Tag Archive | Covert Cougar Christmas

Do You Read Print Books?

Feb9

 

At the Coastal Magic Reader’s Convention in Daytona Beach, some authors had their novellas in print, so I spent the last two days working on mine.

It is in all the ebook forms also, but it is now in print for my print readers. I’m one, mostly because I look at a screen all day and half the night, and so I like to enjoy print.

His Wild Highland Lass is nearly ready, and I just finished on Vexing the Highlander also.

Next I’ll work on Loving the White Bear and Galaxy Warrior’s proofs. But first, I’m revising a bit of Night of the Wolf before I send it back to my beta reader.

Covert Cougar Christmas

Bridget Sinclair, new Special Agent with the Cougar Special Forces Division that takes down rogue cougars, has a mission—permanently stop two shifters from distributing a new drug in Cheyenne, Wyoming. While investigating, she rescues a man they’ve tranquilized and learns Travis MacKay is a cougar shifter with the same law enforcement agency. Winter advisories are in effect for the Christmas holidays, but that doesn’t cool off the sizzling heat spiraling out of control between the two agents as they covertly team up to take down the drug-runners.

Print: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1633110230

Whoops, I’d been working so hard on Night of the Wolf, I forgot to finish this. *sigh*
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B019KFDU2U

Barnes and Noble:http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/covert-cougar-christmas-terry-spear/1123151535?ean=2940157676162

Kobo:https://store.kobobooks.com/en-us/ebook/covert-cougar-christmas

Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/601631

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Terry_Spear_Covert_Cougar_Christmas?id=12knDAAAQBAJ

iBooks: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/covert-cougar-christmas/id1113811076?mt=11

blackbird-looking-up-900-daytona-beach-140

Hope you are having a great day!!

Terry Spear

“Giving new meaning to the term alpha male where fantasy is reality.”

Connect with Terry Spear:

Website: http://www.terryspear.com

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/421434.Terry_Spear

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TerrySpearParanormalRomantics

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TerrySpear

Trailer for Covert Cougar Christmas! Neighbor’s Halloween! & Red Dragonfly!

Sep29

Covert Cougar Christmas

https://s3.amazonaws.com/embed.animoto.com/play.html?w=swf/production/vp1&e=1475147428&f=INpwKBNlXD197C865dQPpw&d=0&m=p&r=360p&volume=100&start_res=360p&i=m&asset_domain=s3-p.animoto.com&animoto_domain=animoto.com&options=
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B019KFDU2U

Barnes and Noble:http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/covert-cougar-christmas-terry-spear/1123151535?ean=2940157676162

Kobo:https://store.kobobooks.com/en-us/ebook/covert-cougar-christmas

Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/601631

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Terry_Spear_Covert_Cougar_Christmas?id=12knDAAAQBAJ

iBooks: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/covert-cougar-christmas/id1113811076?mt=11

Can you tell I’m in the mood for cooler weather? Well, making these brought it on! Really!

I actually have had cooler weather!

Excerpt from Covert Cougar Christmas!

PUBLISHED BY:

Terry Spear

 

 

 

Covert Cougar Christmas

Copyright © 2015 by Terry Spear

 

 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

 

Discover more about Terry Spear at:

http://www.terryspear.com/

Chapter 1

 

 

Snowflakes and ice drizzled down his windshield as Travis MacKay hoped the winter storm warnings and winter weather advisories for later this week weren’t wrong and the storm was coming in earlier than expected. His Dodge Durango slipped on another patch of ice, and he tightened his hands on the leather-covered steering wheel. He was in a real time crunch already if he was going to pack and move his household goods from Cheyenne, Wyoming to Yuma Town, Colorado before the weather worsened and before New Year’s Day at the latest, when the new owners moved in.

It was nearly two in the morning when he reached the outskirts of town and realized he needed groceries and packing boxes. He was certain some grocery store would be open this late and drove into town, but found that none of them were. Then he spied several bundles of great, clean boxes folded and tied up next to a Dumpster behind a Christmas pop-up store, set up for business only during the holidays. Packing boxes had been another of his pressing priorities to get first thing in the morning and he was delighted to check one thing off his list. He pulled into the alley behind the building and parked.

He got out of the car, but out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of something move. He spun around to see if it truly was what he thought he saw. A golden cougar! Beautiful. The cougar raced past the entrance to the alley. A female, or younger male, not as big as an adult male.

A shifter like him? He couldn’t imagine it was a full cougar. Not in town like this. Yet he had never run across a shifter in Cheyenne before. Because of his cat’s curious nature, it made him want to chase after the cougar and learn the truth.

But he was now working out of Yuma Town as a field agent of the Cougar Special Forces Division, CSFD that took down rogue cougars.

Still, Travis took another long look in the direction the cougar had run, and hoped the cat would return so he could get another look at it when he knew it wouldn’t come back. The cat would think Travis was human and a real danger because he might call the sighting into animal control and someone would come out and shoot the cougar.

Then he saw the Christmas shop’s back door propped open. He was going to holler out that he wanted to use the boxes for moving if that was all right with the shop owner, but heard a heated argument inside, and paused. He listened in case he needed to stop a fight. Being a Ranger with the army and well trained in tactical maneuvers in his current job, Travis was well qualified to intervene and break up a fight, when he heard one of the men arguing say, “What do you mean that bastard wants more money?”

“He said if we don’t pay up, he’ll shut us down permanently. And I don’t mean that we’ll have a chance to pull up stakes and start up our operations someplace else in the States either.”

“Then we need to take him out.”

“Yeah, right. The two of us against—“ The man abruptly quit talking.

His heart thundering in his ears, Travis backed toward his car as quietly as he could, but his boot crunched on frozen snow. He pulled out his Glock, ready in case anyone came out of the building with a gun trained on him.

“So how much did we make on sales today?” the one man asked as if there was nothing the matter.

“Fourteen hundred and some pocket change. So not too bad. The angels are really going over big this year. And the naughty elf wooden ornaments from Denmark too.”

The other man chuckled. “Our Christmas trees are making the real money. Can you give me a hand with setting up another couple of trees where sales have left some bare spots?”

“Yeah sure.”

Travis hesitated. His kind didn’t take down human criminals, unless a situation presented itself and he couldn’t avoid it. If the men were cougars, different story. It sounded like the men were up to no good, but without some kind of evidence to go by, he couldn’t alert the police. And he couldn’t go in to check and see if they were cougars either. First thing in the morning when the shop was open, he could sniff around. Or later, when the men went home, he could check out the boxes and see if they smelled like cougars had touched them.

He eyed the pristine boxes one last time, wishing that everything had been on the up and up, and he could have just gotten the boxes and been done with it.

Then Travis saw movement out of his peripheral vision. Instinctively, he lunged to the right, hoping he was overreacting, but if not, that his car would give him cover, hating that it could be shot up though.

A blond-haired man was armed with a rifle and fired a shot. Travis’s quick reaction hadn’t been fast enough. The shooter had been just as quick, like a highly-trained sniper.

Travis heard the shot fired, felt the stick of a dart when it hit his shoulder, and he yanked it out. By the time he fired his own gun at the shooter, Travis was sinking to the asphalt, cursing himself all the way down. His vision blurring, he hoped to hell his shot had impacted on the guy’s body somewhere that it would make a difference. His mind drifting, Travis reminded himself there were two men, not just the one. And then his world faded from gray to black.

***

I had never seen a red dragonfly in person before, so when I saw one land on one of my little wrought iron trellises, I was excited! I wanted to get a picture of him while outside though, and using the tripod. I managed a few shots inside, just in case I couldn’t get him outside–as in he flew away. Which he did.

But then he came back and I was prepared. I moved around him, he fluttered off a few times, but I caught a few neat shots. Isn’t he beautiful? And magical?

red-dragonlfy-outside-on-tripodThen I came home after seeing my daughter last night and my neighbors go whole hog on Halloween.

So this was what I came home to. I’m not very good at nighttime photography. So I quickly looked up settings one photographer used, then sent my camera and went back out to take the shots, hoping they’d turn out. And they did!

night-neighbor-halloween-900-165Okay, I’m off to work on Double Cougar Trouble. 63,000 words to go!

Have a great one!

Terry Spear

“Giving new meaning to the term alpha male where fantasy is reality.”

Connect with Terry Spear:

Website: http://www.terryspear.com

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/421434.Terry_Spear

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TerrySpearParanormalRomantics

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TerrySpear

Uniformity–to a Degree on Book Covers

Jul15

The Dark Fae

The Deadly Fae

The Winged Fae

The Ancient Fae

Dragon Fae

Hawk Fae

Phantom Fae

Golden Fae

The World of Fae

Golden Fae is not coming out until I finish some other deadline projects first, but a couple of years ago, I was at conference and there were a number of YA book bloggers there so I passed out my book marks. An author said that I needed to make my cover fonts more uniform because it was a series.

fae book marks

These are the book marks that show the non-uniformity. Now I’ll have to change them out. But for now, I just need to get the books redone and uploaded.

The problem was the books came out in different years and my computer has crashed a number of times. So I lost fonts and couldn’t find the ones I picked up along the way. One of the covers was done for me, so she had put my name in the middle of the book. And on a couple, I had put my name at the bottom, the title at the top. All were in different fonts. So I upgraded my Photoshop Elements 5 to 13, not yet ready for a subscription service for the bigger package that designers are using so I could get some upgraded fonts and use them.

This font gives a slightly more whimsical appearance because they are YA, though adults love them, and they do have a lot of humor. All my books do. My daughter told me once when I said that darker seemed to sell, I’ll make mine darker, “Mom, you always have rainbows in your stories.”

🙂 <3 Not rainbows literally, ever, hmm, I should put one in one of my stories…but figuratively. I always have humor in the stories. It just comes naturally for me, even though the stories have some thoughtful thoughts that are more serious.

What really got me going on this though was I had just created a cover for a novella that will be in an anthology. I didn’t realize they were going to include covers or that I’d have to have one so soon. So since my cover artist is swamped, I didn’t want to bother her with making one just for the novella. And came up with this.

Covert Cougar Christmas

But what really got me started on redoing the fae covers was that a fellow author–which I love, by the way–shared that she used this really cool formatting program for her books, it was easy, and took no time at all. It creates Table of Contents, Epubs, Mobi, has cool large letters at the beginning of a chapter, automatically turns the first sentence into caps for scenes, has a neat scene divider, automatically converts my left adjusted mss to book format, AND has all the headings for me so that I don’t have to mess with them. Like, chapter 1…and Preface, About the Author, etc. And the best part? It has a box you fill out with the code for your book on Ibooks, Amazon, and BN. I need to set up a different file for one for Kobo.

It’s Vellum, and what’s really neat is that I can take my Windows docx and slip it into Vellum on my Mac, add a few book details and then upload them to Ibooks, something I couldn’t do before. I was going through Smashwords. But it’s always better to go directly through the site as covers and such were taking forever to be updated by going through the middle man.

I’ve had the Mac for a while, couldn’t figure out how to use it, so when I learned about Vellum (only on Mac unfortunately), I was determined to learn how to do it and upload my first book to Ibooks. Since I’d already moved Dragon Fae over, though not the first in the series, but at the time I hadn’t uploaded it to SW, I figured I’d finally get a new book uploaded to Ibooks. Didn’t happen. So I used it as my test project.

After getting it set up the way I wanted, I submitted it. And worked on The Dark Fae, first book in the series next.

So why did this spur me to change my covers? They wanted bigger covers. Uploading to BN and Amazon, the file size had to be smaller. Ibooks wants bigger. *sigh* So I changed out the two covers, and then realized if I had to go through all this work with all of them, I might as well make them all uniform. So I’ve got to do that again and reupload them. *double sigh*

And that’s it. Two books uploaded to Ibooks, pulled from SW. The other neat thing was that you can automatically create buy links to a book you want to include in the back. Maybe I should include it for the whole series. Hadn’t thought of that. But in any event, I have the excerpt to the next book, and now the buy link to the respective vendor. And the other really cool thing is that they take that one bigger cover and immediately resize it for all the vendors. I love all the features that helped me to save some time, even though I’m redoing covers, which I needed to do anyway.

But of course, I turned in She-Wolf edits, they changed the title for SEAL Wolf Diving for Trouble to SEAL Wolf in Too Deep (which means they’re working on the cover), and I’m still working on Billionaire. I’ve been managing word count, though if I could just stay focused, I’d have it finished. I have 17,235 words to go, and I’ve been printing out pages and editing it every day. Stayed up past midnight to work on it some more.

I hope the new covers work for the fae series. What do you think about Covert Cougar Christmas?

I’m also working on Taming the Wild Cougar, but that will be a full length novel.

Taming the Wild Cougar WEB 05082015

Okay, I’m off and running! Have a super great day!!

Terry

“Giving new meaning to the term alpha male where fantasy is reality.”

Connect with Terry Spear:

Website: http://www.terryspear.com

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/421434.Terry_Spear

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TerrySpearParanormalRomantics

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TerrySpear

Wilde & Woolly Bears http://www.celticbears.com