The Church of Real Truth

We have been eagerly awaiting news on the title for Downside 4. Stacia has been talking a lot about needing to find a title that both she and her editor liked, and finally it seems we have a winner! Tonight an e-mail went aout to all members of the Downside Army with the title of Downside 4, which is hereby known as: *drumroll*

SACRIFICIAL MAGIC

What do you think? I love it! My first impulse was to try and figure out what it might mean, and according to Stacia “[i]t fits the book *very* well.”. It sounds ominous, but then again, it’s the Downside series, so that’s what we would expect.

I’m slowly, but continuously, updating different parts of the site. Recently I’ve added a page for A Glimpse of Darkness, a book that was a collaboration between five authors. Each author wrote their own chapter, and the direction each chapter should take was voted upon by the readers when the chapters were released online last fall.

The chapters are no longer available online. However, you can buy the book in e-format.

Buy A Glimpse of Darkness here.

To read more about the book, and see excerpts from the chapters, visit our page for the book, located in the menu, in our The Books section

The final clip that I’ve added to the Media pages, is a video of Stacia getting her Seshat tattoo. Seshat is a goddess of writing.

The clip was filmed for L.A. Ink. It never aired, but was released as extra material.

From the Suvudu Paranormal Blog:

In the upcoming season of Discovery Channel’s LA Ink, you can see Stacia get tattooed with a Seshat hieroglyph, the Egyptian goddess of writing and writers. “I basically promised myself that if the book sold I could really call myself a writer,” says Stacia

I can’t get the embedding to work, but you can visit the L.A. Ink website for season three. There is a list of clips, and Stacia’s is called “God of writing“. Fitting? 😉

The second video I’m posting isn’t a video with Stacia. However, you get to hear Stacia in it. It’s Episode 14 of Book Chatter, where we see Stacey Cochran talk to several writers, although we only hear the writers.

Stacey Cochran, the moderator of the chat, gives a description of the video:

Book Chatter Episode 14 with Stacia Kane, Jackie Kessler, Paul Clayton, Elisa Lorello, Simon Wood, Holly Christine, and RJ Keller.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsqliYRx5is]

We hear Stacia at the beginning of the video, where she introduces herself:

Hi! I started out, actually, in erotic romance, e-publishing with Ellora’s Cave, under a different pen name.  And now I write a kind of semi-lighthearted, romantic Urban Fantasy series. The Megan Chase books for Juno Pocket. There are two books out in that series so far, Personal Demons and Demon Inside, and the third book, Demon Possessed, comes out February 23rd. And then I have a new series that I’m really excited about. Very dark Urban Fantasy. It’s about ghosts and drug addicts and ghettos and punk rock. I really love it. And that comes out from Del Rey, the first book, Unholy Ghosts May 25th. The second book June 22th. And the third July 27th.

Then follows a discussion about the Harlequin controversy. (For details, listen to the chat.)

Around 0:42 Stacia tells us how she acquired her agent for her Urban Fantasy series.

Around 1:04 Stacia talks about e-publishing, and her books as e-books, audiobooks and foreign language rights. She also talks about How to be a sex-writing strumpet and that she’d been thinking about publishing it as an e-book.

Around 1:10 Stacia talks about marketing strategies, and if she’s noticed anything in particular that influenced number of books sold, with things like web presence and word of mouth.

The last 20 minutes of the video is hilarious. That’s when Stacey steps away from the computer, get something to drink, and puts on some music for the people still watching the live feed. lol

Michele Lee (leatherzebra) posted a great photo on twitter a couple of days ago, and wrote this about it:

What happens when the boss puts me in charge of the Fantasy display @seananmcguire @staciakane @lucyasnyderhttp://yfrog.com/h5ppxrwtbj

Seeing the Downside books prominently displayed is always a wonderful thing.

Tonight we got a few tidbits from Stacia about Downside 4 on twitter:

“[…]  At 123,000 words final first draft. I have edits now and think I’ll end up cutting another 1-2k, maybe.” Source

“Also, my editor likes my suggested title, so next week (fingers crossed) I very well might have a Book 4 title for you!” Source

Are you as excited as I am about the title? We won’t have t refer to it as “Downside 4” anymore. On the other hand, I’ve almost grown fond of it being called that.

Stacia also mentioned that she’s been thinking of “doing some character trivia/book trivia type stuff” on her website, along with posting the deleted scenes. I think that would be incredibly fun! I know there’s a lot of information I’ve picked up here and there, and that I hope to be able to compile on the website. I always love it when you get the feeling that an author has the complete backstory for their characters and world, even if they don’t write all of it down in the books. 😀

As I mentioned in the last blog post, Stacia has written a guest blog for Book Lovers Inc about what it’s like for an author to wait for a book. It’s a really great post for us readers, to let us know that it can be just as hard for a writer to wait for a book to come out, and that they are dying for us to read it just as much as we are dying to read it.

Stacia writes:

It’s just…it’s like planning a surprise party for your best friend, but that friend’s birthday isn’t for a year and a half yet. You have all the plans laid and the work done, but now you have to keep your mouth shut about it for that long. And you want to tell. You want to tell because you’re excited, as I said above. You want to tell because you can’t wait for the reaction. But you can’t tell, and it’s some weird form of torture, because you’re supposed to be promoting this book and the series, and making people anticipate the next book, while at the same time not telling them anything that will happen in the next book.

To read the rest of Stacia’s very interesting blog post, visit Book Lovers Inc.

Make sure you enter the giveaway for a chance to win all three Downside books, signed by Stacia. 😀

Btw, I love how she calls our favorite Downside residents, her “little gang of ghetto no-hopers”.

There are a couple of opportunities to win Downside books at the moment.

The first is at Book Lovers Inc, where Stacia has also written a great blog post about waiting, and how it’s just as hard to wait when you’re an author, as it is when you’re a reader.
In this giveaway you can win all three Downside books, signed by Stacia.

The second chance to win a Downside book is at Magic and Mayhem Writers.
The contest runs until February 10. If you subscribe to Nadia’s newsletter, you’ll also get the short erotic paranormal romance she’s sending all subscribers on Valentine’s Day.

We got a whole bunch of book updates from Stacia in her blog post today:

1. I turned in my story for the MAMMOTH BOOK OF GHOST ROMANCE. I’m fairly pleased with it, although writing romance really isn’t my forte, necessarily, and you all know sorts definitely aren’t. Plus, it’s a Downside story–or more accurately, a Chess/Terrible Triumph City story–so writing a happy ending was a bit weird, ha. But I think it’s a fairly sweet little tale, and I think there’s enough this-love-thing-kinda-sucks in there to make it work. Plus, kinky hippies.

2. Working on edits for Book 4, and plan to start Book 5 tonight. At some point these books need titles, although I admit the idea of simply titling them “4″ and “5″ has its own ascetic appeal.

3. Working on New Project too. Still pleased with it 3,000 words in, which is nice, since usually the “This sucks” sets in after the first few pages.

So much of this that we wish we could get more information on! We need to get a title for Downside 4 soon, otherwise we really will go on calling it exactly that.

And I can’t wait to hear what the New Project is all about. We haven’t really heard anything about that yet.

Maybe you’ve seen this cover before, when Stacia posted it originally. The reason we’re posting it now, however, is that in a week, on February 11, Unholy Ghosts is released in Germany for the first time!

This is exciting, since it’s only the second time the Downside books are released in another language than in English! (Poland was first.)

We hope Germans discover the Downside series, and that they realize how lucky they are.

You can order Geisterflut here. There you can also find Zeelenzorn, the German translation of Unholy Magic, which is available for pre-order.

I love that the books are published under Egmont Lyx (luxury ;-).