biancadarc.com Blog

ARe Best of 2007 Awards Tonight

I’ll be at the ARe Best of 2007 Awards tonight at 9pm. I hope I’ll see some of you there! Just go to allromanceebooks.com, click on the chat room and wish me luck!

Prince of Spies WINS!

Prince of Spies won the CAPA for Fantasy Erotic Romance! Many thanks to TRS for the honor. The competition was fierce and I truly didn’t expect my book to win. My best wishes to the other nominees and congratulations to my friends Beth Williamson, Maya Banks, Lora Leigh and Lauren Dane for their CAPA wins!

And now for the winners of my Valentines Anniversary Contest. Because it was my 2nd Anniversary, I decided to give away 2 downloads of Maiden Flight. Congratulations to Sandra and Kris. Thanks to all who entered!

If you’re able, please join me tonight at 9pm in the All Romance eBooks Chat Room for their Best of 2007 Awards Ceremony! I bet we’ll see a lot of familiar faces there, and I’m happy to support my friends at ARe.

I’ll also be at the FarPoint Sci Fi Con this weekend in Maryland. I hope you’ll stop by and say hello if you’re in the area!

Valentine’s Day Anniversary Contest

On February 14th of 2006, my very first book was published. Maiden Flight was not only the start of my Dragons Knights series, but also the start of my writing career. It’s absolutely amazing to me to look back and realize just how much has happened in the last two years. Thank you to everyone who has read my books and supported my writing!

To celebrate my 2nd anniversary as a published author, I’m giving away a free PDF download of my very first book, Maiden Flight, to one lucky winner. So if you haven’t read it yet, be sure to enter!

To enter, send an email to: biancadarc AT gmail.com with the subject line “Maiden Flight” and just tell me how you found my blog and anything you might like to see more of on the blog, in the newsletter (if you receive it), or on my website or my chat group (if you’re a member). Really, just any observations or comments on my web presence and how to make it better would be much appreciated.

All Kinds of Book Related News

A bunch of things have happened in the past day or two…

First, I turned in the manuscript of FireDrake to my editor, so the rest of the process should begin shortly. I’m really happy with the way it turned out. Lots of action, lots of romance, lots of dragons and knights and a very cool heroine I think you’ll all like a lot.

Second, the print edition of Hara’s Legacy seems to be making an early appearance in some book stores. Joy (of Joyfully Reviewed fame) reported in on my chat group yesterday that she just picked up a copy at her local Borders. I also received a copy I’d pre-ordered from Amazon as a test. It showed up in the mail yesterday afternoon and may I say, it looks really GREAT in print!

Third, I had dinner with my publisher in Manhattan on Saturday night and a great time was had by all. I love it when she invites me places – we always have a gab-fest talking about anything and everything.

Now that FireDrake is finished, I’ve been giving some thought to what I’m going to work on next. I have one more contractual obligation to write Book 3 in the Resonance Mates series – Jaci’s Experiment – and then I’m free to do some other projects. I’m just not sure where to start.

Also, yesterday I got a great email from a reader asking if Prince Wil would get his own story in my Dragon Knights series. He most definitely will! I just am not entirely certain where to go next with the Dragon Knights. I had intended to do a time/dimension travel thing with the older set of twin princes, but given the way FireDrake ends – on a very action-oriented scene – I thought maybe I should pick up directly from that point in the over-arcing story and write a different story altogether. I’ll probably do that, and save the twin princes for the next book. Believe me, they’ll be worth the wait.

Sweeter Than Wine is Book of the Month at The Howling Scribe

The Howling Scribe emailed me this morning to let me know she’d chosen Sweeter Than Wine as her first-ever Book of the Month for February!

You can see the posting on her forum here: http://scribe.citadelofthewolf.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3

And you can read her review here: http://scribe.citadelofthewolf.com/reviews/book_reviews.php?id=38

I think you can vote on your opinion of the book, just for fun, and perhaps post your own opinions. (I’m not great with forums, as you all probably know by now. LOL)

My thanks to The Howling Scribe!!!

Space Shuttle Launch

Many of you probably know how much I love to watch the progress of the Space Shuttle every time it goes up. STS-122 is now in orbit and working on catching up with the International Space Station for a scheduled docking on Saturday.

Here’s a bit from the NASA site about this mission:

NASA astronaut Steve Frick commands a crew of six, including Pilot Alan Poindexter and Mission Specialists Leland Melvin, Rex Walheim, Stanley Love and the European Space Agency’s Hans Schlegel and Leopold Eyharts. This is the first spaceflight for Poindexter, Love and Melvin.

During the 11-day mission, the crew’s prime objective is to attach the European Space Agency’s Columbus Laboratory to the International Space Station, adding to the station’s size and capabilities.

Expedition 16 Flight Engineer Daniel Tani, who arrived at the station aboard Discovery in October, will return to Earth with the Atlantis crew as Eyharts takes his place on the station.

More info on the NASA site – http://www.nasa.gov/

I’ll be watching NASA TV and marveling at the space walks and everything else these guys are doing up there that they let us see. I love watching those space walks!

The Winter Blues

I know my friends Down Under aren’t having this problem right now, but here in the Northeastern United States, it’s Winter. It’s been a mild Winter so far, that’s true, but it’s still the time of less sun and more wind, rain and cold. Personally, I like cold weather, but I really do miss the sun. It gets me down when it’s dark at 5pm and about this time each year, I’m ready for Spring!

I want to plant things in my garden though I know it’s too early. So I start seeds indoors and always make a hash of it. I’m considering getting one of those aerogarden things for my kitchen, but I have no idea where to put it. Counter space is at a premium.

So I need a little advice. What do you all do to beat the Winter Blues?

Fantasm Awards – Vote Now!

As you may know, a few of my books have Finaled in the Fantasm Awards this year. I hope you’ll consider voting for my books if you get a chance to go over to their site. http://fantasmawards.blogspot.com/

Thanks!

February Newsletter & New Contest

The D’Arc Side NewsletterIssue 24 – February 2008To view the newsletter Click Here There’s a sneak peek excerpt from Davin’s Quest in this month’s issue, along with information on Bianca’s upcoming releases, awards and appearances. And check out the new, free, desktop wallpaper featuring the Davin’s Quest cover.

New Contest for February     This month’s prize is a goodie package featuring a D’Arc Side T-Shirt! (Size XL)     How to enter: Sign up for my NEWSLETTER by midnight on the last day of February. Anyone who is a member of the Newsletter Group on midnight of that day is automatically entered! One winner will be chosen at random and announced in my next newsletter, so stay tuned…

Visit Bianca’s Website – Join the Chat Group Joing the Newsletter Group – Check out the Blog

Sneak Peek: Davin’s Quest Prologue

As promised, here’s a sneak peek at one half of the prologue from my upcoming release, Davin’s Quest. This section introduces one of our heroes and the way humans live in this future, post-apocalyptic world. This book is the second in the Resonance Mates series. Book One, Hara’s Legacy, will be out in print this March and is already available in ebooks formats.

Human 

Richard St. John was a hard case. Raised in the Waste since his early teens, he had only scattered memories of the way the world had been before the aliens came—before the attack from orbit tore apart the fabric of the world.

He’d wanted to be a doctor in the old days, but the crystal bombardment destroyed everything long before he was old enough to go to medical school. His mother died in the first wave, leaving his father heartbroken. But Rick’s father, Zach, was a survivor. He’d packed Rick up and they’d headed for the mountains in his pickup truck. They’d just barely made it before the next orbit when the attacks began anew.

Zachariah St. John had been both a doctor and an Army Ranger in the old United States and he taught his son everything he knew about living off the land and surviving in the wild. Rick’s old man had a sixth sense about nature and was able to keep them both safe through the waves of attacks that followed, each time the Earth rotated fully on its axis. They’d moved farther into the mountains, working their way north, into the deepest recesses of the Rocky Mountains. They kept up with radio reports about the decimated coastlines as tsunamis spawned by the massive crystal shards hitting the Earth’s oceans killed by the millions.

One day, their small transistor radio stopped working entirely. Only static met repeated attempts to tune in a station — any station at all. Civilization, as they’d known it, was over.

“Guess that’s it,” Zach said, stowing the antenna and switching off the radio. “We’re on our own now.”

The last broadcast had listed details of nearly unimaginable devastation. Coastlines all over the world under water from giant tsunamis. California separated down the line of the San Andreas fault. Massive earthquakes brought on by the crystal bombardment from space had finally clipped the golden state nearly in half. The ring of fire was more active than ever with two or three volcanoes erupting violently in the Pacific and Pacific Northwest.

The sky was dark with soot covering the sun, and autumn came early that year, but by the following summer, temperatures started drifting back to normal. The sun shone brightly in the sky—but so did alien craft.

Zach St. John took in the news spreading through the wastelands of the Rockies—now called simply the Waste—with his typical calm. They’d run into a trader one morning who told of tall, fair-haired aliens building a silver city on the plains. Rick asked his dad about it that night at dinner.

“I figured it was something like this, son,” Zach said as he dressed the rabbit they’d snared for dinner. “The attack came from orbit. First thing to go down was my sat phone and GPS. Not many world powers who could do that, and none that could launch an attack on the entire planet. Had to be something from outer space.”

“Aliens?” Rick wasn’t entirely surprised. They’d talked about various possibilities often during the early days. “So they’re not little and green like in the old movies.”

“According to the trader, they look a lot like us, but with elf ears.” Zach finished with the rabbit and looked at his son. “This changes things. Now that they’re on the surface, they might just start hunting. Up ’til now, all we had to worry about was other men. The stakes are higher now, because any race that can do what they did to our planet has got to have superior weaponry. You’re going to have to learn to defend yourself, and we’ll make plans for when they come.” 

Rick thought it significant that his father said “when” and not “if”. 

He spent the next ten years learning from his dad and growing to adulthood. They’d met a few fellow survivors along the way, but not many, and not often. They grew close in those years. 

Zach shared an amazing secret that helped keep them both alive. He had a strong gift of empathy with animals, and could sometimes pick up their thought images and see through their eyes, sensing when the animals of the forest were scared or felt threatened. He could also read people, but only when he touched them. 

Rick had his own secrets. He finally let his father in on the biggest of them. He could heal most wounds by simply laying his hand over them and thinking real hard. That was why he’d wanted to study medicine—to find out how he did what he did, but also to help people with his gift. 

Through their infrequent interactions with other survivors, they realized they weren’t the only ones with psychic abilities. It seemed like every single soul they met had something different about them. Many had small amounts of precognitive ability that had led them out of harm’s way before the attack began. Some were telepaths, some could move things with their minds. Others had combinations of skills that were often benign, but some were downright deadly.

All in all, Rick preferred to be on his own—just him and his dad. They didn’t need the society of others, except for one thing, but hetero sex was hard to come by since there were so few women among the survivors of humanity. Still, Rick grew into a good looking young man and the few women he was able to charm were as eager for him as he was for them. But dalliances were few and far between as the lack of females turned many of the male survivors into beasts. Women went into hiding for their own protection, though few towns existed with even fewer inhabitants.

“I pity women today,” Zach would often comment after contact with others. “They’re traded like commodities, forced into whoring or multi-partner families. That’s not the way it was, son. You should always remember that. You were old enough to know the way it should be. The way our family was. God knows, I miss your mother more every day, but I wouldn’t have wanted her to see the level of depravity to which we have sunk.”

Rick took all his father’s teachings to heart, but especially that one. He’d just been starting to date when the cataclysm happened and felt strongly that girls should be protected, not exploited. Every time he saw some poor, frightened creature creeping about a settlement under guard by one of her protectors, the lesson was driven home again. He’d never sink that low.

The likelihood he’d ever have a woman of his own was close to nil, but Rick didn’t curse fate—at least not too often. He had his dad. That was more family than most people could claim nowadays. So the St. John men lived off the land in their own small cabin out in the middle of nowhere.

Until the Alvians came. 

They heard the ships fly by in the night and then the miniscule sounds of one landing not far away. Silently Zach signaled his grown son to head for the woods behind the cabin. They’d planned for this kind of thing. Each man would fend for himself, since two together were more likely to be captured or killed. They had a rendezvous and backup plan already in place. 

Zach grabbed his son for one last hug before they headed out the doors—Zach out the front, and Rick out the back.

That was the last time Rick St. John saw his father.