Saturday Snippets: Mistaken Identity

Today's Saturday Snippet theme is mistaken identity.

My daughters look a lot alike and are often mistaken for twins. Sometimes people mistake one for the other. This annoys them, particularly the younger one. But this is nothing compared to what Sioban goes through in my mistaken identity story.

In "Carbon Copy" Siobhan is mistaken for a mass murderer. Not only is she mistakenly taken for the criminal, she finds herself on death row for crimes she didn't commit.

Blurb - Carpon Copy

When Confederation Captain Siobhan Mallory finds herself a prisoner on death row for crimes she didn't commit, she's rescued by the disreputable but very sexy Captain Jeremiah "Caid" Kincaid. But Caid is far from the proverbial white knight. His armor is very tarnished. In exchange for rescuing her from certain death and helping her to clear her name, he demands her sexual favors.


A survivor, Siobhan accepts his help and they set out on a whirlwind adventure of sex, romance, and danger that steals her breath. Soon her pirate challenges every preconceived notion she has cherished about pirates, life, and the labels placed upon people as she discovers her soul mate in a most unlikely hero.
An Excerpt From: CARBON COPY

© Copyright ASHLEY LADD, 2004.
All Rights Reserved, Ellora's Cave, Inc.

Rough, the guard chained Siobhan’s hands behind her back, clasped a metal ring around her neck, and hauled her like a dog to death’s corridor. The heavy chain clanked on the floor, biting into her neck and making it almost impossible to hold her head up. With every scrap of strength she could muster, she held it up to meet her fate head on, marching proudly past the rows of the worst deviants and slogs in the galaxy.

“What’d you do, sweet thing? Burn the muffins?” A particularly disgusting double-faced, four-legged Glitopuss taunted, coiling his long slimy tongue toward her. His genitals swelled and glistened grotesquely in the weblinthium’s pulsing glow.

She veiled her eyes, looking away. Unfortunately, the view was no better wherever her glance fell.

“Maybe the Diva Goddess stuck that perky nose up in the air at the King,” a single-breasted Pretadorn drawled. Sporting a single beady eye and three nostrils, she was as abominable as the Glitopuss.

“You take a wrong turn? The debutante ball is in the penthouse, at the top of the compound.” Startled by the svelte, human voice, her gaze sought out the owner. He appeared to be the only man on the corridor. The inmate’s amused gaze dissected each and every inch of her. He leaned against the weblinthium bars nonchalantly as if he was hanging out at the cantina. Mischief danced in the man’s jade eyes, striking against his waist-length coal-black hair. He was simultaneously the most disreputable and sexiest male she’d ever seen, so much so, he made her forget to breathe. “Don’t mind them. They never heard of manners.”

And he had? Regardless of his handsome façade, she detected no evidence of his so-called manners. “You’re on death’s corridor because you have such sterling ones?” Siobhan returned the favor, letting her gaze drink him in. Tall enough to make her look up at him, the man had to stand at least six foot four inches. Broad shoulders tapered down to a narrow waist, slim hips, and powerful legs. Mocking intelligence smoldered in his disturbing gaze. Unkempt though he was, she grudgingly admitted the man was ruggedly handsome, with sculpted cheeks, a braided beard with faded beads strung through the two braids, and a high forehead, which his unruly locks insisted on tumbling over. He was one-hundred-eighty degrees opposite her fiancé’s polished blonde figure. He wore the outfit of pirates, her sworn enemies.

“Just a little misunderstanding, sweet thing. My attorneys are working on my appeal as we speak.”

Sweet thing? Hardly. If he’d heard the rumors of her supposed crime, he wouldn’t waste a drop of charm on her. “Hope your attorneys are better than mine.” Considering her own case, it was possible, if highly unlikely, he spoke the truth. Danger seeped from his every pore, mixed in with his scallywag charm. Charming men made her internal alarms whir out of control—they couldn’t be trusted. Her father had tried to alliance her with several. Blatantly honest, she loved her straightforward Dennis. No artifice. No games. Thoroughly trustworthy, she could consign him her life. She had done so often and he had never let her down.
So where was he now?

Trying to find her, most definitely. She had been captured and arrested without due process…

The guard disabled the weblinthium force field in the cell across from the pirate, then unclasped the chain from her collar and shoved her inside. In a reverberating, mechanical voice, he said, “Better pray fast to your gods. Your execution will be at the rise of the third Balderian moon.”

Carbon Copy available at Ellora's Cave.
For more reading pleasure check out excerpts from today's other participating authors.

McKenna Jeffries
Vivian Arend
Ashley Ladd
Shelley Munro
Taige Crenshaw
Mari Carr
Shelli Stevens
Elisabeth Naughton

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Saturday Snippets: Pets

Today's Saturday Snippets theme is "pets". If you know me even a little bit, you'll know my cats and dogs are my babies. If you know me a lot, you'll know I'm a cat person from way back. Sometimes I think I'm part cat. :)

My kids swear our Husky speaks English. When he howls it does sound a lot like "Out". Maybe they're right. And my cat Bobby understands us and follows instructions as well as or better than any dog and he looks at me with such human eyes. I swear I think he understands everything we say.

In my Ellora's Cave romantica "Make-Believe Lover" the heroine Becca and her cat are sucked into another world. In the new world, Gizmo her cat, can talk. And boy does he ever talk! He won't shut up.

I love Gizmo. He tries to steal the show, but Becca and her hero Lobo put him in his place when he gets too far out of line.

Blurb:

Becca is either dreaming—or dead. She's been transported into the medieval world of her favorite adult cartoon. When her cat talks, fire-breathing dragons stalk her, and an evil king pledges his resources to see her dead, her favorite fantasy morphs into a nightmare. Worse, the hero can't wait to send her home.

Lobo is cursed. Everyone who has ever loved him has died, thus he's become a recluse. When the witch Becca and her devil cat insist on his help, he risks everything to save their separate worlds—and keep his bruised heart intact.
 
An Excerpt From: MAKE-BELIEVE LOVER

© Copyright ASHLEY LADD, 2006.
All Rights Reserved, Ellora's Cave, Inc.

They must have trudged five miles over the arduous hills when a thunderous sound startled her. A moment later, wide-winged dragons straddled by primitive warriors roared from behind a mountain.

Her hand trembling, she pointed at the sky even as she squatted down in self-defense. “Oh my God, Giz. Do you see what I see?”

The cat gulped and he covered his eyes with his paws. “If you see big flying dinosaurs, uh huh.”

When one of the gigantic winged creatures nose-dived not far distant, Gizmo threw himself to the ground, covered his head, and hissed, “Hit the deck and don’t make a sound.”

Way ahead of him, she flung herself to the rocky terrain.

A lyrical voice announced out of nowhere, “You have walked six point two miles, seven-thousand three-hundred, twenty-one steps.”

Cripes! Her bigmouth pedometer chose this moment to go off?

Yanking the lousy thing off her elastic waistband, she dashed it to the ground. “Thanks for nothing.” The least it could do was tell her how many calories she’d burned or sing a decent song, instead of that funky aerobic workout music.

One of the flying lizards picked that instant to spin and make eye contact. Baring its filthy, razor-sharp teeth, the beast swooped down from the air, swallowed her pedometer, and then plucked her from the ground.

The no-good gadget kept chirping from inside the monster’s belly, mocking her. At least, it had gotten its just rewards, having given away her location to the fiend.

Kicking and struggling with all her might, she screamed, “Gizmo!”

She clawed at her barbaric captor’s eyes. “Put me down!”

The armor-clad creep astride the dragon guffawed and clamped meaty vice-like hands around her wrists pinning them to her side. His malevolent beady-eyed gaze bore into her. “Keep this up, wench, and I’ll drop you here—from a thousand meters. Your pretty face will get all mangled.”

The dragon turned its reptilian face to leer and dipped its right wing so that she would have tumbled off if not for the brute’s slimy hold. Then it snorted a fireball in her direction that fried the bush a mere foot to her right.

She got the message that she was their guest—or their Bar-B-Q. “What do you want with me? I have no money. This is dollar-store jewelry, but it’s all yours.”

“You will inform the King whose army you are spying for.” He fingered her tousled hair and grunted. “What kingdom has blue-haired nymphs?”

Then he tugged at her psychedelic nurse’s tunic. “And what matter of outlandish garb is this? What form of material?”

Army? Kingdom? Nymph?

She glanced down at her hot pink, cotton-blend tunic that rained cats and dogs. Should she give him her employer’s name? In the war movies the prisoners offered their name, rank, and serial number. “I’m Rebecca Weiss, I’m an office manager for a pediatric clinic, and I’m not giving you my social security number and having you steal my identity.”

“Stay cool, Becca! We’ll get out of this.” Gizmo yelled from the back of another dragon as it pulled around them.

The man’s bushy uni-brow puckered. “You speak in strange riddles. You will be truthful with King Heinrich or you will be locked in the dungeon.”

Dungeons? Dragons? King Heinrich?

Make-Believe Lover is available at Ellora's Cave.

Here are several awesome excerpts from other authors participating in today's Saturday Snippets. Please check them out and have some fun. After this brutal week we need a little diversion.

McKenna Jeffries
Taige Crenshaw
Ashley Ladd
Shelley Munro
Mari Carr
Jody Wallace
Shelli Stevens
Victoria Janssen
TJ Micheals

Guest Blogger: Author Christiane France

Please welcome my friend and fellow anthology partner, Christiane France. I hope you'll ask her a lot of questions and check out all her books. Be sure to enter her contest.

1) Please tell us how you came to move from England to Canada. Please tell us if there’s a big difference in the two countries and what they are.

When my husband was demobilized from the Royal Air Force, work was hard to find in the UK. Our chances seemed better in Canada, so dh got a job here and we came over. We lived first in the Ottawa Valley, the small town of Renfrew, but once his contract was finished, we went to Montreal and lived there for ten years. Then, a work-related issue brought us to Hamilton in the Niagara Escarpment where we're only 40 miles from Niagara Falls and the US border and Buffalo.

There are, of course, many differences between the UK and Canada, but we've been here so long now, I don't think about them much any more. One thing I do recall is that I hated Canadian chips--I thought they tasted like salted paper, because, for those who're familiar with Miss Vicky's chips, that's how they were in England. Also, fruit and veggies in North America (and that's both Canada and the US) do not have the depth of flavor of their English counterparts. It apparently has something to do with dampness over there.

2) What is your normal day like? Do you have a writing routine?

Now that I'm officially retired, my days are anything but routine. I envy people who do so many pages or hours of writing per day, but that's not me. I have to make myself write and that's not always easy. So, I get up when I feel like it, have breakfast, play with my 2 kitties, check my e-mail, and then I do a little housework, or I go shopping, or some days, if I'm on a deadline, I go straight to writing. And then there are those days when I just hang out.

3) What do you do to relax when you’re not writing?

Read, knit, shop, watch TV.

4) Which do you prefer to write? Mysteries or erotic romance?

I really prefer to write mysteries, but there's not much market for them at the moment, unless you're with a NY publisher and your books are in the bookstores, so I'm happy thinking up romantic entanglements for all my imaginary characters.

5) What are you working on now?

My next erotic romance is due out in February - Double Delicious is a menage story about an out-of-work radio host and announcer who meets her two very hunky and handsome neighbors, can't figure out which one she likes best, and then, joy of joys, discovers she can have them both.

March will see the release of Sabotage - another erotic romance, but this time the setting in WWII England and the main characters are an MI5 agent and an Italian prisoner of war.

I then have five more erotic romances contracted for this year--one will be a regular contemporary romance and the other four will be gay m/m. The one I'm working on right now, involves a a gay man twisting between some very conflicting emotions--guilt for starting an argument which he feels contributed to his partner's accidental death, self-directed anger for giving in to instant attraction and not realizing the man was playing him, and fear at the thought of moving on with his life in case he repeats his mistakes.

6) Do you have any tips for new writers?

Yes! Competition is fierce, but you need more than a well-written, exciting story to achieve your dreams of publication. You need to put a smile on the acquiring editor's face and to do that, I suggest you use your spell check--and if you use M/S WORD pay attention to any green underlining which identified grammatical problems; do your research--do not assume because you don't know something the reader won't either; try to learn the difference between "telling" and "showing"; watch out for too many passive sentences, e.g. "He/She was walking/driving/running etc." or "They were..."--too many passive sentences slows the story down to a crawl. And finally, before you submit your story to a publisher, go through the manuscript very carefully, figure out how many times you used the word "that" and take out at least half of them.

7) What are your goals for the future?

To win the lottery. Make the NY Times best seller list. I don't know, I just try to take each day as it comes and be grateful for what I have--a wonderful husband, a good life, two wonderful kitties aka The Boys, and a total of 18 published works.

Cool mysteries and hot romance - http://www.chrisgrover.ca
Latest Release: INSEPARABLE - http://www.amberquill.com http://www.myspace.com/185513895
http://chrisgrover2.bebo.com/

CONTEST NEWS: I'll give away a download--reader's choice. I'll pick one name from those who contact me.

Thank you, Chris, for being my guest blogger today. I enjoyed chatting with you. I hope you’ll come back. Good luck with your many books.

Ashley

Please read the following excerpt by Christiane.

Inseparable
by Christiane France
ISBN-13: 978-1-60272-134-0 (Electronic)

When Alison Palmer flees to England to escape the financial mess left by her late, philandering husband, she is, to use her own words, plain flat on her ass. With no money and no job training of any kind her future looks pretty grim—until she gets a job house-sitting Foxton Hall and meets handsome Nick Berringford and his deceased, identical twin brother, Nathan.

Nick and Nathan’s parents once owned the Hall, and the twins were planning to buy it back. But before that could happen, Nathan was involved in a freak accident and died. Now, rumor has it Nathan’s ghost not only haunts the bedroom where he died, but the ghost is gaining a reputation for making love to any woman who happens to sleep there.

At first, Ali thinks she’s having sexy dreams about the live twin, Nick, until Nathan introduces himself, and Ali realizes she’s as much in love both the ghost and his twin, and the trio are quickly caught up in a ménage a trois.

Nick knows Nathan’s spirit is trapped in the Hall and that’s why he’s also never left the village—he won’t desert his brother. They are, in fact, inseparable. But what will happen if Nick’s bid to buy back the Hall is successful? Will Nathan’s unfinished business cause him to disappear out of their lives for good?