free books on Amazon

A Treacherous Flame is now free on Amazon for five days! It is a precursor to When Stars Die. Once you get the story, you can also freely lend it to whomever you wish. I will eventually make it perma free. I just have to format it for Smashwords and have Amazon do a price match.

Here’s what it’s about:

Benjamin Fairchild, interrogator at Usiburn Tower, is in charge of extracting confessions from witches–and then killing them. His methods are brutal. From crushing thumbs to cutting out tongues, Benjamin is not afraid to use the most extreme methods to get what he wants.

On a crusade to eliminate every last witch he can, Benjamin is currently tasked with a young girl named Emily. She proves to be a most difficult case. Trying to convince Benjamin of her innocence is impossible when he is certain that witches are the biggest embodiment of sin. However, Emily will force Benjamin to discover a secret about himself that threatens to undo everything he has been taught.

***

So besides this, what else is going on in this hectic life of mine?

Well, I finally got certified in CPR/AED/First Aid, which means I’ve scheduled my personal trainer exam for next Friday at 1 PM. YIKES! Here I am wondering what more I need to study besides the math, which is easy, but I just need to memorize the formulas. I’m both nervous and excited because I’m finally certain of what I want to do as a career, and even though I hear it’s really tough, I hope to find both happiness and contentment in this career. To be honest, I’d love to be as big as Kayla Itsines. But that’s a long-term goal. Right now, I’m just going to focus on short-term goals: passing the exam, getting a specialty certification, getting my BA in English, then finding a job as a trainer.

I’m also developing my fitness platform, primarily through blogging and Instagram. I started a Twitter account, but I feel like I need to be more popular to really have Twitter work for me. It’s easier to get followers on Instagram because pretty pics really attract people, so I’ll depend on my blog and Instagram for now. It’s kind of crazy trying to juggle both a fitness and author platform, which is why a Manic Monday post is late in the first place.

What about my goals as an author?

Well, with the re-release of When Stars Die being next Saturday, I plan to submit my second book some time in December after I go over it once more. And I can’t say I’ll be able to start the third book soon. Maybe I can, but there’s no promise. Right now I have to focus on getting certified and then getting my BA, which will hopefully be next March if I can get into two classes instead of one like I’ve been forced to do lately.

Like striving to be like Kayla Itsines, my long-term goals are to eventually be a bestseller, or even just make enough that it’d be a GREAT supplementary income. Even if I made loads of money from writing, I wouldn’t let go of my job as a trainer.

From here on out, it’s all about HARD work.

Zach Chop nominated me to discuss my reading habits, which I am more than happy to do, especially because this blog has been rather empty lately in my sad attempt to find some sort of balance in my life.

Onward!

The Rules:

The rules are simple, answer a bunch of questions about your reading habits and then nominate a bunch of people to do the same. Don’t forget to tag the person who nominated you!

OK! And now for the questions:

You have 20,000 books on your TBR. How in the world do you decide what to read next? That’s a super good question, because I’m not the most organized person in the world. In fact, organization isn’t even in my language. Honestly, the only way I would decide is to go with whatever book I’m feeling at that time. If I want an edgy YA book, I’ll read that first. If I’m in the mood for some fantasy, I’ll go toward that. I always get in these weird reading kicks where I only want to read a certain type of book, and I’m not interested in anything else. Right now I haven’t *gasp!* been reading for fun since I started my senior thesis class, have been tortured by work, and I’m now studying to be a fitness trainer, which is loads of reading in itself–one manual in exercise science and one manual in ACE’s IFT model, for a whopping total of over 1,000 pages! But I do have a HUGE TBR list waiting on my Kindle from all the free book deals I’ve snatched off Amazon. I need someone to hand me a whopping dose of time. I haven’t even been a good author lately!
You’re halfway through a book and you’re just not loving it. Do you quit or commit?
I oftentimes commit, especially because I did buy the book. But there are rare cases where the book is just too boring that I simply can’t continue. I am THE WORST when it comes to coping with boredom. And it’s not even that I made a conscious decision to stop reading it. I just put it down when I feel like taking a break from reading–and I don’t ever return to the book and don’t really care to.
The end of the year is coming and you’re so close yet so far away on your GoodReads challenge. Do you quit or commit? I’ve never done the GoodReads challenge. I’m just not interested. I don’t want to read books for the sake of meeting some intangible goal of reading ‘x’ amount of books in ‘x’ amount of time. I’d rather read books at my own pace and enjoy the experience of reading as well as the book. Heck, I’ve never even tried any writing challenges, like NaNo.
The covers of a series you love DO. NOT. MATCH. How do you cope? I don’t know if I’ve ever come across a series of books with covers that don’t have a pattern, so I honestly can’t say how I’d feel. I might be bothered, just because patterned book covers can make it easy to determine the order of a series, but, otherwise, I can’t really know how I’d react unless I actually come across it one of these days.
Everyone and their mother loves a book you really don’t like. Who do you bond with over shared feelings? My best author/buddy/friend/whatever from Canada. Her and I have VERY similar dislikes when it comes to books, so I rant to her when I come across a blatantly poor book and wonder why, even among authors, it’s being hailed as some remarkable piece of literature. I’ve learned over my short time as an author that it’s just best to rant in private about a book you strongly dislike, instead of blogging about why you hate a particular book.
A sequel of a book you loved just came out, but you’ve forgotten a lot from the prior novel. Will you re-read the book? Skip the sequel? Try to find a summary on GoodReads? Cry in frustration?
Uh…I don’t re-read. I just continue the next book in the series. If I truly loved the first book, then it’s almost impossible for me to forget what happened. In fact, there are several sequels I need to read that came out a few years ago! But I can still recall some major events from their predecessors.
You don’t want ANYONE borrowing your books. How do you politely tell people “nope” when they ask? I primarily read on my Kindle, so I don’t have this problem. But I have let people borrow my books in the past, so there really is no straight answer for this. I really don’t know how I’d politely tell someone no since I don’t have an inclination to not let people borrow my books.
You’ve picked up and put down five different books in the past month. How do you get over the reading slump? I don’t have reading slumps. I have periods where I don’t read, but that’s often because I have to prioritize other types of reading over pleasure reading.
There are so many new books coming out that you are dying to read! How many do you actually buy?
Depends on how much money I have. Since I’m using a great deal of my money to pay off my ACE certification course, I’ve been having to trawl through the free books on Amazon, so I’ve been swiping those up in copious amounts. Otherwise, I might buy two at a time. Usually I just try to buy one at a time so as to not have a huge TBR list, which I am failing miserably with right now.
After you’ve bought a new book you want to get to, how long do they sit on your shelf until you actually read them? I try to get to it immediately after I’ve bought it so it won’t sit ten million years on my bookshelf or Kindle. I don’t like to keep books waiting for too long, unless I have no choice, like right now.