I decided to create my own business.

 

Creating my own business has been very interesting. Coming up with the name and what they did wasn't too difficult, but when I started having to figure out where its headquarters were and the company's background....wow! It suddenly became just like creating a "real" business. I had to know who opened the company and why. I had to know who worked in the technical side of the business and who they helped. I had to figure out what the lobby looked like and what hours the head office was open. At times, it's still overwhelming, but for the most part it's exciting because it's all from my own head!

 

 

THE ORGANIZATION

The International Protective Network is a world-wide organization of bodyguards. When other legal agencies can't guarantee a person's safety, the IPN can get the job done. The headquarters are located
in Edinburgh, Scotland. A Scottish couple, Russell and Mary MacLeod, started the agency after their youngest daughter testified against a criminal even after she was threatened. The police couldn't protect her and the criminal's friends eventually found and killed her. Russell, Mary and their remaining children opened the IPN soon after.

The IPN protects everyone from foreign dignitaries, to politicians, to Hollywood celebrities and even ordinary folks who can't get help anywhere else. They operate officially within the law, as true bodyguards, but they also have a more clandestine branch for more difficult and dangerous jobs. The men and women hired by the IPN come from all walks of life. At the moment, the company is still fairly new. So they only have offices in Edinburgh and Boston. But the agents will go wherever they're needed because in the end, justice must win.

 

THE IPN OPERATIVE OF FRACTURED PARADISE

In Fractured Paradise, the IPN operative is Rachel. She is a senior technical analyst. She's been known to get information on just about anyone and honestly, no one asks how she gets it. She worked for a computer company in the States until Russell and Mary MacLeod contacted her and asked her to join their company. Knowing exactly what it was like to feel all alone, as many of the IPN clients feel, Rachel accepted the job offer in hopes of helping people fight for justice. She moved to Edinburgh the week after her online interview.

 

Although Rachel's on vacation in this book, her IPN skills come in handy when someone tries to scare her away from her grandmother's cottage. Too, she calls her best IPN friend for advice.

 

AND NEXT....

I'm already hard at work planning 3 new IPN stories for next year (one in Scotland, one in Thailand and one in Mexico)! Plus, you've got Simple Treasures coming out next month with a Scotsman who hopes to join the ranks of IPN operatives.



Remember to comment on any of the posts this week to be in the running for the PRIZES!

Release Party Day 3-Fun Facts

Good morning! Welcome to DAY 3 of the Fractured Paradise release party. This morning I'm sharing FUN FACTS about me, the characters and the making of Fractured Paradise. Some of the facts you may already know. Hopefully some will be new to you as well.

Ready? Here we go!

About Alexa:
*I'm a HUGE sports fan. I grew up watching my brother play baseball, watching football with my father and keeping score for my high school basketball team. I'm a die-hard Boston Red Sox and New England Patriots fan, and the family all loved Rocky. BUT if I could only watch one sport for the rest of my life it would be soccer. (Of course my favorite soccer teams are English. Liverpool, Chelsea and Sunderland!)

*I would pack up and move anywhere in Great Britain without a second thought if I had some way to support myself. (Anybody got any ideas???)

*I have a REALLY bad habit of writing a story and then thinking of connecting stories for all the secondary characters. Yes, it means I'll always have stories to write, but I don't mean just one or two secondary characters here and there. I mean ALL.


About Rachel Grant, the heroine:
*Rachel got picked on as a kid. A teacher in her grade school took her under her wing and introduced her to the "beautiful world" of computers. Rachel stayed in touch with that teacher, but by the time she was in middle school she was a well-known hacker.

*Rachel was approached by Interpol, the FBI and the CIA for her computer skills before she took the job at the International Protective Network.

*Rachel gets annoyed when people doubt her technical abilities and she's not above hacking into someone's personal accounts to prove it!

*Rachel was "dumped on" her grandparents as a child while her mother traveled with Rachel's beauty pageant contestant sister, Vicki.

About Aidan Camden, the hero:
*I tried to make Aidan a Scotsman, with the story set in Edinburgh, but Aidan wouldn't hear of it. He's a Sunderland lad through and through.

*Aidan wanted to work in a big city and so he went to London, where he worked several jobs in tourism before landing a gig as a tour guide.

*Aidan always had big dreams and always felt living in Sunderland was holding him back. He left at 18.


Miscellaneous Facts:
*All of the secondary characters in this story have the names of my young relatives in Sunderland.

*Although she's only on the phone, Rachel also makes an appearance in my December Honor Guard story, Simple Treasures.

*Gemma Barnes works in the hotel Rachel uses and becomes an instant friend.

*Adam McAndrew, a secondary character here, affected me so much I'm pretty sure I'll be writing his story one of these days.

*At one point, Rachel contacts her best IPN friend, Ian MacKenzie. Ian made his first appearance in Her Highland Champion.



So, what did you already know and what did you learn? What surprised or intrigued you most?

Stay tuned to the party, folks! Remember to comment to be in the running for PRIZES and this afternoon I'll be sharing the deets on my fictional company that each of my Honor Guard stories includes.

Release Party Day 1- The Story Behind The Story

Welcome back to Day 1 of my week-long release party for Fractured Paradise! This afternoon I'm sharing with you the story behind the story. Here, you'll find out how this book came into being, why I wanted to write it, and why I chose the dedication I did. 

Fractured Paradise started out as a way for me to get over my British grandmother's death back in 2003. She had been sick for quite a while and I'd said my final goodbye, but I was not with her when she died. At the time, I needed comfort and turning to my happy place (the UK), I was able to get through my emotions as I wrote the book. The story has Rachel's grandmother in it, so I was able to honor my grandmother as well.

As a granddaughter, I managed to get through my grief by doing the physical writing and working through my emotions in the story. As a writer, I revised the manuscript, which started out as a 250-page contemporary romance (no suspense), and submitted it to contests (in which it finaled and won a couple) and a lovely editor rejected it but gave me some great feedback. I then put it aside for a few years and wrote other contemporary and romantic suspense stories. It was last year, when I signed my first contract with Decadent Publishing, that I started to think about revising Fractured Paradise for the Honor Guard line. I cut it down, added in a suspense element (and an International Protective Network employee) and submitted it earlier this year. In my mind, the book had become a way for me to honor not only my grandmother, but also my British heritage in general. When it came time to write the dedication for the book, choosing my grandparents was not even a question.

You see, I spent a lot of time with my grandmother as I grew up. Because she worked in a school, she had the same vacations as me so she babysat quite a bit. Sometimes she came to our house and sometimes I went to her house. My grandfather worked a lot so I only saw him at night and on the weekends. But I remember very vividly sitting on their living room floor while music played, with my notebook in my lap and a pen in my hands. My grandfather would come in from work and ask, "Are you not done with that book yet?" (My usual response was, "No, I started a new one!") I always remember them being supportive of my fanciful career plans. They were both very proud of me and my push to get published, to see my dream come true. Sadly, my grandfather died in 2009 and so he wasn't around for my first book to come out either, but I hope I've honored them both in my attempt to bring all that I love about Britain, and especially Sunderland, to readers everywhere. 

For Mary L. Martin (1922-2003)

And Jimmie Martin (1919-2009)

Nan and Granda, I did it!

Okay, remember to leave comments on the blog ALL week long for your chance to win prizes, including a FREE copy of Fractured Paradise! I'll choose today's winner after midnight!