Tag Archives: contests

Avelynn Monster Swag Giveaway

As a huge thank you to all the wonderful people who have purchased a copy of Avelynn, I am running a Monster Avelynn Swag Giveaway!

You must have purchased a copy (either ebook or paperback) of Avelynn to enter. If you haven’t purchased your copy yet, the contest will stay open until December 31st. Lots of time to get in your Christmas shopping! 😀

Included in the prize lot: T-shirt (size medium or large), mug, mouse pad, notebook, pen, two bookmarks, and two Avelynn cover magnets.

Swag Giveaway Prize Lot (2)

Also included is a necklace with a Prosperity Rune engraved on the pewter pendant.

Swag Giveaway Pendant (2)

You can earn BONUS entries by posting a review to one of the book sites listed. Post to all 5 sites and earn an extra entry!

Good Luck!
To enter the contest click here: a Rafflecopter giveaway

Terms and conditions will apply. Contest open to North American Residents only. 🙂

In gratitude,

Marissa xo

Hitting the Studs with Liv Rancourt

TWO more days everyone! Only two more days until Avelynn’s Publication Birthday! *cue happy dance*

Helping me celebrate are some pretty amazing authors, and today I would like to introduce you to Liv Rancourt​!

selfie with roses

Not only is King Stud our romance novel of the month in my book club: Brooklin Moms Wine and Book Lovers, it’s also $0.99 on Amazon for 2 days only!

Here’s a little about King Stud:

KingStud-evernightpublishing-JayAheer2015-smallpreview

The hardest part of any remodel is avoiding the studs


Blurb

Danielle’s got three months to make her Grandmother’s rundown Craftsman house livable. Her game plan is to get in, get grubby, and get back home to L.A. She needs a carpenter, and her best friend’s younger brother is a good one. It’s hard to ignore the buffed body under Ryan’s paint-splattered sweatshirts, but her friend declares he’s off-limits so Danielle reluctantly agrees.

Ryan doesn’t have the cleanest record, anyway. His recently ex-ed girlfriend wants him back, and he has a reputation for brawling. He’s also had a crush on Danielle since he was a kid. Despite their nine-year age difference, he knows she’s worth pursuing.

Soon the paint under Danielle’s fingernails starts feeling more natural than the L.A. sunshine. She’ll have to navigate plumbing disasters, money problems, and one seriously cranky best friend to find something she hasn’t had before: a real home, and a man who loves her.

KingStud-hardest part-Teaser-3Drender

To find out more about all of Liv’s books, visit her Amazon Author Page

Or follow her on Facebook

Don’t forget to pop into Avelynn’s Facebook Launch Party to eMeet Liv when she takes over!

In gratitude,

Marissa xo

Getting Funky with A.b. Funkhauser

FIVE freakishly fantastic days until #Avelynn hits the world! I’m so grateful for the fabulous friends who are going to help me celebrate this dream come true!

I’d like you to extend a fiery welcome to A.b. Funkhauser​.

New Funkhauser

Here’s a little about her book: Heuer Lost and Found

Heuer Lost and Found - Print

Unrepentant cooze hound lawyer JĂŒrgen Heuer dies suddenly and unexpectedly in his litter-strewn home. Undiscovered, he rages against God, Nazis, deep fryers and analogous women who disappoint him.

At last found, he is delivered to Weibigand Brothers Funeral Home, a ramshackle establishment peopled with above average eccentrics, including boozy Enid, a former girl friend with serious denial issues. With her help and the help of a wise cracking spirit guide, Heuer will try to move on to the next plane. But before he can do this, he must endure an inept embalming, feral whispers, and Enid’s flawed recollections of their murky past.

Is it really worth it?

For more information about A.b. and Heuer, visit her website

Or follow her on Facebook

Don’t forget to pop into Avelynn’s Facebook Launch Party on September 8th, to eMeet A.b. as she takes over!

Gonzo Funkauser

Want more? Here’s an excerpt from Heuer to whet your whistle. 😀

Two Weeks Ago

The house, like the man who lived in it, was remarkable: a 1950s clapboard-brick number with a metal garage door that needed serious painting. Likewise, the windows, which had been replaced once in the Seventies under some home improvement program, then never again. They were wooden and they were cracked, allowing wasps and other insects inside.

This was of little consequence to him.

The neighbors, whom Heuer prodigiously ignored, would stare at the place. Greek, Italian, and house proud, they found the man’s disdain for his own home objectionable. He could see it on their faces when he looked out at them through dirty windows.

To hell with them.

If the neighbors disapproved of the moss green roof with its tar shingles that habitually blew off, then let them replace it. Money didn’t fall from the sky and if it did, he wouldn’t spend it on improvements to please strangers.

They were insects.

And yet there were times when JĂŒrgen Heuer was forced to compromise. Money, he learned, could solve just about anything. But not where the willful and the pernicious were concerned. These, once singled out, required special attention.

Alfons Vermiglia, the Genovese neighbor next door, had taken great offense to his acacia tree, a towering twenty-five foot behemoth that had grown from a cutting given to him by a lodge brother. The acacia was esteemed in Masonic lore appearing often in ritual, rendering it so much more than just mere tree. In practical terms, it provided relief, offering shade on hot days to the little things beneath it. And it bloomed semi-annually, whimsically releasing a preponderance of white petals that carried on the wind mystical scent—the same found in sacred incense and parfums.

What horseshit.

It was a dirty son of a bitch of a tree that dropped its leaves continuously from spring to fall, shedding tiny branches from its diffident margins. These were covered in nasty little thorns that damaged vinyl pool liners and soft feet alike. They also did a pretty amazing job of clogging Alfons’ pool filter, turning his twenty-five hundred gallon toy pool green overnight.

This chemistry compromised the neighbor’s pleasure and it heightened his passions, blinding Alfons to the true nature of his enemy. He crossed over onto Heuer’s property and drove copper nails into the root system. It was an old trick, Byzantine in its treachery; the copper would kill the tree slowly over time leading no one to suspect foul play.

But Heuer was cagey and suspicious by nature, so when the tree displayed signs of failure, he knew where to look.

The acacia recovered and Alfons said nothing. Heuer planted aralia—the “Devil’s Walking Stick”—along the fence line and this served as an even thornier reminder that he knew. And if there was any doubt at all, he went further by coating his neighbor’s corkscrew hazel with a generous dose of Wipe Out.

Intrusive neighbors and their misplaced curiosities were, by turns, annoying and amusing and their interest, though unwanted, did not go unappreciated. The Greeks on the other side of him weren’t combative in the least and they offered gardening advice whenever they caught him out of doors. The man, Panos, talked politics and cars, and expressed interest in the vehicle that sat shrouded and silent on Heuer’s driveway. He spoke long and colorfully about the glory days of Detroit muscle cars and how it all got bungled and bargained away.

“They sacrificed an industry to please a bunch of big mouths in Hollywood,” Panos would rant in complete disregard for history: Al Gore and Global Warming didn’t kill the GTO; the OPEC oil crisis did. But there was no point in telling him that.

Panos was an armchair car guy and incurable conspiracy theorist. He also kept to his side of the fence, unlike his wife, Stavroula, who was driven by natural instinct. Not content to leave an unmarried man alone, she routinely crossed Heuer’s weedy lawn, banging on the door with offers of food and a good housecleaning.

Heuer had no trouble accepting her cooking. But he declined her brush and broom. Was it kindness, or was she trying to see inside? He suspected the latter.

No one was ever seen entering Heuer’s house and while this piqued public interest, he never gave in, not even to those who were kind to him. He liked Panos and Stavroula and he regretted poisoning their cat.

But not enough to let them in to his home.

Others on the street had less contact with him. Canvassers at election time would disturb him, in spite of the lawn sign warning the solicitous away. That this didn’t apply to neighbor kids brave enough to pedal cookies and magazine subscriptions in spite of the sign, was a testament, perhaps, to some residual soft spot in his heart that endured.

Even so, he knew that people talked about him and, frankly, he had trouble accounting for their fascination. Short, curt, bespectacled, he courted an ethos that favored enforced detachment. When people got close enough to hear him speak, they detected a trace of an accent. Now faded after years of U.S. residency, his speech still bore the unmistakable patterns of someone undeniably foreign. Elaborate, overwrought and heavy on the adverbs, he spoke very much like his neighbors. Yet the distance between them was incalculable


***

Day 1: Post Mortem

Heuer shook his head, finding it especially odd that he would think of such things at this particular moment. The circumstances, after all, were beyond peculiar. Coming out of thick, dense fog, standing upright, looking wildly around, and having difficulty comprehending, the last thing that should trouble him was human relations.

The man on the floor would have agreed, had he not lacked the resources to speak.

Heuer canvassed his surroundings. The room, still dark, the shades drawn, and the plants Stavroula forced on him, wilted and dry, bespoke of an unqualified sadness. His computer, left on and unattended, buzzed pointlessly in the corner, its screen saver, a multi-colored Spirograph montage, interspersed with translucent images of faceless Bond girls, twisting ad infinitum for an audience of none.

What happened here?

The bottle of Johnnie Black lay open and empty on the bedroom floor, along with a pack of Marlboro’s, gifts from an old friend. The desk chair lay on its side, toppled, in keeping with the rest of the room. His bed sheets were twisted, the pillows on the floor, and there were stains on the walls; strange residues deposited over time representing neglect and a desire to tell.

He looked down at his hands. They kept changing; the veins, wavy, rose and fell like pots of worms.

Trippy.

There was no evidence of eating, however, and this was really weird, for it was in this room that Heuer lived. Flat screens, mounted on the ceiling and on the desktop, kept him in line with the world outside in ways that papers could not. Screens blasted twenty-four and seven with their talking heads and CNN, whereas papers were flat and dirty, suitable only for the bottoms of bird cages. He cancelled the dailies first and then the weeklies, seeing no value whatever in printed words.

Pictures were another matter. Several in paint and charcoal and sepia covered the walls and floors. He loved them all, and he stared at them for hours when he pondered. His beer fridge, humidor, and model rocket collection completed him; housing the things he loved, all within perfect reach.

His senses, though dulled, honed in on a scent, distant yet familiar, coming from inside the room. It was bog-like-foul like a place he’d visited long ago, buried under wood ash. He frowned.

What was the last thing he ate? Did he cook or go for takeout? He wanted to go down to the kitchen to check, but found, to his astonishment, that he could not get past the doorframe into the outer hall.

Nein, das kann nicht sein!—Now this is not right!—he fumed, switching to German. He would do this whenever he encountered static. The spit and sharp of it forced people back because they could not understand what he meant.

Unballing his fists he felt his chest, registering the sensation of “feel”—he could feel “touch,” but he could not locate the beating heart. Consciously knitting his brows, he considered other bodily wants, his legal mind checking and balancing the laws of nature against the laws of the impossible. He could not, for example, feel “hunger” and he wasn’t dying for a drink either.

Was this a mark of passage into the nether? The man on the floor had no comment.

He thought about his bowels and if they needed attention, but that, to his great relief, no longer appeared to matter. Regularity, in recent years, wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. When he was young, he reveled in a good clean out after the morning coffee because it reset his clock and established the tone for the rest of the day. Not so latterly. His prostate had kept its promise, letting him down, enlarging, pressing where it ought naught. Awake most nights, he lost sleep and dreams.

With this in mind, he bounced up and down on the soles of his expensive shoes in an effort to confirm if he was awake or not. Perhaps he was sleepwalking, or heading off to the can for another urinary evacuation that wouldn’t come?

The man on the floor ruled out these options.

He tried the door again, and again, to his dismay, he could not leave.

What to do? What to do?

‘I think, therefore I am,’ went the popular saying, but what good was ‘being’ when one was confined to a bedroom like a rat in a cage?

He struggled to remain calm, just as he became aware of that heavy oppressive feeling one gets before receiving bad news. Pacing back and forth across the ancient floorboards in the house he was born into, he checked for the kinds of incriminating evidence the court of public opinion would hold against him once found. Pornography, loaded handguns, too many candy wrappers all had to be dispatched before someone inevitably broke the door down.

As light turned to dark and day gave over into night, Heuer’s thoughts came faster and faster, in different languages, interspersed with corrugated images, accompanied by generous doses of Seventies rock; a fitting sound track for the old life, now ended.

He fell to his knees. Somewhere in this mélange was something to be grateful for and with time, he was sure, he would figure out what that single, great, thing might be. For now, all he could really do was take comfort in the fact that his death had been perfect.

In gratitude,

Marissa xo

Complete with Lynn Burke

Do you know what day it is? It’s day 7 of my Countdown to Avelynn, and I’d like to introduce you to another fabulous guest author: Author Lynn Burke​

Tracey Hanlon Photography
Tracey Hanlon Photography

Here’s a little about her latest book:

CwH Cover

Complete with Her

Bastian Risso breaks away from his loud, intrusive family and moves to Charleston, West Virginia. His new neighbor is a seemingly lonely soul, a kindred introvert who might be his perfect match. Her beauty calls to him like a siren, and determined not to be a chicken-shit, he steps out of his comfort zone to make her acquaintance.

Eve Thompson is protective of her privacy. She relishes her solitude as it keeps people from staring at her deformed upper lip or making fun of her speech impediment. Her persistent neighbor, however, proves a temptation too great to resist. His sincere smiles and compliments threaten to crumble the brick wall she hides behind. And his affections evoke feelings she can’t control.

Bastian plans to show Eve the beauty of who she is inside and out. But will his efforts break down her barriers or shatter both their fragile hearts?

For more about Lynn’s books, visit her Amazon Author Page

Or check out her website

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Join Avelynn’s Facebook Launch Party to meet Lynn in ePerson. 😀

In gratitude,

Marissa xo

Avelynn On The Road… Blogosphere Style

Join me for some blogosphere fun!
Join me for some blogosphere fun!

I’m thrilled to announce the Historical Fiction Virtual Blog Tour Schedule for Avelynn!

Pop in, follow along, and join in the fun. There will be prizes and giveaways too!

Monday, September 7
Review at Oh, for the Hook of a Book!

Tuesday, September 8
Review at A Chick Who Reads
Review & Giveaway at Historical Fiction Obsession

Wednesday, September 9
Review at Book Lovers Paradise
Excerpt at What Is That Book About
Review & Giveaway at Unshelfish

Thursday, September 10
Interview at Unshelfish
Guest Post at Book Lovers Paradise

Friday, September 11
Spotlight at The Never-Ending Book

Saturday, September 12
Excerpt & Giveaway at Teddy Rose Book Reviews Plus More

Sunday, September 13
Review at Genre Queen

Monday, September 14
Review at Ageless Pages Reviews

Tuesday, September 15
Review & Giveaway at Broken Teepee

Friday, September 18
Spotlight at Historical Fiction Connection

Saturday, September 19
Spotlight at Romantic Historical Reviews

Monday, September 21
Interview & Excerpt at Oh, for the Hook of a Book!

Tuesday, September 22
Review at Just One More Chapter

Wednesday, September 23
Review at Curling up by the Fire

Thursday, September 24
Review & Giveaway at 100 Pages a Day

Monday, September 28
Review at CelticLady’s Reviews

Tuesday, September 29
Review at Jorie Loves a Story
Review & Giveaway at Reading Lark

Wednesday, September 30
Review & Giveaway at Let Them Read Books
Interview at Jorie Loves a Story

Thursday, October 1
Review & Giveaway at A Literary Vacation

Friday, October 2
Review at The True Book Addict

AVELYNN Day 6 Cover Reveal Countdown!

Avelynn Cover Reveal Teaser #6

ONE HOUR and counting!

JOIN the event! Win LOTS of prizes! Every comment earns an entry for the giveaway that hour. Come in your pyjamas, in your underwear, heck, you’re welcome to hang out in your birthday suit! It’s all happening on Facebook, and it starts in less than an hour.

Here is your Day 6 AVELYNN Cover Reveal Countdown Teaser! (This one is EASY) Hope you’ve been keeping track.

Pop over to the party for your chance to win!

In gratitude,

Marissa xo

Goodreads Giveaway for Life!

Hurry! Enter today for your chance to win a copy of Life!

Open to residents of the United States and Canada.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

LIFE by Marissa Campbell

LIFE

by Marissa Campbell

Giveaway ends February 19, 2013.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win