Preditors & Editors Readers Poll Results Are In!

I'm really proud and humbled to share this year's 2009 P&E Readers Poll results with you.

My short story collection, Metamorphorsis, finished in the top twenty five in the Best Anthology category and 17th in Best Cover Art.  Congratulations to my fabulous cover artist Renee George for that cover, which is one of my all time favorites.

Lovely, isn't it?

The last book in The Asphodel Cycle--Apostle of Asphodel finished fourteenth in Best Sci Fi/Fantasy Novel.  The Asphodel Cycle as a whole, then, has finished high in the polls for three years, garnering two top ten finishes in Best Sci Fi/Fantasy and a top five finish in Best Novel.  The absolute loyalty Asphodel fans have shown over the past three years is a humbling thing to witness.

And, finally, the first book of the Covenants trilogy, Breaking the Covenants,co-written with Rob Graham finished in fifth place in the Best Erotica category.  I now have a new banner to add to my collection:

So over the course of the past three years, collectively I've amassed five Top Ten finishes in the P&E Readers Poll and eight top twenty five finishes--all due to you!  Thank you, thank you, thank you--I cannot adequately express how amazing it is to me that I have readers who consistently appreciate my work enough to shower honors like this on it.

Thank you.

And one more bit of news--I will be attending the RT Book Lovers Convention in Columbus, Ohio from April 28-May 2. I'll be signing books, giving away e-books and lots of other goodies.  Drop by and see me at the Book Expo or just flag me down if you see me!  I'm looking forward to having a great time!

And now...I'm off.  This is moving week in the Summers household and I have to find a way to somehow get all of my books into portable receptacles.  I'm planning on spending tomorrow afternoon settling my books and getting my kitchen in order--the two things I love most about moving. After that, it's all drudgery.

And again, thank you. Get ready, though--there's going to be a lot of fun news this week from me!

Blast From The Past Blasts Into The Present

So every once in a while, I get sideswiped. Not often--it takes a lot to confuse me. But when something happens that shocks me, I get really shocked.

For example:

I got an email this weekend from an old friend I haven't heard from in years.  Turns out she'd gotten a hold of my first book (The Reckoning of Asphodel) and really liked it. So she bought the rest of them. Granted, that's enough to make me excited.  After all, we've all had dreams of going back to high school and having someone completely random tell you, "Yeah, I've read your book/seen your movie/danced to your album/been to one of your games." Right?

Well, she took it a bit further.  She had emailed me to inform me that having read my blog and my website and noting all the Preditors and Editors Readers Poll nominations I've gotten in the past, she thought she'd go vote for me this year.  And, when she didn't find my stuff on the Readers Poll yet, she nominated me.

So, allow me to announce the following:

Apostle of Asphodel, the concluding novel of my fantasy series The Asphodel Cycle, has been nominated for Best Sci Fi/Fantasy Novel of 2009.

Metamorphosis, the collection of my spec fic short stories published by Aspen Mountain Press, was nominated for Best Anthology.  Also, in a complete coincidence as best I can tell, the cover art by Renee George was nominated for Best Cover Art.

Breaking the Covenants, the first book of the Covenants gothic vampire romance series co-written with Canadian author Rob Graham, was nominated for Best Erotica.

And, strangely enough, I was nominated for Author of the Year.

This is my third year in a row with nominations in the P&E Readers Poll.  Last year, the second Asphodel book, The Gift of Redemption, placed in the Top Ten for Best Sci Fi/Fantasy Novel while its sequel Temptation of Asphodel placed in the Top Ten for Best Novel. So now all four Asphodel novels have been honored with readers' nominations on the P&E poll, which I find very exciting and gratifying. As I've been proofing the print galleys for Reckoning, I've allowed myself to get caught up in the editing side of things.  But this has changed my focus, quite properly, back to where it should be--the reader.

And I figure that if I'm entertaining someone who is reading my work, I must be doing something halfway right. 

So Oxford commas and serial adverb abuse aside, please let me thank you, the people who read my stories, for allowing me the very great privilege and honor of sharing my worlds with me. Hopefully, the stories I write in the future will get better.  Hopefully, I improve in my craft.  Hopefully, one day, I may actually get one of these stories right.  But until then, thank you for bearing with me as I follow the writers' path.

If you wanted to check out the 2009 Preditors and Editors Readers' Poll and maybe...you know...vote or something, follow this link.

I'm off to go shovel more snow from the driveway.  And thus does the mundane burst my little bubble.  Then, maybe some football and perhaps...the tiniest little amount of shameless begging for votes.

It's Almost Time For Vampires--And Some Winners!

Yay! Breaking the Covenants is coming out this Friday--after an unforeseen and regrettable delay last week. Rob and I are very excited. We've worked hard on this project (still are--there are more books in it, after all) and are anxious to see what our readers think. For those of you who read the Asphodel series, a moment of warning--this is MUCH different from my fantasy work.

Vampires are fun though. Not as much fun as killing Elves, but what could be?

Tomorrow night I'm doing a chat for writers in the Absolute Write chat room at 9 pm EST. Just click the chat room link at the top of the page. I'll be discussing world building, fantasy archetypes and new mythology--and might very well give a book or two away in the process. Bring your questions and be ready to have a good time!

As for winners---yes I promised you some of those:

Winner of a copy of The Reckoning of Asphodel--Marianne Stephens!

Winner of a copy of Metamorphosis--Babyblue22!

Winner of a copy of The Vampire Covenants 1: Breaking the Covenants--tinkandalissa!

Winner of a copy of ALL my books--Tami!

Congratulations and email me with contact info and the format you want your books in!

Metamorphosis is Released!

Today's the big day--my short story collection Metamorphosis is being released by Aspen Mountain Press. It's my ode to my classical idol Ovid and his great work Metamorphoses.

Metamorphosis is a journey through the short stories of critically acclaimed author Celina Summers. Every story deals with a transformation--from a world where the Church places the blame for original sin upon men to a New Orleans garden that brings a play to life. The collection culminates with a previously unpublished prequel to Summers' best selling epic fantasy series The Asphodel Cycle. Sometimes funny, sometimes horrifying, Metamorphosis is a romp through the realms of speculative fiction--where anything can happen and nothing is quite as it seems.

You can find Metamorphosis at http://www.aspenmountainpress.com/new-releases/metamorphosis/prod_226.html -- where you can read an excerpt from one of my stories, Funeral Meats. It will also be available soon on Fictionwise, Amazon, Mobipocket, Kindle and other online retailers. And at only $2.50--what a bargain!

I hope that you all enjoy the stories of Metamorphosis, because I certainly enjoyed writing them.

I also wanted to prove that I could write something shorted than 150,000 words. *wink* They don't call my fantasy 'epic' for nothing. The fabulous cover art was done by Renee George and the collection was edited by my good friend Lori Basiewicz.

Have fun and thanks! I'll be spending the day wedding dress shopping in Kentucky with my daughter. In yet another instance of life imitating art, she, too is going through her own metamorphosis. Timing is everything.

Metamorphosis

Here it is--the long promised cover for Metamophosis, my collection of short stories being released by Aspen Mountain Press on March 27, 2009! Pretty sweet, huh? Thought you might like it.

Metamorphosis

Metamorphosis is a journey through the short stories of critically acclaimed author Celina Summers. Every story deals with a transformation--from a world where the Church places the blame for original sin upon men to a New Orleans garden that brings a play to life. The collection culminates with a previously unpublished prequel to Summers' best selling epic fantasy series The Asphodel Cycle. Sometimes funny, sometimes horrifying, Metamorphosis is a romp through the realms of speculative fiction--where anything can happen and nothing is quite as it seems.
Coming March 27, 2009 from Aspen Mountain Press.

This collection was edited by my very good friend and outstanding writer in her own right, Lori Basiewicz. You can check out her pet project Trunk Novels for some outstanding pieces of literature that she's set her red pencil to. The cover art was done by Renee George, whose cover for my book The Asphodel Cycle: Temptation of Asphodel was nominated for Best Cover of 2008 by Love Romances and More Cafe.

Read an Ebook Week! And a contest...

This week is Read an Ebook Week and so, in honor of the occasion, I'm giving some lucky person all three Asphodel novels absolutely for free! All you have to do is shout out in the comments portion of this thread and you're entered. At the end of the week, I'll draw a winner and that person will get to Read not just one Ebook, but Three! That way you'll be all ready for the release of The Asphodel Cycle 4: Apostle of Asphodel when it comes out in May.

So this is Read Three Ebooks Week in Elf-Killing land--welcome aboard. It's also a good time to check out my fan page at Facebook and join up. That's the first place to look for news these days.

I just got the cover art for Metamorphosis--it's WONDERFUL. I'll share it with you guys later.

A Great Day

So, I've been working hard on my paranormal romance/urban fantasy theater novel Carnival, now renamed Deception Enters Stage Left, getting it ready to query. Since the month of February is cursed in my household--a superstition my husband created and now has me believing in--I decided that I wouldn't query until March 1. Keeping that goal firmly fixed in my mind, I started to send out queries after midnight.

Then this morning, I found a request in my mailbox. That's always exciting. Before I'd quite gotten the SQUEEEEEE! out of my mouth, I hit refresh and found another. This time, I bypassed the SQUEEEEE! and went straight for the valium. I'm an old-fashioned kind of girl in that way. Then I went and took a hot bath--with bubbles naturally--before I returned to my computer.

And lo and behold, there was a third request in my email.

Three. In one day. Dang. I'm not the mass-query kind of writer. I send out only a few at a time, mostly because I had a nightmare once of sending out a hundred queries and getting all the responses screwed up as a result. So I send out small numbers--like ten. I usually pick them with an eye to their response times too. So while I might send out a couple with quick turnaround times on query letters, I compensate by sending out some that have longer response times and then some that are the ones who say on their website "if we aren't interested, we won't reply." That way, I figure that when the inevitable rejections come, they'll stagger in instead of swarming. Then I send out one query to replace the rejection so that I never have more than ten out at once.

That's my theory anyway. I like to try to keep my stress levels down as much as possible.

So anyway, now I had three submission packages to get out today. I always--always--double check my submissions before they go out just to make sure that something wonky hasn't happened and I knew that was going to take up a bit of time. Problem was, I already was fully booked for the day. I had to get four more chapters edited for a project I'm working on for another writer, I had a brainstorming session with Rob for our vampire project, I had a doctor's appointment, a book trailer to make, edits to get done for my short story collection (Metamorphosis) coming out in a couple of weeks plus my daily writing hours--and I even had hopes of getting the house in order.

Yes, yes...the house is still messy. But, here I am at four am the next morning with everything else on my list done. I'm feeling pretty proud of myself. Now for the fun part--I have to get up at eight.

A writer's life is grand, isn't it? Hectic, stressful and bizarre, but grand. I figure as long as I don't turn the news on for a while, my mood might remain cheerful for a couple of more hours at least. Here's hoping!

Wow. I just realized something. I even got a blog post into the mix. Wonders never cease.