The Persecution of the Wolves – Lucy Felthouse

Out Now – The Persecution of the Wolves by Lucy Felthouse (@cw1985) #PNR #thriller #shifter

Blurb:

Werewolf brothers Matthew and Isaac have lived in the peaceful village of Eyam, Derbyshire all their lives. The villagers know what happens every full moon, and have their reasons for keeping quiet. But this secrecy comes at a cost—the brothers can’t risk romantic entanglements.

Then, at the full moon, a sheep is slaughtered on Eyam Moor, by what could only be a large animal. Even the brothers’ staunchest supporters begin to have their doubts about who—or what—could have done it.

As the brothers fight to clear their names, things are complicated by unexpected opportunities to indulge their lust. Isaac is intrigued by a handsome newcomer to the village, and a vivacious visitor is happy to offer Matthew her all.

Can the men prove their innocence, or is their centuries-old secret about to be revealed to the outside world, bringing their carefully-crafted existence crashing down around their ears?

PLEASE NOTE: This book was previously published as Pack of Lies—the content has not changed. The novel also contains both M/F and M/M scenes.

Buy links: http://lucyfelthouse.co.uk/published-works/the-persecution-of-the-wolves/

Excerpt:

As Matthew and Isaac Adams opened the front door to their house, the telephone started ringing. Matthew sighed. “Typical. No rest for the wicked. I’ll answer it, you go and get ready for work.”

Isaac nodded and headed off to do as his brother advised. Matthew, the older of the two, walked toward the ringing phone and snatched it off the hook. Then, remembering that the person on the other end of the line would have no idea what a rough night he’d just had, he made the effort to inject some politeness into his tone.

“Hello? Adams residence.” Isaac had told him time and time again that the last part about the residence was old-fashioned, that people didn’t say that anymore, but Matthew couldn’t seem to shake it.

“Hello, Matthew? It’s Richard.” The village vicar’s voice, even though he’d only spoken four words, sounded strained, almost panicked. “You boys just get back?”

“Yeah, a moment ago. Why, what’s up?”

“I, uh… I got a call. A dead sheep has been found up on the moor. Not just dead. Mutilated. Like a wild animal attack.”

An unpleasant feeling wormed its way under Matthew’s skin and his stomach flipped. “Oh?” He paused, then figured he had nothing to gain by not saying the next words he wanted to. “You don’t think it was us?”

The vicar’s gasp was instant, one of genuine surprise. “Lord, no! Absolutely not. I just phoned to let you know and I was wondering if you’d come up there with me and take a look? You and Isaac are probably more qualified than anyone else in the village to tell what did this.”

“Isaac has to work, he just went to get ready. But yes, I’ll come up. I’ll let my brother know where I’m going, then I’ll be straight over. Are you at the rectory?”

“Yes. Okay, I’ll see you soon. Thanks, Matthew. Bye.”

“Goodbye.”

Matthew hung up the phone with another sigh. The horrible feeling that had crept under his skin and taken over his gut seemed as if it was there to stay, and it was never a good sign. The vicar’s news was surprising, yes, but he also had an inkling that it was going to spell trouble, or at the very least, inconvenience for him and his brother.

Pulling in a deep breath in an attempt to calm his jangling nerves, Matthew walked upstairs and toward his brother’s bedroom. The door was closed. He knocked. “You decent?”

“Yeah,” Isaac replied, “close enough.”

Stepping into the room, Matthew looked at his brother. He was half-dressed, ready for his shift at the doctor’s surgery, where he was a general practitioner. “Sorry to interrupt, mate, but that was Richard on the phone. They’ve found a mutilated sheep up on the moor, and he’s asked me to go with him to check it out.”

Isaac paused with one arm pushed into his shirtsleeve. “He doesn’t think—”

Matthew cut him off. “No. He was quite adamant about that. He just thought we’d be able to help figure out what did it. I explained that you’ve got to go to work, though. I’m going to head across there now and go up with him.”

“I could phone in, let them know I’ll be late.”

Matthew held up his hand. “There’s no need, brother. Relax. Just go to work and help the sick people. I’ll let you know what—if anything—I find out.”

Opening his mouth, then closing it again, Isaac seemed to have thought better of whatever he was going to say. He continued to dress. “All right, I will. But make sure you let me know what happens. Send me a text or something, and I’ll phone you as soon as I have a gap in between patients.”

Matthew grimaced. He hated texting. Hated mobile phones, actually. Technology was one of the things he disliked most about modern-day life, though he realized it was a necessary evil. It solved as many problems for him and his brother as it created, so he dealt with it as best he could. Fortunately, Isaac had always had an affinity with computers and phones, so he tutored Matthew.

“Yeah, all right. I’d better go and find my phone first then, eh?”

Smirking at his brother’s rolled eyes, he left the room and headed for his own bedroom, where he thought he’d left the device the previous night before he and Isaac had headed for the caves. Immediately spotting the mobile phone—which Isaac often made a point of telling him was akin to a brick—he grabbed it, stuffed it into his pocket, and made his way downstairs.

Retrieving his keys from the hook by the front door, he called up to his brother. “I’m going now, Isaac. I’ll see you after my shift at the pub. I’m working until closing time.”

“Okay. Don’t forget to keep me posted!”

“I won’t.” As if he could forget. The dead sheep was going to be a big thing, he just knew it. The vicar might not think he and his brother had anything to do with it, but some of the other villagers might. When there was no proof either way, just his and Isaac’s word, it was understandable, really. Since he and his brother changed into wolves every full moon, it was a natural conclusion to draw. Particularly since normal wolves had been extinct in England for over five hundred years.

*****

Author Bio:

Lucy Felthouse is the award-winning author of erotic romance novels Stately Pleasures (named in the top 5 of Cliterati.co.uk’s 100 Modern Erotic Classics That You’ve Never Heard Of, and an Amazon bestseller) and Eyes Wide Open (winner of the Love Romances Café’s Best Ménage Book 2015 award, and an Amazon bestseller). Including novels, short stories and novellas, she has over 140 publications to her name. She owns Erotica For All, and is one eighth of The Brit Babes. Find out more about her writing at http://lucyfelthouse.co.uk, or on Twitter and Facebook. You can also subscribe to her monthly newsletter at: http://eepurl.com/gMQb9

Author Interview Number Forty-Six – Adriano Bulla

Welcome to Adriano Bulla.

Please tell us a little about your writing – for example genre, title, etc. I published my first book back in 2005, a collection of poetry, Ybo’ and Other Lies, which has been re-published recently. I never really thought I would write a novel, but it so happened that I did, so, The Road to London came along. I find it hard to define The Road to London in terms of genre, if anything, I find the very idea of genre rather restrictive: she (yes, she is a  lady) is partly romance, partly fiction, partly a coming-of-age novel, partly a supernatural novel, partly psychological partly erotic. When I say supernatural, I do not mean there are werewolves or vampires, she is about the supernatural that is in every one of us.

Where do you find inspiration? I would not say that I ‘find’ inspiration; I’d rather say that inspiration finds me. I am not one of those writers on the lookout for something to trigger my ‘creative juices’, on the contrary. I may sound deranged, but I fully believe that the Muses exist, and they float amongst us waiting for the right time to strike us: I do not feel I have any control on the birth of a novel or a poem; I feel the words coming to me and, yes, using my experience as a person, as a reader and as a writer to work for them and put them down in writing, but I am not part of the ‘decision process’. I believe the Muse chooses whom she thinks is most suitable for what she needs and then, if I have been picked, there is a strange, compelling feeling that I have to write. I do not know what exactly I am writing until it has come to life; I do not set out to plan and devise characters and plot, nor do I say to myself, ‘I shall be writing a novel about…’ None of this. I regard myself not as a writer, but as a ‘scribe’.

Do you have a favourite character? If so why? If I had to choose one, it would have to be the one readers call ‘the Boy’ in The Road to London: he is the protagonist, and has no name. Why? To start with, the whole story is his story, and he is a very troubled boy indeed: most of the story is about him fighting against himself and the world. I think it’s hard in life to come to terms with who you really are, especially if you are regarded as ‘different’ whatever that means: adolescence in particular is such a troubled time in life! It becomes worse if you don’t fit in, you start wondering what is wrong with you, you fall into self-denial, and that is a downward spiral that can have very sad consequences, and leave scars that are not easy to heal, or maybe will never heal. I think many of us have pretended to be what others wanted us to be, well, imagine if the whole world as you know it didn’t want you to be who you really are. In the case of the Boy, he starts lying, first to others, then to himself; he then finds an alternative to his life in his dreams, then in drugs… I have been asked if the Boy is based upon myself, and the answer is easy: no, and yes. I think he is based on everyone who has found that there is no place for him/her in the world s/he lives in, and I simply happen to be one of them. Being an outsider, even in your closest circle of friends is not a nice position to be in. Yet, thinking back, maybe everybody is an outsider.

Do you have a character you dislike? If so why? No, I don’t dislike any characters; none of the characters are perfect, some can be quite cruel, including My Dear, the Boy’s great love (who may exist, or simply be in the Boy’s mind), but I could not dislike a character. On the contrary, having characters whom we don’t understand straight away puts us in the position of trying to understand them. Oddly enough, even if the story is mainly narrated from the point of view of the Boy, his story should not be seen as a judgement on how cruel the other characters have been to him, even those who bully him and beat him up, but an example of how people do things, sometimes things that are wrong, because they do not understand you. There is certainly something amiss in the world, but we cannot blame this on others. And I am guilty of it myself.

Have you ever used a person you don’t/didn’t like as a character then killed them off? No, I haven’t, but if I can twist your question, one of the sweetest characters in The Road to London does die, not because I killed him off, as, not at all, I said, I have little authority on what goes on in my novel. Actually, I cried when he died. But his death brings life. I think it’s sort of easy to ‘kill off’ characters because they are inconvenient or because one does not like them. It’s much harder to see a dear character, in this case maybe the only one with no faults, die, and die in a very tragic way. I won’t say his name, of course. What I can say is that this character is very close to who I, as a person, would like to be.

Research can be important in world-building, how much do you need to do for your books? Do you enjoy this aspect of creating a novel and what are your favourite resources? Not much. I mean I do have a rather extensive vocabulary, so, I don’t need to look words up. Having said this, I have looked up names of particular shades of colours: colours are very important in The Road to London, they have symbolic meanings and in a recent article on the novel in Lit Art Magazine it is suggested that you can read the novel like watching the process of painting a white canvas and adding more and more colours, in the same way as we add traits to our personality as we grow up. In fact, she starts colourless and ends with an explosion of colours. So, because each chapter focuses on a few (usually two) colours, I wanted to be as detailed as possible. My favourite source? The Insomniac’s Dictionary.

Is there a message conveyed within your writing?  Do you feel this is important in a book? Of course there is. I am not going to say what the message is, that would defeat the object, and readers have been discussing it at length, but there is – actually, there are messages, I would venture to say quite deep messages in The Road to London. Whether we choose to write or are coerced, as in my case, books need to have a message: it’s an imperative for me. I would feel I am a cheat if I just wrote to narrate an interesting story, at least this is where I stand. The whole purpose of writing a novel is to share something we feel strongly about, the entertainment, the pleasure etc come as a means to an end, I would disagree with Wilde on this, and I think, in practice, Wilde disagreed with himself (there is a very deep message in The Picture of Dorian Gray for example). It is mainly presenting the messages as a journey of self-discovery on behalf of the reader that requires artistry and even, I would say, a delicate touch, but the messages must be there at the very beginning and heart of the writing to make it meaningful.

Sort these into order of importance: Great characters; great world-building; solid plot; technically perfect. Can you explain why you chose this order? (Yes I know they all are important…) I think the most important one is mastery of writing techniques, I would not say perfection, as I believe perfection does not exist, but being technically equipped to create an effect is necessary to create a good character and to present a plot in an interesting way; without the first, the other two simply cannot be. Between character and plot, for me, it is the depth of the characters that matters most, though I do understand that some novels are plot-driven. I actually, however, believe the whole of Western Literature has made a massive mistake in taking Aristotle’s (misinterpreted) claim about the ‘supremacy of the plot’ in his Poetics as a mantra: the human soul is much, much more interesting than the accidents that Fate may throw our way, in the end, it is not the accidents themselves that make us humans, but our reactions to them.

In what formats are your books available? (E-books, print, large print audio) Are you intending to expand these and if not, what is the reason? It depends on the book, but The Road to London is available in paperback and kindle/ebook. I am not part of the decision-making process when it comes to the format, that is up to the publishers (all three of them), but I would like to see her as audio and large print one day, who knows.

Do you self-edit? If so why is that the case? Do you believe a book suffers without being professionally edited? No, I don’t self-edit; I actually write in pen (rigorously fountain-pen) and then pass my writing on to be typed. Of course, books that do not go through a professional proof-reader may have glitches, mainly typos. I think it depends on the frequency of the typos; I have found typos in novels by Dickens, published by extremely big companies, so, a few will always slip, but when they become annoying, then, well, it’s another matter. There is, however, a point to consider concerning the current situation of the publishing industry: I have read triumphant articles that the number of books sold has been soaring in the last couple of years. What these articles do not keep in mind is that most of the sales are now in kindle, and that the pie is shared by many more books, thus, even traditionally published books cannot always afford to be checked by a professional proof-reader very often.

What are your opinions about authors commenting on reviews? How important are reviews? I don’t think authors should be commenting on reviews of their own books. A review is an opinion, in the end, and once a book is published, by definition, it ‘belongs’ to the public. I suppose some reviews can literally hurt, in other cases, the author may disagree with what the reviewer says, but I believe a writer should step aside from adding interpretations to one’s own book. In the end, you can’t please everybody, and I’m sure readers know that. In my experience, I have found that readers have found angles from which to read The Road to London that I had not considered myself. I read the reviews and I am very often taken by how readers have put their own personal experiences in reading her. And who am I to say they are right or wrong? I must also say that I don’t go much by the ‘star grading system’, what matters is how different perspectives come into the reading of a book.

What are your reviews on authors reviewing other authors? I have nothing against it. As I said, a review is an opinion, so, why shouldn’t writers have an opinion? The point is that when a writer reviews a book s/he does it as a reader: it is not an ultimate verdict on the book, nor should it be read as such. As to the idea that writers may be partial, I must say that there is such thing as an honest review: what I look in a review is not, in fact, how much the reviewer has enjoyed it, and in fact, when I read reviews that simply say, ‘I loved this book,’ in as many words as possible, my reaction is to say, ‘Good for you.’ What I am looking for is information on the book, different perspectives: the better the book the more freedom it will leave to readers to read it from different angles, that is, unless it is the instructions on how to assemble a flat-pack airing cupboard, in which case it would be a disaster, so, if I see readers/ reviewers have different perspectives on the meaning of the book, you can bet that I will feel I want to join in and see what this book has to offer to me, or if I have something to offer to the book. If I see that all reviews say the same thing, then, I’m sorry, but I am no longer interested in mono-dimensional experiences.

Most authors like to read, what have you recently finished reading? Did you enjoy it? I have just finished Matryoshka by Doris Dawn and I really loved it: it is a very, very weird novel, and I love books that dare to be different, especially in conformist world such as ours. It’s a cross-over among a Platonic dialogue, a confessional novel and erotica and it mixes Physics, Mythology, Philosophy of Science and sexually, with good peppery sex in it. The take on Doris’s (here the protagonist) on sexual arousal coming from listening and talking to an intelligent person reminds me of how I am quite similar to that, and how sensuality is not in a set of muscles purchased from a gym and whatever shops sell estrogens to cover up whatever lack of confidence hides beneath it, but from someone’s personality. Very often, lack of confidence is much more sexy than confidence, at least in my opinion.

Book links, website/blog and author links:

Author’s page: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7209201.Adriano_Bulla

Book’s Webpage: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18990618-the-road-to-london

Book’s Webpage with excerpt: http://www.gay-literature.com/texts/love/adriano-bulla-road-to-london.html

Book links (1 link- it redirects readers to their Amazon website according to their country) http://myBook.to/TheRoadToLondon

Indie Block Party – Post 3 – Work in Progress.

 One of the activities suggested for the Indie Blog Party was a brief mention of our Works in Progress. As some of you may know my second novel – The Shining Citadel – was released at the end of May. I had hoped to release it before but due to personal circumstances, including the death of my mother from cancer about a year ago work on that book was delayed.

There was also the matter of changing the ending…which of course means subsequent ideas also have to change.   I am not a planner, I am a ‘pantser’ so more often than not the stories go the way they want to go. I see the beginning and the end but the middle is negotiable, this is within the over-reaching story arc which lives in my head and pokes me at inconvenient moments. Thus book 3 has been tricky. The initial idea I decided was not workable (after about 10 chapters) so I shelved it to work on at a later date in a different guise. Then I came up with this awesome idea…which isn’t… That one may become a short story but until I can work out the holes it goes to live in the “misbehaving story” folder.

So book 3 – well after much contemplating, bouncing ideas around with my sounding board I have found a way of making my original plot for book 3 work. At least I hope so. Book 3 doesn’t yet have a title and is very much a work in progress but IF all goes according to plan will follow on from the events of The Shining Citadel, in the quest for allies, knowledge and magic. Archos and Dii will not feature so prominently but they will feature, and may well have some excitement themselves during the course of the main story. The plan is to follow the adventure of the trolls, Talfor (who was an important character in book 2),  and his his sister Mirandra, who must undergo a rite-of-passage to prove her worthiness to lead her tribe. Of course the adventure is not going to be straight-forward and what they find may have profound influence on later events. The trolls have a complex culture, matrilineal in nature and this will be explored in a world which in many places male dominated.

Book 2 left a few threads untied and these will be picked up in later books, and I am planning some short stories with minor characters both new and established so they should be fun.

I am also working on a collection of short erotica stories the first of which should appear reasonably soon. So if this is to your liking look out for announcements.

Both poetry and short fantasy stories will appear in the next month or so in a couple of anthologies, one of which is a charity event to raise money for a premature baby charity and one which will be a free anthology from a collection of fantasy and sci-fi authors who publish on Smashwords. Again please look here for announcements.

I have just published the large print edition of Book 1 via createspace and book 2 will be along soon. The formatting is …rather fickle so it is taking longer than I anticipated.

https://libraryoferana.wordpress.com/the-light-beyond-the-storm-chronicles/

 

Smashwords Sale!

To celebrate deciding to become a Smashwords Affiliate member I am having a sale:) The price of my e-book is reduced by 50% until 31st July. If you wish to buy it please use voucher code LF87D.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/290716.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/290716?ref=ALB123 affiliates link.

If you buy the book and enjoy it please tell your friends and I would be very grateful for reviews.

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• Smashwords Introduces Preorder Distribution to Apple iBooks, Barnes & Noble and Kobo (smashwords.com)

Hooked By You – Clarissa Wild

This was a short  story which is a lot of fun and the naughtiness gets down and dirty pretty fast.

Feeling unloved by her man, Ethan, Chloe has a one night stand with a sexy and sweet, but rather mysterious Japanese man. Plagued by guilt she returns home but will her boyfriend forgive her? The naughty scenes are well written and playful. Some scenes of a BDSM nature.

Why the slightly low rating, there were a couple of typos, and I did find the language a little odd in places. I also prefer a little more plot but overall an enjoyable read.

Please note I received this in return for an honest review.

Buying links –

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/333924?ref=ALB123

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hooked-Erotic-Romance-Enflamed-ebook/dp/B00DTIBTG4