Fallen Angel

My NaNoWriMo novel, Fallen Angel, is available now in the Kindle store.

In addition to the Kindle, Kindle books can be read on the free Kindle app, available for Mac, PC, iPhone, Blackberry, and iPad.

If you don't have a Kindle, and don't want to use the Kindle app--maybe you would prefer to print it out rather than read it on the screen--I've made a PDF version available for the same price as the Kindle version ($1.99). To purchase the PDF version, just click on the "Buy Now" button below and you will be taken to the Paypal site to complete your purchase. As soon as I receive notification of payment, I'll email you the PDF, so watch for it in your email!

If you buy the book, and like it, I would really appreciate it if you would leave a positive review at the Amazon site. Thank you!

REVIEWS:

Five Star Review

Now this is what I call a feel good read!

I totally believe in guardian angels and the signs that we ask for when we need some guidance and help, so I could totally relate to this book. Sarah was a lovely main character and although she suffered some heartache in her life she didn't go on and on and on about it like some books that I have read, she just dealt with it in her own way without really bothering everyone else in her new life in Saratosa. Zach well, sorry but I just fell in love with him, he was just so adorable and such a believable guardian angel. I have never been to the USA but willa described this beautiful place in Florida so well I felt that I had been there.

I loved the story line, it was not complicated, it was just a story that could have happened to anyone. It was a totally believable storyline.

At first I thought it was too short a book, however when it finished...and I will say that the last few lines made me cry, I realised...yes that's where the book should end!

Thank you Willa for writing such a simple and beautiful story, I almost felt I was watching a movie as I could see all the characters so well.

I would recommend this book!

~Firedrake, on Amazon

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Four Star Review

there is much to be found in this book. from angels that kick butt to angels that make your teenager look sane, you will definately find something to love here. but there is something missing to the story. while zach is amazing (can i have one? please?) and sarah is fun, there is something missing between the beginning and the end. it seems the story ended too soon (what happened to zach? what was with that council of angels? are yukemi and carmiel going to come back?) with many plot points left untied. all i can hope for is a sequel to solve those conundrums. but it is still a wonderful book, with all the right things to make you fall in love over and over again

~Amazon customer review

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Mentioned in Friday Finds - Sweet Indie Deals at Indie Paranormal Book Reviews.

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Five Star Review
An urban fantasy that starts off with the protagonist owning her own bookstore grabs my attention right away because that's one of my fantasies and that of most anyone who loves books. The descriptions were delicious -- life in a small Florida town, working in an independent bookstore (with resident feline) and encountering mysterious angels. The story flowed smoothly, and I enjoyed watching the protagonist gradually open to love and risk. A feel-good read that isn't overly sugary, which is sometimes a hard balance to achieve. I hope to see more by this author.

~Liora Hess, on Amazon

UPDATE:

Fallen Angel is now also available at Barnes & Noble, Sony eReader, Smashwords and Lulu.com.

Read an excerpt.

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While deriving

I'm immersed in books lately. It seems to have started after my recuperation from surgery. Once I was able to concentrate on something other than bad television, I started reading, and I haven't stopped yet. I've read 44 books so far this year, which compares favorably to the number of books I was reading years ago before I started spending so much time on the computer.

I've been checking out books from the library, but I've also been reading a lot on my iPhone, which I'd rather do, actually, except for the minor point of buying all those books. I ran across this article about the Kindle this morning on the Amazon blog:

And...of interest to me as a critical reader...one of the anticipated minuses turned out to be a plus, in a way. There were no clues--no jacket, no typographical design, no author photo, no blurbs...nothing to influence my response to the book except the words themselves. I read everything a little more carefully.
--Lee Child

That's one of the reasons that I like reading electronically also. I'm kind of a snob about books; if I pick a book up off the shelf, either in a bookstore or in the library, I do judge it by the cover. I also judge it by the typeface, how large the type is, the size and heft of the book, whether it has deckled page edges (which I dislike) or not, etc. The biggest thing for me is the typesize and no, I don't want it larger so I don't have to wear my reading glasses, I want it to be small. I like long books, I like being able to immerse myself in a book for days.

I also especially like trade paperbacks. That's probably my favorite format. But with an ereader, none of those considerations come into play. As Child says, it's just the words. And I do find myself reading pretty much all of them, unlike how I tend to read a paper book. I don't speed read or skim, really, but I do tend to skip over long descriptions of fights or battles or landscapes. An interesting note -- Bob has been known to pick up a book and reject it because it has too much dialog, while I'll reject a book because it has too little dialog.

What I find with an ebook, particularly reading on the iPhone with the small screen, is that I read more closely, and feel like I get more out of it. It seems like a more personal, more intimate experience, I think. It's kind of the same way with audiobooks. I think I get a more complete understanding of a book by listening to it, because for some reason I pay more attention than I do when I'm reading a book.

Of course, I guess that's not exactly a good thing, since I only listen to audiobooks while I'm driving . . . [I first typed that as "deriving," as in, "I only listen to audiobooks while I'm deriving." :) I derive much pleasure from audiobooks, btw.

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Blogger conversion

I had a couple of clients who were using Blogger as their blogging platform, and updating through FTP, which is no longer available as of yesterday. I got both of their blogs converted and updated so that they could continue to update their blogs through Blogger as they always had.

I hadn't decided what to do about mine. I had been thinking about converting to Wordpress, and I also thought that I could just do the blog manually, like I used to. Last night I sat down and opened up the test Wordpress blog that I set up months ago, but I just couldn't do it. I wasn't ready to give up the template that I had designed. I know that you can use customized designs with Wordpress if you install the software on your own server, but I just wasn't ready to tackle that, either. And all of the links I have in the sidebar; I would have to either give them up, or duplicate them.

So I thought, well, I'll just do the blog manually like I used to, and I started working on templates, stripping out the Blogger code, and then I realized that I was breaking ALL of the previous entries. So I had to start backtracking, undoing, checking . . . What a pain.

I ended up converting the blog to a "Blogspot" blog, which means that future entries will be on Blogger/Google's servers, not on my own. I will back them up, of course. I had to do a bunch of work on the templates anyway, to make everything work, and I stopped the conversion before it got to the point where it adds forwarding code, so all of the previous entries haven't been affected. I would appreciate it if anyone notices anything weird, or something that doesn't work, if they would let me know. Now, for every image and every link, I have to put in the complete path, which is also a pain, and not really good code, but it'll have to do.

Last September (I looked it up -- the benefits of having an online journal) we had weird electrical problems, but Bob fixed it, and I didn't worry about it anymore. Then on Wednesday or Thursday he called me at work and said that we were having the same kind of issues, that he thought he needed to replace the GFI, but for now the outlets in the bathrooms didn't work.

When I got home that night I put water on the stove to boil, and when I turned on the burner, the lights in the kitchen dimmed, like a brownout. Deja vu. I turned off the stove, the lights came back on, I turned it on, the lights went out. The GFI had tripped, so I reset it, and then all the lights on the first floor stayed out. I went down to the basement to check the breakers; they were all on, but I flipped them just in case. Nothing happened, so I went upstairs, where we had lights, and read.

When Bob got home, he replaced the GFI, but it didn't help. He tried several things, with me running up and down the basement stairs to flip the breaker on and off, but no luck. So he talked to an electrician friend of his, who came over the next day to check things out. They discovered that it was a bad breaker outside--they said it was actually melted, and broken, so it was definitely good that we discovered it when we did!

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Lists and adventures

I was reading this this morning (Crazy Aunt Purl), about how she loves to re-read books and watch movies over and over, and some of her commenters said they don't do that. I do have favorite movies that I can watch many times, but I almost never re-read a book. I think it seems like wasted time to me. But it got me thinking, because I do have a few books that I have read more than once. So I made a list. I could only come up with five.

Ten Five Favorite Books

• Ladder of Years - Anne Tyler
• Miracle and Other Christmas Stories - Connie Willis
• Timeline - Michael Crichton
• Under the Dome - Stephen King
• American Gods - Neil Gaiman

It was easier to come up with ten movies.

Ten Fifteen Favorite Movies

• Beverly Hills Chihuahua
• Bolt
• The Phantom Menace
• The Money Pit
• Grosse Pointe Blank
• Christmas With the Kranks
• Love Actually
• School of Rock
• The Bourne Identity
• The Terminal
• Home Alone
• The Commitments
• Robots
• Under the Tuscan Sun
• The Incredibles

I've been working my way through the free Kindle books that I've downloaded from Amazon over the last year or so. I don't download every free one that is offered, but if I think there's a possibility that I might enjoy it, I do. Sometimes I'll read a few pages and decide I don't like it, and will delete it, but there have been some that I've really enjoyed, and have gone on to buy other books from the same author, so it seems that, at least from my perspective, the strategy works.

The latest series that I've been reading is Elizabeth Moons "Vatta's War" series. I would never have purchased the first book, "Trading in Danger," at the bookstore--it looks very military, very much a "space opera." But I tried it, and I loved it. So much so that I'm reading the rest of the books in the series. I'm currently reading the third one, "Engaging the Enemy," and finished the second, "Marque and Reprisal" over the weekend. There are two more.

The series is about a young woman who is something of a black sheep in her very business-minded family, a family who owns a very successful shipping company. The woman, Kylara, declines to join the family business, and instead decides to go into the military, and enrolls in military school. Through what was basically a misunderstanding, she's thrown out of the school, and comes home in disgrace.

In order to get her out of town until the scandal blows over, her father asks her to take command of an old spaceship that needs to be take to the scrapyard. He assigns her a basic crew, and sends her off. All hell breaks loose after that. I'm really enjoying reading about Ky and her adventures.

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Ranting about ebooks

I have read all the books in Kim Harrison's "The Hollows" series, and was looking forward to the latest, "Black Magic Sanction," which was released in February. I don't buy hardback books anymore (except for Jim Butcher's "Dresden Files" books that I buy for Bob); I either put the book on hold at the library and wait, wait for the paperback, or, increasingly, wait for the ebook version.

Publishers are now tending to hold the ebook version for a period of time after the hardback comes out; this seems to have started with Stephen King's "Under the Dome" (which I ended up buying in both hardcover, audio, and ebook versions). Before that, it seems that the ebook versions were released at the same time as the hardback. But I can understand the motivation--it appears that the publishers believe that if the ebook version isn't available, people will just go ahead and pay for the hardback version, although I don't think that's true.

In any event, it isn't true for me. I'll wait. I was looking forward to Ms. Harrison's latest book, and the release date for the ebook version was April 6. I could have pre-ordered it a month or so ago at $8.65, but since most Kindle books at Amazon are $9.99, I figured that wasn't a huge savings, and I might as well just wait and pay the money when it comes out. But April 6 came and went, and now Amazon is showing the ebook version of Black Magic Sanction as "no longer available." I also noticed that the Kindle version of Charlaine Harris' "Dead in the Family," her newest, due to publish in May, also appears as "no longer available," and the Kindle version of "Changes" has disappeared also, although I see that the hardcover version is listed at $9.99. I ordered it for $12.99 at WalMart, plus a couple of dollars shipping; with all the book pricing volatility it's just impossible to know if you're getting the best deal or not.

When Black Magic Sanction was theoretically available to purchase in ebook form, the latest price at Amazon was something like $12.65, and another book that I'm interested in reading, Jennifer Crusie's "Wild Ride," is $12.99. When I saw those prices, I thought, well, I'll wait and they'll come down, like the hardcover prices tend to do. Ebook version of most backlist books are available at Amazon for around $6.50. But after reading this, I suppose they won't, or maybe they won't for a year or more. I just have no idea.

I guess one thing I don't understand is, if Amazon and other online retailers are discounting the hardcover versions so steeply, what difference does it make if you pay $9.99 for a hardback or $9.99 for the ebook version? I don't pretend to understand or know anything about the publishing business, but it would seem to me that publishing a hardback book would cost quite a bit more than producing an ebook version. I'm not going to get into that argument, because I know you're not paying for the paper itself, but for the work that went into writing and producing it, but an ebook, being only bits, obviously contains less physical production cost, so if they're being sold for the same price, why not release them at the same time?

There's a page at Kim Harrison's blog where she has opened up comments for people to rant about their dissatisfaction with ebook pricing, ebook delayed releases, etc. Either of things are certainly not the author's fault, and I hate to see people direct their comments at her, or at any author. They're as much a victim here as anyone.

I just wrote an extensive review of iPhone ereader apps over at my iPhone blog yesterday. As I said, I love books, and I love ebooks. I love the convenience of reading books on apps on my iPhone. I'm very conscious of price, though, and will very seldom pay what has, up 'til now, been the "normal" ebook price, that is, $9.99. Still, there are a few books that I will pay that price for. I bought Patricia Briggs' "Silver Borne" last week, and I see that it's still listed at $9.99 for the Kindle version at Amazon. "A Local Habitation" by Seanan McGuire is $6.39, but there was no hardcover version, it was released in mass market paperback.

While I was reading Kim Harrison's blog yesterday, I discovered that I could buy the "enhanced" combination ebook/audiobook version of Black Magic Sanction for $16.99 in the iTunes store. I do have about $6.50 worth of credit in my iTunes account, so that would make it cost about $10, but I was going to buy Swankolab . . . And the thing is, I hate the idea of buying a dedicated app for one book. I don't have that much real estate space on my iPhone, I definitely don't want to start loading it up with an app for every book that I want to read. I guess I could read them, then delete them, but I kind of like hanging on to the ones I like.

I don't know. I guess it will be an interesting issue to follow. I hope they figure it out soon.

Update: "Black Magic Sanction" came out in Kindle on April 7, just one day late. I still haven't bought it, though. I think I may wait to get it from the library.

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