Great Beginning!

...to a New Year that I hope will bring you everything you want! I didn't make any resolutions, as normal, I plan to wing it. *smile*

But I did wake up to a new cover and wanted to share it, along with a snippet, with everyone.

Dirty Rotten Vampires 2

Love Me Madly

Coming soon to Changeling Press

With one undead and the other full of fire, they had two choices—fight dirty and love madly.

Split (Sophronius) Kryder didn’t enjoy hunting demon mixed vampires, hell, his daughter is one. Drawn back into the battle for vampire supremacy, he needs a new partner. The council tossed the name Tang into the pot so Split figured the vamp must be good. Turns out Tang Odette has curves and legs that go on, and on. A maddening inferno of desire ensues wreaking havoc on his world and to possess her Split plans to fight dirty…and win.

The new slayer assigned to Tangerine Odette is an ancient, chauvinistic, and cold-ass vampire she plans to ditch immediately. His superior attitude drives her crazy. Didn’t help any that each time she’s near him, her body heats up more than a pit in hell. Maybe if she gives the old jackass a taste of what he pines for, he’ll whimper away into a corner and leave her to fight.

Excerpt:

Heat has a smell. Magical and as sweetly perfumed as an exotic night-blooming jasmine, warm air whispered around him, gently brushing his face with butterfly-soft wings. Keeping his eyes shut tight, Split Kryder embraced the scent, allowing it to render him helpless, exposing memories buried deep a long, long time ago.

Shit. Opening his eyes to the real world, he spied a spider vanish into a crevice between ornate moldings joined high up in a corner across from him. He shoved a booted foot against the desk and sent the antique piece banging against the wall. Standing, he strode to the corner, stood on the desk, and reached to rip wood away. “Goddamn Philadelphia.” The gray, dank atmosphere was colder than his undead heart. Split slammed his fist into the wall and pulled chunks of red brick away.

“Sophronius!”

Spinning, he eyed Vigier Stone, a vampire with slightly more skill and strength than himself. “Don’t call me that.”

“Have you lost the capability to levitate along with your mind?” Vig, a member of the vampire council, elicited fear and respect because of his position. “Get off my desk; that was a gift from…”

“There’s a spider in here.” Yeah, I’ve lost it. Screwing with Vigier was not wise, but the only thing Split feared at the moment was going fuck-nuts if he didn’t get the hell out of the City of Brotherly Love.

“You could have killed it with a flick of your fingers.” Vig blinked the behemoth desk with a myriad of cubbyholes and paper stacks back to its original position in the office, leaving Split hanging in the corner. “Fix that gaping hole or I send your sorry ass after the eight-legged horror.” He shuddered. “I can’t believe you disturbed the nest.”

Split contemplated the council member. “Whatever.” Landing lightly on the balls of his feet, he waved a hand and watched stone and mortar fly into place and the splintered wood bind together, forming a loose bond in the corner. “Has your almighty council found me a partner yet? I’m growing cobwebs sitting here.”

“Insolence has won you no friends on our council.”

“Those bastards sit in luxury while slayers keep demon mixes from chewing their lazy, fat asses off.”

Vig smiled wanly at the corner as he tightened the molding with a mental nudge Split didn’t miss. “Have you ever seen a fat vampire?”

“You get my drift.”

Available now at: Changeling Press; All Romance Ebooks; B&N; Kobo; Amazon

Dirty Rotten Vampires 1

Hurt Me Good

A cold heart plus hot blood sweetens the pain.

Barringer Ganteau has hunted enough demon-mixed vampires to last a million lifetimes. His wish is to see all demi-vamps maimed, preferably dead. Single-handedly, he attempts to vanquish the scourge of mixed breeds from the face of the earth. Then Ringer meets Armada, a demi-vamp with the power to deliver the kind of pain he desires and melt his frozen heart.

Armada comes from Haiti, carrying the exotic heat of the islands and her kind with her. When she faces a cold-hearted vampire, a being superior to her mixed heritage, she vows to hate him as much as he hates her. Armada hadn’t reckoned with the vamp’s ability to use pain to bring out a side of her she had not known existed.

Read More

J. Hali Steele
Growl and roar-it's okay to let the beast out.

An Interesting Process...

Greetings PNR friends, peers, and (frequently) fantatics!

As many of my beloved stalkers...er, Facebook-savvy fans know, I have been hard at work creating the comic book version of my PNR urban fantasy/adventure novel, Black Dog and Rebel Rose. This dark paranormal has just about everything: sex, tattoos, motorcycles, vampyre slaying (resplendent with blood splatter and awesome horror gore), angels, demons, a headstrong Nephil huntress who likes things done HER way, and a half-demon bad boy known for rocking a woman's world (note the illustration above--;-). A story I loved writing and that I STILL love in prose...and yet one that I always felt would work BEST as a comic.

I have begun posting the fruits of my continuing labors on my Facebook page, and the response has been awesome. Lots of folks are asking: how does it work? What is the process of creating a comic book page? Even those who have no interest in comics--which, I'm sure, involves much of the PNR reading world--are still interested in the process. So...*drumroll please**...here you go! Creating a comic...in pictures!

Now, I will not be illustrating this using all the same page artwork each time...hopefully this will make things more interesting and still be easy to follow.

STEP 1: THE SKETCH

Not too impressive, I know...but this is just the beginning. :-)
To give myself an idea for how a page should be laid out, I will create a very scribbly looking sketch of where characters should be placed, how panels should work out, etc. In this case, my heroine is riding her Ducati Monster along a dirt road, where she spots a vulture eating roadkill and proceeds to have an intense flashback regarding her mother's death. Can you see that in this drawing? HELL NO! But I can, and that's all we need at this point.

STEP TWO: FINAL PENCIL SKETCH

Now, in the "old school" of comics, pencils would usually be tighter than this. Some artists still make their pencils as tight as any finished drawing for a comic page. I do not, since I am working digitally in a program called Manga Studio, a program specifically designed for comics creation and publication and allows me to create cutting-edge artwork demanded by the industry standard, and I don't need pencils to be so final. Dialogue bubbles are added as a "guide".

STEP THREE: DEFINING PENCILS/ INKING

Here you will see a definite "in process" shot. Again, not super impressive, but important nonetheless. :-) In this particular example, I have eliminated parts of the pencil art and drawn in sketchy areas in blue--these would be called "non photo blue" sketches (because if you are doing this art on paper rather than digitally, sketches would be done using a special blue pencil that would allow you to sketch parts of the drawing that won't show up when scanned/printed). You can see part of the page has already been inked a bit. The red line allows me to plot the flow of the page to make sure it will make sense before it is finalized in ink.

STEP FOUR: FINAL INKING

We're getting there! Clean inking is applied digitally, and a grey background is applied (this particular comic is being created in black, grey and white tones with eyes in color only). I have also already colored the eyes in here, and applied the final panel layouts.

STEP FIVE: FINAL COLOR

Here it is!!! The final colored page! All we need now is to add dialogue bubbles and narration and...presto!!! We have a finished page! :-D

Looks pretty different from the first example, huh? :-) 

--Danielle

TAG!! You're it! Find me online:
http://www.danielledsmith.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/danielle.d.smith.10?ref=tn_tnmn
Twitter: @DaniDSmith
Check out the original Black Dog and Rebel Rose story on Amazon (also available everywhere else):
http://tinyurl.com/BD-RRKINDLE