Friday Reads: Nobody’s Butterfly

December 1, 2017February 12, 2019 ~ Ofelia Gränd ~ Leave a comment

December first! The countdown to Christmas has begun and what better way to get into the holiday spirit than read a holiday story? I’ve said it before, but the absolute best thing with having writer friends it that I get to read their books before you do :p. Today is the release day of Nobody’s Butterfly by Claire Davis and Al Stewart…and I read it weeks ago.

Johnny Strong hasn’t spoken to anyone for two years unless you count the ghost living in the cobweb by his window, of course. But then Finn comes – Finn who’s always there, who is loud and eats all the time, Finn who claims to be Johnny’s wizard. Finn makes potions and he knows what Johnny is thinking. And then there is the neighbour…

I know many reviewers say Davis and Stewart’s writing style is quirky, and it might be, but I’m always thinking it’s poetic. No one paints a picture like the two of them do, few highlights the little things the way they do, and Nobody’s Butterfly is just as magical as the other stories they’ve written…it even has a wizard…and a butterfly.

If you like YA, you’ll love this. If you don’t, read it anyway. If you’re looking for erotica, this is not for you!

books2read.com/NobodysButterfly *

Cobweb ghosts are so inconvenient—especially grumpy ones with bad breath. Don’t they know silence is golden?

Johnny Strong is the expert; he hasn’t spoken in two years. Not one word to anyone except the ghost. The main purpose of life is to avoid people and not get noticed. Friends? He doesn’t need them; and certainly nobody wants him despite what the ghost says.

Until a new boy appears at Windybank—Finn Lyons, teenage wizard. He eats frogs, concocts potions, and is always hungry. Not only does Finn stand up for Johnny; he actively seeks his company and soon becomes part of life.
First love; family and words; a heady mix to go in the potion but how will it all turn out?

Hubble bubble; Johnny Strong’s in trouble! Silence is not always golden in this sweet, zany story of the purest magic at Christmas.

* By clicking the Books2Read link you’ll be taken to an external page. Links to Smashwords, Kobo U.S and Amazon contain affiliate links that earn me a small commission at no additional cost to you. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Halloween Reading: Pink Slip by Amy Spector

October 31, 2017 ~ Ofelia Gränd ~ Leave a comment

Halloween – I’m thinking pumpkins, candy, costumes, horror movies and ghost stories…and in Sweden, we have none of that *sigh*. But, I’m not gonna let that ruin the fun. Are you looking for something to read for the holiday? Pink Slip by Amy Spector is a rather short romance story that takes you on a wild ride through the corn maze.

It’s the first release in a short story series called The Tattooed Corpse Stories. The tagline to the series is: Different Time. Different Place. Same Body. And that’s what the series is – stories taking place anywhere, at any time, with different characters, but with the same recurring body. And I’ve written one… It’s coming soon.

But, back to Pink Slip! Someone really should write a manual about what to do when coming across a dead guy. I mean there are so many options and then there is one thing that you definitely shouldn’t do – that’s the thing Jackson Winter and Tae Min Reese do.

This story had me laughing so many times. It’s sweet, it’s funny, and it has a few Wait? What? moments where you wish you reach into the story and tell them that they really shouldn’t do that LOL.

I loved that it took place, partly, in a corn maze. I’ve never been to/in one but it seems so cool. I was imagining the maze scene in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire but with corn instead.

Check it out!

Pink Slip Book Cover by Amy Spector Jackson Winter loves everything Halloween. He loves the weather, he loves horror movies and he loves his job at Hoffman Farm and Dairy’s yearly Trail of Terror. Now he thinks he just might be falling in love with the trail’s newest special effects artist, Tae Min Reese.

Tae is a disappointment all around. He’s not a doctor like his brother, he’s an art school dropout, and he has no interest in making his mother any grandbabies. Now it even looks like he’s going to lose his job at a second-rate, haunted farm. And he’s not even sure why.

When Tae decides he needs to break the bad news to the good-looking zombie actor who makes up any excuse to see him, a chance encounter gives them both something else to worry about.

Now, two angry drunks, a stinky car, and a dead body could ruin Halloween for Jackson forever. Or could it mean a happy ending for them both?

O Gränd – a writer’s body double

October 21, 2017September 27, 2018 ~ Ofelia Gränd ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday I sent out an email to my Mailing List where I told everyone that I’m cutting myself in half. It’s not quite as drastic as it sounds, but I’ve created another me. Those of you who have read more than one of my stories know that I tend to be all over the place genre-wise.

I’ve never seen it as a problem, always figured readers will read the blurbs, the categories the story is listed in etc, so despite knowing it goes against all marketing advice out there, I’ve jumped between romance, horror, weird fiction, gay fiction, paranormal and so on. I’ve always kept the MC a gay man (except A Christmas Princess where the MC is a transexual kid) and somehow been thinking that the LGBT flag has been enough to keep it all together.

Lately, however, the one-star reviews including warnings to the fellow readers out there about this not being romance story have left me a bit puzzled. Most of them make me laugh, but despite me finding it comic that someone is looking for romance in horror flash fiction the rating is still there and a reader is out there feeling cheated.

I talked to my writer buddies about it, because what more can I do than write THIS IS HORROR? They suggested removing the dark and horror stories without romantic elements from my name and put them on another. I thought about it for a while and then I did, because what do I have to lose? Except for the time of keeping two names going instead of one, not much. So meet O Gränd.

O Gränd—writer of coffee break sized fiction

O Gränd is an introvert living deep in the Swedish woods. She spends most of her days staring at the computer screen and dreaming up characters. Placing her writing in a particular genre is hard, though most of her stories lean towards the dark side and they’re most often short.

She likes the challenge of telling a story in just a few pages and has had some of her works published in a Canadian flash fiction magazine.

When she isn’t caught up in her writing, she is spending time with her husband, their four kids, three cats, one dog, and a various number of fishes.