Pick Your Prize Giveaway!

Let's have a giveaway to fill up those new Christmas Kindles!
Between now and New Year's Day, you can enter over and over again to win one of my e-books.  That's right; if you win, I'll contact you, and you can choose which book you want!  Fun, right?
Here are your three options:

Becoming Brigid.  Click on the link to read about it.

Confessions of an Average Half-Vampire.  Click on the link to read about it.

A Clockwork Christmas.  Click on the link to read about it.

You can tweet every day and pin every day (it needs to be a new pin onto a different board each time, though.  I WILL check.).

UPDATE 12/23/13:  I've already had to delete a cheater!  Look, people, I freakin' TEACH JUNIOR HIGH.  Do you honestly think I'm NOT going to check your entries?  Seriously?  Think again.
Play fair.  Enter honestly.  Or I will delete your entry.  Period.

Ready to enter?  Here you go:


a Rafflecopter giveaway

Clockwork Christmas Is Now Available! (And I'm Giving Away Two E-Copies This Week!)

My steampunk Christmas short story collection is now available on Amazon for 99¢.  Just click here.

It's Christmas, 1874, like you've never experienced it before.  Like it never was, actually.

In "The Cephalopod Who Saved Christmas," lighthouse keeper Zeke Longstalks is troubled by his son Timmy's request for a Christmas tree when there's no way to cross the dangerous shoals of the River Victorianna -- the largest in all Pacifica -- in order to find one.  In "The Steampirates of St. Andrews," merchant sailman (and sometime smuggler) London Sunday is over the North Sea aboard the airship La Virgen del Aire, hoping for a way to distance himself from the noisy, smelly animals below deck.  In "The Wise Men and the Angel," apprentices Bertie Haven and Oliver Laird are worried that the secrets of their employer's son might become public with the arrival of the theocratic leader of the Independent State of Deseret.  And in "The Reason," Derrik Andrews sits in a boardinghouse in New York City, longing for a future which has been stolen from him -- by his own mistake.

These four short stories form a stand-alone collection, but they also serve as a teaser forThe Chocolate Smuggler's Notebook, an upcoming steampunk adventure by Lisa Shafer.


To celebrate the official release, I'm giving away two e-copies this week.  Here's the rafflecopter entry form:


a Rafflecopter giveaway

The winners will be announced on Thanksgiving Day.

Announcing Clockwork Christmas! (And Requesting Reviewers.)

It's Christmas, 1874, like you've never experienced it before.  Like it never was, actually.

In "The Cephalopod Who Saved Christmas," lighthouse keeper Zeke Longstalks is troubled by his son Timmy's request for a Christmas tree when there's no way to cross the dangerous shoals of the River Victorianna -- the largest in all Pacifica -- in order to find one.  In "The Steampirates of St. Andrews," merchant sailman (and sometime smuggler) London Sunday is over the North Sea aboard the airship La Virgen del Aire, hoping for a way to distance himself from the noisy, smelly animals below deck.  In "The Wise Men and the Angel," apprentices Bertie Haven and Oliver Laird are worried that the secrets of their employer's son might become public with the arrival of the theocratic leader of the Independent State of Deseret.  And in "The Reason," Derrik Andrews sits in a boardinghouse in New York City, longing for a future which has been stolen from him -- by his own mistake.

These four short stories form a stand-alone collection, but they also serve as a teaser for The Chocolate Smuggler's Notebook, an upcoming steampunk adventure by Lisa Shafer.


*****
And so, I finished this over the weekend.  It's 33 pages, a collection of four steampunk Christmas short stories.  I plan to release it on November 25 and sell it -- e-book only -- for 99¢ on Amazon.
However, I hate to see it languishing unreviewed, as is the fate of most of my books for weeks after publication.  But this needs to be out for Christmas sales; it can't wait weeks for reviews.
Thus, if anyone would like to have a free PDF copy of it THIS week, ahead of publication, and with the promise you'll post a review of it on Amazon -- and I hope on Goodreads as well -- as soon as the book is available (i.e. on November 25), please leave your e-mail address in a comment (I won't publish the comment if it has an address in it.) below or else tweet or DM me your e-mail address. @lisamshafer
The book is short, about a half-hour's read.  And the review can be short; a paragraph would be just dandy.
The stories are rather funny -- at least, I think so.
Do I have any takers?  C'mon, it's a FREE BOOK.  Can you resist that?  (I hope not.)

So, What's Happening Now?

1) My goodreads contest ended on Halloween.  There were 389 entries (significantly fewer than for any Half-Vampire goodreads contest I've done), and 180 people added Becoming Brigid to their TBR list.  A girl named Hannah won, and I mailed off the book Friday.  (I hope she likes it and gives it a positive review somewhere.)
2) This Thursday I'm scheduled to meet with the creative writing club of a high school across town from where I teach.  This should be fun, as they're older kids and I don't know any of them -- for a change. :)
3) Yes, I'm aware that NaNoWriMo is starting.  I don't do NaNoWriMo.  I believe that writing is a craft which takes time.  I suspect that it is extremely unlikely that anyone could write a whole novel from outline to finished first draft in thirty days and have anything that wasn't 90% crap.  (And I read LOTS of self-published fiction which came from NaNoWriMos past and backs up my suspicions here.)
4) I am working on several things right now.
4a) One of them is a 2-book set of Confessions of an Average Half-Vampire and All in the Half-Vampire Family.

(Max in stereo with both HV books.)
I've finished putting them together -- and putting BACK all the italics which inconveniently disappear when I copy and paste.  But I've got to decide on and put in the "extras" at the back of the book and fix up a new cover.  I've been tinkering with variations on that original blood splatter, but nothing is jumping out at me as a good choice just yet.  (Yeah, I have about 15 photo aps on my iPad.)  At any rate, I hope to have this e-book only set ready to roll for Christmas sales.  :)

(A teaching colleague with both HV books.)
4b) I've had The (Dis)Appearance of Nerissa MacKay on hold for months now, as I've been so busy with finalizing Becoming Brigid and working on the first draft of The Chocolate Smuggler's Notebook.  But I hope to have some of these high school creative writing kids beta read if for me.  (I'm also still struggling with the cover of this one.)

4c) I've been pecking away at Chocolate Smuggler's Notebook, but I got stagnated and disappointed for a few days.  I then went back to my idea from last year of writing some short story prequels to introduce the world of the book, and I got another idea.  I decided I'd write a set of short stories as prequels to the prequels -- but Christmas stories!

I have 4 mapped out, and one and 3/4 of them written.  And tonight, I had Dad look over the covers I'd created.  He picked out the one he thinks is best, praised my color choice (usually very good), font choice, and letter placement (often where I have trouble).  Thus, the cover is set.  (Uh, I might add here that Dad spent his entire career as a commercial artist, the forerunner to today's graphic artists, so he knows what he's talking about.)
I hope to have a 99¢ story collection ready by Cyber Monday (e-book only).
5) I do have more contests planned and prizes sitting on my craft desk, ready to be sent out to winners.  I just keep hoping to get some more book reviews for Becoming Brigid, but they're not coming in very fast.  Perhaps I need to start the contest and see if that generates some interest????

6) I've certainly learned that posting photos on this blog (and on Pinterest and Twitter) REALLY increases my blog traffic.  I don't know that it's really increased book sales, but it certainly brings folks to the blog!