Winner of Kindle Fire

And the winner of the Kindle Fire is: DRUMROLL PLEASE!!!!

************* Erin Poma! *************

Congratulations!

The Winner will be contacted by email. Thanks to all of you for entering and taking the time to visit my page, tweet or post on FB about it. I had over 1,500 entries. Hope you'll stick around: I love doing contests and hope to do another big one in 2012.

Kindle Fire Giveaway!!!!

Just in time for Christmas:

I'm giving away a brand new Kindle Fire. Here's what you need to do:

1. Go to my Facebook Fan Page and 'Like' it.
2. Fill in the entry form

That's all!

Of course, if you want more than one entry, you can do a few other things to get more (the entry form will prompt you):

• Tweet about the contest
• Post about the contest on Facebook
• Follow me on Twitter
• Write a review on Amazon for any of my books

The contest is open till December 26, and you will need to have a US shipping address if you win.

Good Luck!

Pay With A Tweet

I'm happy to announce that you can now download Samson's Lovely Mortal, book 1 in my bestselling Scanguards Vampires series for FREE.

All you need to do is go to the link below and tweet about it. As soon as your tweet is posted you will be directed to a download link for Samson's Lovely Mortal.

Or, if you have a smartphone you can just simply scan this QR code below. It works the same way (even though I haven't tried it out since, yes, I'm still on my Blackberry. One of these days, I'll get an iPhone.)

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and a Happy New Year to all my readers and their families!

Venice Vampyr: The Beginning nominated for Award - Please vote

My collection of 3 erotic, historical Vampire Novellas was nominated for Best Erotic Paranormal (Vampire) on The Romance Reviews.

If you have read this book and would like to vote for it, please visit the button below and follow the link.

Voting is open until November 30, 2011.

Thanks!

Author Sharon Hamilton and Heavenly Lover

Today, my RWA sister, author Sharon Hamilton is here and has brought us her debut novel Heavenly Lover. If you stay till the end of the interview, there will be a giveaway.

Tina: You started writing relatively late in life. Please tell your readers what inspired you to put pen to paper.

Sharon: I’d always wanted to be a writer. Actually started writing in grade school, and have kept a journal ever since I was 5.

But life has a funny way of getting in the way, plus, I didn’t like what I wrote when I was young. I felt I didn’t have enough life experience. At that time, I was reading mainly classics. Romance was never talked about in my household. In fact, I never knew it existed. I thought it was porn. (tee hee)

After raising 4 children and having a successful sales career for some 25 years, our house burned down. Overnight, everything changed for us. So did my focus. I was relocated to an 800 sf apartment while my husband had to stay up on the property to take care of our animals. I started writing December 15^th 2008 and basically never went back to work!

All I can say now is that I’m glad I never discovered the joys of being a novelist while my kids were little. I would have sucked at being a mom and wife.

Tina: When most paranormal authors write about vampires and werewolves, you write about angels. Please tell us more about this world you've created.

Sharon: The house fire was really divine providence. I started thinking how really lucky I was at having to start all over. I actually started dreaming about angels, guardian angels in particular.

Then this story came to me in a dream. The rough outline of it just poured out. I went to bed when I got tired, got up and wrote. Went to bed with the story ideas, and woke up with the solutions. I became intrigued with the idea that a guardian angel, sent to save a human from committing suicide, could fall in love with a human. What would she feel? Would she risk her immortality, or worse, risk his soul to experience this forbidden love?

Although I like other beings and am working on 2 Navy SEAL romances, as well as 2 vampire romances, angels, at least the way I write angels, are not portrayed anywhere else the way my story shows them. I’ve watched movies and read other books, and no one shows them the way I do. As a writer, you have to love your work, and I do.

I also like the idea that angels have free will. My premise is this: Heaven isn’t 100% perfect by design. The Underworld isn’t 100% evil by accident.

My angels challenge and test this theory.

Tina:  In Heavenly Lover your hero tries to commit suicide at the very beginning of the book. This seems a hard sell for romance readers. How are you making sure that your hero is still a man a woman can look up to?

Sharon: Daniel, who is based on the actor Rodrigo Santoro (I have a video of him on my blog site in a commercial with Nicole Kidman), is a normal, Brazilian-born painter with tons of talent, but, like most artists, doubts his genius. He isn’t a weak man plagued by insecurities. He’s been targeted and preyed on for several months by a talented dark angel and his female accomplice. This creates in Daniel fear, doubt and insecurities, making him a prime candidate for suicide. The dark angel stages this so just the perfect things happen that send him over the edge.

Claire gets the emergency job. She is called in because she has a 100% track record saving humans. And, her unconventional ways are thought to be a good fit against the powerful and cunning dark angel.

Away from the negative influence of the dark angel, and with the help of his guardian, the fullness and passion of Daniel’s life blooms back. And that is what the guardian falls in love with.

Tina:  What plans do you have for this series? What other books are planned?

Sharon: The next book, being edited now, and hopefully uploaded just in time for the Holidays, is Underworld Lover. It is the story of the villain in Heavenly Lover, Joshua, a sexy and powerful dark angel, who falls in love with a human woman whose soul he cannot take. As in Heavenly Lover, the dark angel must make a decision in order to save the woman he loves.

Tina: What does your writing day look like?

Sharon: I get up usually between 4-5 AM, write until almost 6. I go back to my writing desk about 9 and write until noon. In the afternoon I do editing of completed works, if I don’t have other work to do for my husband’s real estate business. I also like to write before bedtime, especially if I haven’t made my daily word count of 2000-3000. On weekends I try to use the hours for polishing and editing the work I’ve done during the week.

Fridays are my “off days” where I go do something like visit a winery, an art gallery or watch movies with my husband.

Tina: Is there anything else you want your readers to know about you?

Sharon: My angel books are not in any way religious. The Heaven/Underworld I have created and the characters that live there are my own twisted spin, like a fractured fairy tale on the Bible and some biblical stories. But good always triumphs over evil. True love always conquers all.

True Love Heals in the Gardens of the Heart.

I like to think I have a direct connection to my higher power, but I fully admit, my antenna is bent.

Thank you, Tina, for having me. This book is partially dedicated to you. After all, I can’t thank you enough for having to suffer through some of my early versions of it!

And now to the Giveaway:

I will give away 2 Kindle copies of Heavenly Lover. All you have to do is comment on this blog and what comes to mind when you think of angels and romance.

Giveaway open internationally.

Want to find out more about Sharon? Check out her blog and her website:

Sharon's Blog

Sharon's Website

New releases and links and what's next?

I know I've been really bad about keeping my blog up to date, but I've had so much going  on in the last few weeks. So, I figured, I'd do a quick post just to update you on the latest releases and any links you might want.

Zane's Redemption, Scanguards Vampires #5 was released on November 3. Here are the links to:

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Apple iBookstore

Paperback

Other retailers will come soon.

I also released my first Spanish edition. Samson's Lovely Mortal, Scanguards Vampires #1 can now be purchased in Spanish as La Mortal Amada de Samson, Vampiros de Scanguards #1:

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Other retailers to come soon.

What's next?

I will be releasing the German and French editions of Samson's Lovely Mortal in early December.

Scanguards: the next Scanguards book will be Quinn, however, you'll most likely have to wait until late Spring / early Summer before I'll be able to release it. Why? I'm working on developing a new paranormal series and hope to release the first book of it in early Spring.

Zane's Redemption

Don't want to keep you on tenterhooks any longer:

The last thing vampire bodyguard Zane wants to do is to guard a hybrid, a half-vampire, half-human, whose father wants to keep her a virgin. Known for his violent temper and callous lack of compassion, Zane’s out-of-control rage, born of the cruelty he suffered during the Holocaust, drives him to focus only on revenge. Trying to find the last of his torturers is his only goal in life.

Portia is a young hybrid with a serious dilemma: in a few weeks, her body will be set in its final vampire form. If she is to avoid having to live out her immortal life as a virgin, she must find a lover in that short time—something her father hires Zane to prevent.

The moment Portia and Zane meet, rules begin to bend, and a forbidden attraction bursts into flames hotter than the hell of Zane’s past. But that past threatens to pull them apart unless they can overcome their prejudice, forsake hate for love, and revenge for forgiveness.

Zane's Redemption will be available between November 5th and 10th - exact release date to be determined.

Teaser Chapter for Zane

Finally, here's the first chapter of Zane's book. For the title, I'm leaning toward "Zane's Redemption" at this point. Enjoy!

Copyright 2011 Tina Folsom

Chapter One

Zane heard a scream and blocked it out to prolong feeding from the succulent neck of the Latino kid he’d cornered in an alley in the Mission, the predominantly Mexican and South American neighborhood of San Francisco. It was a sketchy area; on one hand, trendy restaurants and nightclubs attracted the rich residents from the north side of town, on the other, poor immigrants toiled in dead-end jobs for minimum wage. Yet somehow, Zane had instantly felt at home when he’d first set foot in the neighborhood.

As his fangs lodged deeper to draw more blood, Zane listened to the thundering heartbeat of his victim, fully aware of the power he had over the teenager’s life. If he took an ounce too much, the boy would bleed out, his heartbeat ceasing, his breath rushing from his lungs for the last time, leaving behind a lifeless shell.

It was how he liked to feed, not from a bottle of lifeless donated blood like his colleagues at Scanguards preferred, but from a human where he felt the life pulsing beneath his palms while the warm, rich blood coated his throat. There was no substitute for this feeling. It went beyond pure nourishment; it appealed to his need to feel superior, to be powerful, to be in control of the life in his arms.

Every night, the struggle to allow that life to continue renewed. Despite the fact that each night a different human was at his mercy, it changed nothing, and the battle inside him remained the same: to stop while the human was still alive or to give into the urge to destroy and assuage his need to avenge, for no matter whether he fed from a Latino kid, a black woman, or an Asian man, their faces were all the same once his memories of the past took possession of his mind. Their features morphed into those of a white man, his hair a dark blond, his eyes brown, and his cheekbones high: the face of one of his torturers, the only one he had failed to track down after chasing him for over sixty-five years. The only one he hadn’t slain—yet.

Zane noticed the change in pressure of the blood rushing through the kid’s veins, and drew his fangs from his neck. He quickly licked over the wound to close it and prevent any more blood loss as his fangs retracted back into their sockets, deep within his gums, satisfied for the moment. His own heart hammered furiously in his chest as he felt his victim slacken, but his ears picked up the faint heartbeat, assuring him that he hadn’t gone too far. He’d won tonight’s battle, but the restlessness he’d felt in the last few months was increasing and driving him to take more and more risks with his victims’ lives.

He’d come to San Francisco nine months ago on an assignment for Scanguards, the vampire-run bodyguard company that had employed him for several decades. The assignment had turned into a permanent stay. At first, he’d thought that the change of venue from New York to this quiet West coast town that was frequently engulfed in fog would bring him peace, but the opposite was the case. The hunt for his torturer had stalled, then come to a dead end. With every day that passed after the trail had gone cold, this failure drove his anger and hatred higher. He needed to hurt somebody. Soon.

At a sound, Zane snapped his head to the side. He lowered the Latino kid to the ground, resting him against the wall of a building. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, concentrating on the distant voice he’d heard. Past the noise that indicated a vibrant nightlife, a low whimpering laced with fear and despair drifted to him. It was remote, but his sensitive vampire hearing identified it as a plea for help.

“Fuck!”

He shouldn’t have ignored the scream he’d heard earlier. He should have known that something was wrong. Both his vampire instincts and his training as a bodyguard told him as much. Without casting another glance at his victim, Zane charged out of the alley and headed for the origin of the sound. He hoped he wasn’t too late already.

A few drunks stumbled along the sidewalk, their incoherent mumbles temporarily blocking out the distressed sobs he was following. Had he lost the trail? Zane rocked to a halt at the next corner and forced his ears to concentrate. For a moment, everything was completely quiet, but then the sound returned and intensified his gut feeling that he was needed.

This time the cry was accompanied by the low hissing voice of a man. “Shut up, bitch, or I’m gonna gut you.”

Instinct took over as Zane raced around the corner and into the driveway where two shabby apartment buildings converged. His superior night vision assessed the situation instantly: a man was forcing a young woman face down against a dumpster, holding a knife to her throat. His pants bunched at his knees, and his bare ass moved frantically back and forth as he raped her.

“Shit!” Zane leapt at him just as the man’s head turned, alerted by Zane’s curse.

His fangs lengthened in mid-flight, and his fingers transformed into sharp claws capable of ripping an elephant to shreds. Zane pried the rapist off his victim with one swoop, his claws digging into the guy’s shoulders, cleaving clear through his hoodie sweater.

The man’s scream was first surprise, then pain as Zane’s claws slashed deeper into his flesh. He relished the sound and dragged one hand, claws extended, through the entire width of his shoulder, tearing the flesh apart, rupturing muscle and nerve tissue. Blood spurted from the open wound, and the air became pregnant with its metallic scent. He flashed his fangs, making sure the asshole got a good look at them.

“Nooooo!” The desperate protest of his victim did nothing to stop Zane’s assault. Deliberately slowly, he allowed his other hand to tear through the muscles of the left shoulder, doing equal damage there. His arms dangling limp from his shoulders, the severed sinew and nerves not supporting their movement any longer, the rapist was defenseless.

At his mercy.

If Zane had had a heart, he would have ended it right there, but it was too late. One look at the frightened girl who gaped at him in horror, and his past took hold of him. Suddenly, the strawberry blond rape victim’s features with the terrified blue eyes became a face he knew so well, a face he’d not seen in decades, yet never forgotten.

Her dark brown hair curled at its ends and caressed her pale shoulders as it framed her young face. Her chocolate brown eyes looked up at him, innocence lost, begging him to help her, to save her. “Zacharias …” As her voice faded, he reached for her, but she shrunk back, petrified.

“Maria,” he whispered. “Don’t be afraid.”

Zane became aware of the man struggling against him and tore his gaze from her. He would kill the man who was hurting her, hurting his little Maria.

Zane tossed the rapist against a wall, hearing the cracking of his ribs with utter satisfaction. When he crossed the distance to his victim, his steps were deliberate. He allowed his body to harden and enjoyed the horrified look in the man’s eyes. But he didn’t see the face of the rapist anymore. It had changed. He saw a dark blond man with brown eyes. And finally those eyes shone with fear and the knowledge that his time had finally run out. He was caught and would pay for his crimes tonight.

Without another thought, Zane slammed his claws into the man’s chest and sliced it open with the infallible precision of a man who’d performed this task before. Ignoring the bloodcurdling screams, he plunged his hands inside and jerked the ribs apart. Blood spurted onto him, liberally gushing from the open chest. He inhaled the scent, the smell of life and death equally strong. Despite the fact that he’d only just fed, hunger surged, but it was a different kind of hunger this time, not for food, but for revenge. Sweeter than hunger, it begged to be satisfied by the only means possible.

Zane jammed his hand through the chest wall and reached for the beating heart. His palm clamped around it, the life-sustaining organ beating into his fist, its spasms still strong and fighting against the inevitable. “You’ll never hurt anybody again.”

As he tore the beating heart from its body, the man’s eyes went blank. Zane stared at the still-beating heart in his hand as the warm blood dripped from the torn veins and arteries and ran down his hand and wrist. A river of it tunneled under the sleeve of his black shirt, soaking it, pasting it against his skin. His heartbeat slowed to near normal.

It was done.

“Maria, he’s dead. You’re safe now.”

Zane pivoted, but Maria was gone. In her stead, a strawberry blond, young woman cowered against the dumpster, whimpering and shaking like a leaf. Tears had dissolved her black mascara and left long dark streaks along her cheeks. Her lips quivered.

Zane blinked. Maria wasn’t safe. Maria was gone, and he couldn’t bring her back. But this girl here was alive, and her attacker was dead.

He took a step toward her to impart the good news, but she scrambled back and away from him. “Noooo!” she echoed breathlessly, her eyes frantically searching for an escape route as if she thought Zane was coming after her next.

“I won’t hurt you.” He stretched his bloody hands toward her, but his gesture only made her shriek in panic.

Zane knew what she saw. His jeans and shirt were soaked in blood. The sticky, warm liquid had even penetrated his boots. But that wasn’t the worst. The girl he’d rescued saw his vampire side, the deadly claws, the sharp fangs that pushed past his lips, and the glowing red eyes that made him look like the devil. His bald head only accentuated the air of danger that always accompanied him even when he was in his human form. Even without his fangs extended, people feared him—as they should.

He’d massacred a man like a butcher slaughtered a pig and felt no remorse. He’d done what was necessary, even if most people would never understand it. Evil had to be eradicated instantly, before it had a chance to grow bigger and turn into a festering cancer that could destroy an entire people. As it had once done while the world had stood by and watched.

They’d stood by until it was too late, until the worst had been done.

“I’ll make you forget,” Zane promised the scared girl and allowed his mental powers to take hold of her mind, erasing everything that had happened tonight, including the rape. When she woke tomorrow, she wouldn’t remember anything about the man who’d attacked her, nor the man who’d saved her from this monster.

Or was Zane the monster? Was he the one to be feared, the one who was evil for wanting to avenge what had been done to him and his family?

As he stalked through the night, the warm blood of his victim rapidly drying on his skin and clothes, once again the face of his torturer hovered before him, taunting him. He had to close this chapter of his life and find him, otherwise peace would elude him and happiness remain a foreign word.

Help make Samson's Lovely Mortal free on Amazon

As all of you ferocious readers out there know, Amazon occasionally price-matches free books on other sites. I would love for them to make Samson's Lovely Mortal free on Amazon again so that more readers get a chance at reading the first book in the series for free.

If you want to help me with that, here's what you can do:

Go to the book on Amazon: Samson's Lovely Mortal and click on " Tell us about a lower price" (just below the bestseller ranking in the middle of the page.

Then fill in the window that opens up and tell them it's available for $0 at either of the following links  (just copy and paste the links):

Apple http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/samsons-lovely-mortal/id435208984?mt=11   

Kobo http://kobobooks.com/ebook/Samsons-Lovely-Mortal-Scanguards-Vampires/book-vvso4iYWjkWk-HUb_B1mHw/page1.html

Google http://books.google.com/books?printsec=frontcover&id=Gm5MvGgJUrUC#v=onepage&q&f=false

Thanks for your help! And I hope Amazon listens to you!