If you read my blog last month, you might have noticed that I started a new thing where I ran a Book Birthday Giveaway. I plan to, at the beginning of every month, write a post with the books that have been released that month in the past.

So this month, we have a giveaway of the books that have been published in February previous years.

In January, we had two books, and I’m afraid we only have two in February too. Apparently, I don’t publish much at the beginning of the year – I’ll do my best to rectify that 😀

How does it work?

Last month, I asked you to leave a comment on the post, and that was great! I loved that you did. This month, we’ll try something else. My friend A.L. Lester runs a giveaway every month too (yes, I might have stolen the idea) and she always uses KingSumo, so I figured I’d give it a try too.

Hop on over here and sign up with your email – I won’t email you in the future, I promise. If you want to be on my email list you can sign up here, but leaving your email here will not automatically sign you up for anything.

That’s it. Last day to enter is February 8th, and KingSumo will draw a random winner on the 9th.

The Books

The books I’m giving away are Silent Woods and He Melted Us, and both of them have been around for a few years now. Going through my catalogue reveals that I haven’t had a February release since 2016 😮

Silent Woods is about an established couple with two kids who go camping. Everything is fine and dandy until one of the kids disappear. Silent Woods is a 19k paranormal story, rather creepy at times.

And then we have He Melted Us – it’s madness I tell you! LOL This is one of those stories that had me laughing when writing it, but the craziness goes beyond and above. It’s a 17k contemporary story, also an established couple.

Silent Woods is one of the first stories I ever wrote, not the first, but after having written Knickers in a Twist I thought to myself that this writing thing was fun, and I should do more of it. I didn’t really have a plan of what to do with the story once I’d written it, but I wrote it. Then I wrote From All of Us to All of You that’s part of the Boughs of Evergreen anthology from Beaten Track Publishing. When FAoUtAoY was published, we moved on the Silent Woods.

It’s about a Scandinavian creature called Näcken. He’s a water nymph who plays the violin in a way that makes people walk into the water and drown.

Excerpt:

The forest felt cold; it wasn’t chilly but it wasn’t at all like the day before. And I kept looking around me—almost expecting to see someone. Which was ridiculous, there was not a living soul out here.

After a few minutes Anders came walking up the hill. “Where’s Axel?” I asked as he bent down to tickle Maja.

“Isn’t he with you?”

“No. Should he be?”

Anders didn’t answer. He turned around and searched the area behind him. I got to my feet, feeling the panic rise. Was he serious? I gazed along the trail, down between the trees, looking for the little form of my son, but he was nowhere to be seen.

“Wasn’t he with you? He was with you when Maja and I went ahead.” My lungs felt as if they were contracting, denying me the air I desperately needed.

“Yes, but then he wanted to run up the slope ahead of me. I thought he’d have caught up to you by now.”

“Axel!” Even I heard the terror in my voice. “Axel!”

Maja, sensing my distress, began to blink more rapidly. Her eyes darted between me and Anders, and I could see her lower lip start to quake.

“Relax, Daniel. You’re scaring Maja.” Anders picked her up and made a shushing sound. “He has to be close by. I saw him run up the hill a minute ago. Really, I was just a few feet behind. He wanted to surprise you by making it up ahead of me.”

I felt a stab of guilt. Yesterday had been hard on him; it had been a long way’s hike. God, I shouldn’t have yelled at him. He’d been exhausted, and I got angry because he made a fuss—what five-year-old wouldn’t in that situation? If I had controlled myself yesterday, maybe he wouldn’t have felt the need to prove himself today. He probably thought he needed to please me. It was all my fault.

It wasn’t a big hill. We would catch up with him. I knew my son; he wanted to make it to the top. He’d probably seen a trail and followed it, but he wouldn’t keep going if it didn’t lead upwards. At least that was what I told myself. I knew that a frightened five-year-old didn’t have a chance at rational thinking. If he was scared, he could be wandering in any direction.

“Axel!” Shouldn’t he be able to hear me? Didn’t sounds travel well through forests? “Axel!”

“Calm down, Honey. He’s been gone five minutes, tops.”

“Didn’t you come right up? Didn’t you follow the same trail we did?” I was frantic, I knew I was, but a child lost in the city could ask for directions, or have someone ring their parents. What happened to a child lost in the woods?

“Yes, we did. But he wanted to run ahead…and I let him.” For the first time I became aware of the guilt in Anders’ voice.

Then we have He Melted Us. This was back when they took down the padlocks off Pont des Art in Paris, and He Melted Us is part of an anthology called Love Unlocked.

Each story in the anthology is about a love lock and the story around it.

Delron and Phillipe placed a lock on the bridge years ago, but now that it’s being removed, Delron sees it as a sign their relationship is failing. Nothing will stop him from getting the lock back – nothing!

Doing a love lock anthology was a brilliant idea. Let’s do a gum wall anthology next! LOL

Excerpt:

A light flush spread over Delron’s fair skin, and his eyes glistened with anger. Phillipe didn’t know if he should laugh or cry. Delron was way too worked up—it was just a freaking lock, a tacky symbol that had nothing to do with them. He shook his head.

“Here, they’ve asked a woman what she thinks has happened.”

“And what does she think?” Delron’s tight voice made Phillipe glance in his direction again before he continued reading. His strawberry-blond hair was standing on end. He was clenching his jaw and fisting his hands as he waited for Phillipe to continue.

Phillipe skimmed the paragraph. “She says she thinks the mayor hired someone to remove the locks during the night. That it can’t be a coincidence that Town Hall said last week they wanted the locks removed, and now they’ve miraculously disappeared.”

Relief shone in Delron’s eyes. Phillipe double-checked the text to see what might have brought on the change in his demeanour, but he couldn’t find it.

“So they’re out there somewhere? Someone has them?”

“Erm…Del? It’s one woman, a random person, who thinks that. No one knows.”

“No, I know that, but what if she’s right? What if we could find the person who has our lock? Then everything would be fine again.”

Phillipe felt his brow crease. What the hell was Delron talking about? “It’s just a lock, a piece of metal—”

“It’s the symbol of our love, without it—”

“It means nothing!” Phillipe hadn’t meant to raise his voice. He didn’t want to argue, but it was just a fucking lock.

Delron stared at him. For a moment Phillipe thought he saw hurt in his eyes, but then a perfectly neutral expression chased away every indication of feeling.

“You need to hurry if you don’t want to be late.”

Phillipe glanced at the clock—the ugly cat-shaped clock that defiled the entire room merely by being there. He hated it—he hated the colour, hated the form, and he definitely hated the ugly pink bow around the deformed head. It had been a sunny day about four years ago when Delron had come home with it. He’d presented it as if it were a treasure, and Phillipe didn’t have the heart to tell him he wanted to drop it from the balcony and watch the cars below run over it. It was an urge he fought every day—to throw the darn thing off the balcony and see it shatter into tiny pieces.

There! Don’t forget to head over to KingSumo and type in your email address. And a little depending on when you read this, the giveaway I’m running to celebrate the release of Mind Scrambler might still be running too.