Peeps, please welcome my good friend and all round lovely person Zee Monodee to the blog. Zee is chatting about her newest release, INESCAPABLE, a collaboration with Natalie Owens, and giving us an insight into the whole self-publishing world.
Please join me in welcoming Zee.

 

 
Nat: We should do something together.

(FYI, she lives in Malta, in the Mediterranean; I live in Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean. Thousands of miles apart, and at least 14 hours by flight to connect)

Zee: *nods emphatically* Definitely!

Nat: What, though? A series?

Zee: Yes, yes! With your voice and my propensity to kick arse in every story, we’d do really well (at the time, I wrote mainly heroine-centric espionage)

Nat: So, PNR?

Zee: *nod*

Nat: Our terms. No sex-for-the-sake-of-sex.

Zee: You got it! And we decide everything that is to happen. Our way, all the way!

Nat: Duh! No-brainer, sis. What do you say we self-pub this one, test the waters on our own two – or, uh, four – feet and retain the freedom of publishing schedule and plot content?

Zee: You got it!

Hey everyone! It’s a pleasure to be here today after Cassandra’s lovely invitation. My bestie, Natalie G. Owens (known as Nat to her friends, lol) and I recently indie-pubbed our very first collab book, Inescapable, Book1 in the paranormal/fantasy Eternelles series.

The conversation above is pretty much a summary of how we embarked on this journey together.

What was the most determining aspect of the above discussion? I’ll admit it was the ‘no sex-for-the-sake-of-sex’ part. Allow me to say neither of us is a prude. Nat might be Catholic, and I might be a Muslim, but lol, we do have sex in our stories. Plenty of it, even. But have you ever read a book where it’s supposed to be romantic suspense or PNR with action and danger, and it feels like someone fast forwards the action, pauses the story, slow motions a sex scene, then hits play, only to have the same thing happen again? We didn’t want that. If sex was to be in our story, it would be in organically, not something that feels ‘forced’ just because we have to “write more sex and heat” in.

So Nat and I decided to play…and she surprised me with the blast of heat she brought to this book! The characters she wrote, Sera and Rafe, scorched the pages in their every encounter! The story is written in split POVs – Nat wrote Sera, a 125-year-old girl who clings to the teenage mentality. Sera is of phoenix and gypsy origins, and 100 years earlier, Rafe, a vampyre, turned her and made her his. In 2012, he is back into her life to claim her.

In comparison, my pair – Adri and Des – looks very tame. Uh, exactly like you’d expect ‘staid’ parents to be, I suppose… Adri is a 2,900-yr-old immortal hailing from Ancient Greece and who grew up on Olympus. She’s the daughter of a human maenad and Dionysos, Greek god of wine and revelry. Despite having lived for centuries as a skilled and cunning courtesan in the highest reaches of European courts, Adri came out more like the worrying and over-protective mother she is. For the past 1,000 years or so, Adri has been stuck on uncovering the identity of the mysterious masked man who kissed her on the darkened terrace of a ball in Crusade-time Jerusalem. She finally finds him when Des Roxburgh steps into her life in 2012, too. Why didn’t he come forth all these centuries, and what does he want now? More important, who, and what, is he? Des can disappear out of thin air, wring the neck of a shifty, mist-like Soul Stealer, and bodily haul a vampyre overlord across a room. He admits to being the ‘only one of his kind’ but Adri has no clue what that means, except to suspect he must have something demonic in him…

But her desire for Des has simmering for a millennium, and it’s no wonder she succumbs, no matter what he is…

At the heart of the Eternelles series is Adri and Sera, and the mother-daughter bond between them. Despite being immortal paranormal creatures, the generation gap between parents and children is more than present between these two.

And this is another forte we uncovered – relationships. Nat is older than me, but we swapped the age order when we wrote these characters. She put herself in the shoes of the petulant teenage rebel, while I, recently out of young adulthood, wrote the overbearing parent with so much ‘accuracy’ I’m starting to be worried as to the kind of mother I’d be if I ever had a daughter. Lol, thank goodness I have a son.

Writing these two women, and sketching out their journey for this series, has been a thrill and a heck of a ride for us. With Inescapable now out, and Books2&3, Indomitable and Irresistible, releasing during the second half of 2013, we now look forward to sharing Adri’s and Sera’s journey in our paranormal/fantasy world with you, readers. Join us?
 
Thanks for stopping by, Zee! INESCAPABLE sounds awesome – make sure you peeps check it out!
 

An immortal born from an unlikely alliance…
Beautiful mythic Greek heiress Adrasteia ‘Adri’ Dionysios has roamed the world for millennia, taking her pleasure where she wanted. Until one night, when Fate drops a baby wrapped in fire into her arms. Motherhood is a formidable challenge, but so is figuring out the identity of a mystery man who makes her pulse race.

A vampyre’s obsession…
Seraphine ‘Sera’ Dionysios’ origins are shrouded in mystery. Torn between a mother whose blood saved her life, and a man who now possesses her soul, the only thing Sera can still cling to is her heart.

One rule matters above all others: Always protect the portal…
When Evil comes to Adri and Sera’s hometown of Shadow Bridge, a place where the mortal human world ends and the supernatural realm starts, it’s up to them to stop a prophecy as old as time itself…or die trying.

Available NOW from:

Print version: July 2013

French translation to Amazon.fr in August 2013

Find what reviewers are saying about Inescapable on the Goodreads page