Samhain Publishing

What kind of woman would carve her initial into a man’s chest? What kind of a man would tattoo that wound to make it permanent?

Meet Alya Adad and Mikhail Faustin, the darkest, most reckless characters I’ve ever written. On their twisted, blood-soaked path to love, they break every rule in the book, write a few rules of their own, and break those, too.

For those of you who have been following the Faustin Brothers series, get ready to plunge into the shadow world of the vampires, a world that was only hinted at it in the first two books. Damned by Blood, the conclusion of the trilogy, releases today.

Early reviews are in—sort of! I just caught this thrilling tweet from Dear Author: “evie byrne’s Damned by Blood threw down. It was dangerous and dirty and I loved it.”

Read excerpts from the series here at Samhain, and visit my website for more excerpts, reviews and author’s notes. For a chance to win a free copy of Damned by Blood, check out today’s post at my blog, The Erotická Revue.

(Sincere apologies to Scott Carpenter for altering his beautiful cover!)

Here’s a question for you. When considering a book by an author you don’t know, do you need to read an excerpt of book you buy it? Or is the blurb—or the cover—or the buzz—enough to get you to give it a try? Recently I was surprised to find out that many people never bother to read excerpts, and even more people read them only occasionally. The blurb, it seems, is more important to most folks.

See, I don’t trust blurbs. And you know what they say about covers. Excerpts are the key for me. I won’t buy a book unless I’ve read some of it. Even if a friend shoves a book in my hands and says, “You have to read this!,” I’ll still skulk off by myself and read a page or two before committing to it. For me, the author’s voice is everything. If I like the way her words ring in my head, I will follow her almost anywhere. If, for some reason, her words rub me wrong, I can’t read the book, even if I love the concept.

So what about you? What’s that magic X-factor that allows you take a risk on a new book?

I write about shadow-dwelling vampires, but I like to counterbalance that with time spent in my sunny herb garden. I’m a big fan of using food and herbs to heal, and I wanted to share with you my latest discovery: honey heals cuts.

(Pardon? What, you thought I was going to write about something salacious? Some naughty use for honey? Me??? Get your minds out of the gutter! )

Raw honey—and it must be raw or it’s useless—is a bit of a miracle substance. It’s a naturally soothing antibiotic and has been used as such since ancient times on cuts and burns. I dab honey on pimples before I go to bed and have found it very effective in clearing up little breakouts. Yet I never had the guts to push the envelope and try honey on an open wound—until now.

Two weeks ago, while getting ready for a party, I was frantically cutting lemon slices on a mandoline, and because I never learn my lesson (i.e never, ever, use a mandoline while in a rush), I took a deep divot out of the back of my ring finger.

Instead of using Neosporin as I usually would, I smeared the wound with raw honey, wrapped it in a Band-Aid and went to greet my guests. In the back of my mind I hoped I wouldn’t end up with a raging infection—or an invasion of ants!

What happened exceeded my expectations. My wound knitted neatly and quickly. Today it’s just a thin pink line. You would never guess how broad and deep the cut was, and by the looks of it, I won’t have a scar at all. That’s significant, because I scar easily.

So go to your health food store or local farmer’s market and get yourself a jar of raw, organic honey. It will be expensive compared to the processed commercial stuff, but it never goes bad (really, never!) and you don’t use much of it for this sort of thing. One small jar will last you forever as long as you refrain from snacking out of it!

Does anybody have any honey cures that they’d like to share?

Honey photograph courtesy of alsjhc’s photostream

I never was a big vampire fan before I started writing about them. Sure, I understand the sexy mystique—the devouring of the object of your desire, the absolute claiming—but I also couldn’t help but think of them as gigantic parasites, or worse, the literal embodiment of a dysfunctional co-dependent relationship. I also never liked the immortality thing in the context of romance. It makes for great, tortured literary characters, but I could never really buy into a romance where the age difference in the couple spans centuries. I’m too pragmatic for that.

So I certainly never meant to write a vampire romance, but my subconscious did. It took all my objections, processed them, and threw back a solution: a vampire I could love.

As a result, I began to be haunted by snippety little visions of this very young, down-to-earth vampire named Alex talking to his crazy mother about how much he wanted to get married. (His mother? Married? Wha..???)

I ignored these visions as long as I could. I simply didn’t want to write a vampire story. The market was saturated with vampires. I told myself that readers had moved on to exotic shifters and demons and the like. But Alex wasn’t a shifter or a demon or an alien, he was adamantly a vampire—a natural vampire, mortal, gifted in some ways and disabled in others.

In the end, I had to write down his story just so that he and his mother would leave me alone. Thus the Faustin Bros. series was born: three books, one for Alex and then two more for his intriguing big brothers who showed up while I was writing the first.

Alex’s story, Called by Blood, came out 3 months ago and I’m happy and relieved to say that reader comments and reviews reassure me that I have in fact managed to write a worhwhile vampire romance. Paranormal Romance called it a “new and refreshing twist on vampires.” Holly at The Book Binge said “It’s no secret that I took a break from paranormals ages ago….So I’m sure it’ll come as a great shock to you that not only did I read a vampire paranormal romance, but I actually enjoyed it. Quite a bit…” Mrs. Giggles gave in an 87, calling it “humorous yet sexy and tongue-in-cheek romantic urban fantasy.”

The book releasing today. Bound by Blood, is about Alex’s grumpy, workaholic brother, Gregor. He has no intention of getting married, but he’s about to be corralled by fate. Bound by Blood is the funniest of the three books, in my opinion. The chemistry between laconic Gregor and his true love, Maddy—a geeky librarian from Queens—went snap, crackle pop from their first meeting on the page. All I had to do sit back and take dictation. They remind me of those classic bickering couples from old Hollywood.

I loved every second I spent writing this story, and hope you will enjoy reading it as much.

To catch the flavor of the book, check out the first chapter here at Samhain, or see Maddy and Gregor in…uh…action together in another excerpt at my own site.

Also be sure to visit my blog, The Eroticka Revue, for a chance to win a book, and maybe a little something pretty as well!

A quick note on the chronology of the series:

The third book, the one known around the house as “the twisted one”, is Damned by Blood, the story of the icy eldest brother, Mikhail. That story is coming soon.

All around the world, geeks like me are starting to get a teeny bit excited about the upcoming Star Trek movie. I think this beautiful —and really very funny—corset by EveningArwen at Etsy captures the passion and creativity of the fans of that franchise—their ability to take hold of that mythology and make it their own. It also makes me laugh, because it is without a doubt the perfect piece of fetish wear for the shamelessly geeky heroine of my upcoming Samhain release, Bound by Blood.

Some other corsets and corset-like things to amaze and delight you:

• An amazing beer tab corset

• A Hello Kitty corset!

• A cool pair of punk rock corset gloves for knitters

• A graceful corset t-shirt for sewers

• A darling corset purse for those of us who can’t knit, sew, or shove ourselves into a corset.

Hello! My name is Eustacia Victoire Byrne, but unless you happen to be my mother, my old family doctor, or one of the sisters from my parochial school, please call me Evie. I live and work in Los Angeles. When I’m not writing fiction, I write non-fiction under a different name.

Many author biographies claim that the author has been writing stories since she could first wrap her fingers around a crayon. Not me. If I picked up a crayon, I drew a picture with it. My background is in art, but now I’m drawing with words and I’ve never been happier.

To learn about my books and read an excerpt or two, please visit my website, www.eviebyrne.com.

If you like erotica and the naughty side of art history, please visit my blog, The Erotická Revue.

Here’s a quick taste of Called by Blood, a funny/hot/dark/sweet tale of a vampire finding his mate. I had so much fun writing this book—I hope you will enjoy reading it just as much. Let me know!

Helena gasped and clasped his head, clenching his hair in her fingers. The scent rising off her turned primal and lush. It made his nostrils flare and his saliva run. She was about to come. Alex couldn’t repress a deep growl.

Maybe he’d just immolate with the sunrise.

*

Read the rest of this excerpt here. Read a different one at my website.

It’s not even Christmas yet and I’ve slid on past simple holiday indulgence into complete sugar squalor. Fudge. Eggnog. Red velvet cake. Baileys. I don’t know when I last saw a vegetable. I’m at parties late every night and up early in the morning. To drag my sorry carcass through the day, I drink pots and pots of coffee and make forays into the cookie tin.

It’s time for a nutritional intervention! Tonight I’m breaking out my favorite winter tonic—nettle tea. It good for all that ails you. Nettle is that stern mistress you crawl back to when you’ve been bad.

Yes, I’m talking about regular old stinging nettle, Urtica dioica, wicked as it is widespread. Nettle is a nutritional powerhouse, long admired by traditional healers. Its prickly leaves are packed with calcium, magnesium, iron, chlorophyll, B complex vitamins and everyone’s winter necessity, vitamin C.

The tea is deep green and tastes almost like vegetable broth. It’s hard to describe the taste—not sweet, not bitter, not herbal, just green. Most people like it from the start, and the more you drink it, the more you come to crave that unique flavor.

You can buy nettle tea or tinctures at health food stores, but I gather mine in the wild. It saves money, and it’s kind of a thrill to harvest a plant that fights back.

You’ll find nettles growing in wet places everywhere, maybe even in your own backyard! I search in the dappled shade alongside streams, drainage ditches and roadsides. When you go to harvest, take a big bag, scissors or clippers, and wear gloves and long sleeves. Be sure to tuck your sleeves into your gloves. Your wrists will thank you.

Dried nettles do not sting. I carefully bundle my fresh nettles and hang them upside down (somewhere they won’t smack anyone in the head) until the leaves are dry enough to crumble. Then I strip them from their stems and store the leaves in glass jars in the cupboard. One harvest will keep you in emerald green restorative tonic for a year.

To see lots of good pictures of nettle plants, and to learn more about them, go to the website of wild plant expert, Steve Brill:

http://www.wildmanstevebrill.com/Plants.Folder/Nettle.html

Best wishes to you and yours for the holidays!

The Urban Dictionary word of the day for October 4, 2008:

manicorn: a mythical male creature who is successful (read: pursuing his passion and can pay his electric bills/rent), funny, chivalrous, masculine (read: not chauvinistic), adventurous, artistic (read: not suicidal).

A friend forwarded this to me for a laugh, but it got me to thinking. I write romance, therefore I manufacture manicorns. Romance heroes are perfect men: tall, gorgeous, ripped, commanding, successful, respected, protective, fair, beloved by animals and children, sensitive to the needs of the heroine, and of course, highly skilled, tireless lovers.

The logical part of me knows that any man embodying all those qualities would indeed be as rare as a unicorn. Yet I shiver with pleasure just reviewing the list. The part of me that is responsible for writing romance—and the part that loves reading romance— says “Yes! Him! I want him!”

So what is it with us and these mythical perfect men? What role do they fulfill in our lives? Why do we need them?

We fans of romance have plenty of men in our lives: husbands, boyfriends, sons, brothers, friends and fathers. We love our men, but I’d be willing to bet that few women (or men!) are lucky enough to snare a genuine manicorn as a partner.

Like us, our men are flawed. They’re sweethearts with pot bellies and thinning hair. They think belching is hilarious—no matter what their age. Their eyes glaze over when we try to explain to them the subtle nuances of female interaction. They’re terrible at finding things. In fact, they couldn’t find a boa constrictor in the fridge if it wasn’t on its usual shelf. You know who I’m talking about.

We love our big lugs, but if I wrote a real guy into the role of romance hero I probably wouldn’t sell many books. The Kingdom of Romancia is the domain of the ever-elusive manicorn. Critics from the outside might say that fantasizing about imaginary men is a form of escape and wish fulfillment for unhappy women. That, of course, is complete bull crap.

I have a theory of my own about why we love our heroes. I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours. This is a little out there, but I’m going with it. I see the romance hero as an embodiment of the sacred masculine. A good heroine embodies the sacred feminine. And more, that part of me which reflects the sacred feminine responds to the romance hero on an elemental level.

What do I mean by sacred masculine? I mean a man who’s left his boyhood behind. A man who has fully embraced the challenges, sacrifices and responsibilities of adulthood, and more, a man who is strong enough to lead others by example. The sacred feminine is the opposite pole. And betwixt the two poles lies quite a charge.

It is this strong ethical and moral core which makes a hero worth swooning over. Even the worst Regency rake will show these qualities by the end of a romance. As much as we like crooked smiles with dimples, smoldering eyes and hard abs, these traits quickly lose their charm if they are not married to higher qualities.

These higher qualities reside in our real men—their housecleaning disabilities aside. We see the strength, the tenderness, the self-sacrifice, the determination and dedication of book heroes in our everyday heroes. Far from making us dissatisfied with our men, I’d posit that romance heroes are a celebration of what we love most about men, as well as a reminder that we are heroines ourselves.

So tell me what you think about these perfect men. Do you ever compare your man to romance manicorns? Do these men help you understand men better, or do you think they set up unattainable fantasies? And what does romance teach girls about men?