Cover Reveal & Giveaway: A STAR TO STEER HER BY by Beth Anne Miller

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Today I'm delighted to welcome Beth Anne Miller to the Supernatural Underground to share the very exciting cover debut for her new novel, the New Adult title, A Star To Steer Her By, which releases on March 20th.

And there's a giveaway as well, for extra fun — but wow, look at this cover!

About A Star To Steer Her By:

I’m scarred. Broken. I’ll never be the same.
But I will take this journey.

Ever since my last dive ended in bloodshed, I’ve been terrified to go back into the water. But the opportunity to spend a semester at sea is too good to pass up. I need to get my life back.

I never expected to love it this much. And I never expected Tristan MacDougall.

Rugged, strong, and with demons of his own, Tristan helps me find the courage I thought I had lost and heals me with every stolen moment we share. But the rules of the ship mean we can't be together.

When a dive excursion goes terribly wrong, our only hope for survival is each other.

Love the sound of it already? You can add it to Good Reads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30037050-a-star-to-steer-her-by

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Or Preorder: Amazon

Amazon:http://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XBYZFXF/

But you're Supernatural Undergrounders, so I know you'll want to know moar about Beth Anne, too.
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Beth Anne Miller

About Beth Anne Miller:

Beth Anne Miller’s first book, written in elementary school, was bound in pink fabric and was about—what else?—a girl and her horse. She soon began cheating on horses with the sea, becoming an open water scuba diver at age 14. That love of the sea led her to a college semester aboard a schooner. She returned with fond memories of the exhilaration of being on a ship under full sail, less fond memories of hurling over the leeward rail on a daily basis, and a sailing bug she couldn’t quite shake.

In addition to horses and the sea, she has a fascination for all things Scottish (including, but not limited to, men in kilts), which she explored with her first novel, INTO THE SCOTTISH MIST (The Wild Rose Press, 2011), and carried into her new novel, A STAR TO STEER HER BY (Entangled Embrace, March 2017). A native New Yorker, Beth Anne works in the publishing industry and is always looking ahead to her next voyage, whether a short one on a dive boat or whale watch, or, with luck, a longer one on a tall ship.

Connect with Beth Anne Miller:

Website | Newsletter | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Goodreads

Make sure you sign up for Beth Anne's newsletter & get the 1st sneak-peak at A Star To Steer Her By!

And I did promise you some GIVEAWAY fun!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Weird Romance in Fiction

Ulysses and the Sirens, by Herbert James Draper, 1909

Hi everyone,

With St. Valentine's Day just past, it's hard not to have a few thoughts about romance, real and/or fictional. Here at the Sup, we often write love interests who are different species, from alternate times, dimensions or universes.

Mortals falling for super heroes, vampires, shape-shifters, zombies, Mar, witches, demons, you name it, we have it. But how did this all begin?

The tendency to represent love interests as supernatural has its roots in ancient literature. Take Homer's Odyssey for example, from the 8th century BC. We have sirens, harpies, nymphs, and of course Circe, a spectacular witch, all captivating Ulysses in one way or another. And then, there are fairy tales, ie Beauty and the Beast by French novelist Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve published in 1740. Hundreds of years later, we're still enchanted!

But things really picked up for supernatural romance when Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto in 1764. This launched the Gothic genre, which combines elements of both horror and romance.


After Walpole came Ann Radecliff's The Mysteries of Udolpho, Bram Stoker's Dracula and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

Our Speculative Fiction genre owes much to these inspirational novelists.

They led to our modern day versions of dating a monster.  I think we owe a lot to Joss Whedon and his supernaturals in Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the acceptance and idealisation of mortal-supernatural couplings.

From there, Sookie Stackhouse, in Charlaine Harris's Southern Vampire Chronicles pretty much plays the field with vamp-vamp-shifter-fairy-shifter relationships, giving us a mortal eye's view on what it's really like, loving a sup.

Then there's Isacc Marion's Warm Bodies. Who wouldn't want to date this adorable dead boy, and save the human race while their at it?

Nowhere more that Paranormal Romance and Fantasy YA do we find the 'other' elevated to the role of the immortal lover, be they angel or demon from the earth, the sea, the heavens or far away dimensions.

Here are a few of my favourites. 

Elena and the Brothers - from L J Smith's Vampire Diaries

A demon and her angel

A ghost buster and a dead girl

A girl and her robot

A half-Mar and her doctor

Pop in the comments if you want to share your fav 'weird' fictional romances.
xxxKim

Kim Falconer's latest release is out now - The Blood in the Beginning - and Ava Sykes Novel. Find this novel in a store near you.

You can also learn more about Kim at AvaSykes.com, the 11th House Blog, and on FaceBook and Twitter.  

She posts here at the Supernatural Underground on the 16th of every month and runs Save the Day Writer's Community on Facebook. Check out her daily Astro-LOA Flash horoscopes on Facebook. 

And now I'm just dating myself

The Things I carry: White Dwarf

This one is a little literal for this year's theme of things that I carry with me. I've been doing a little Winter Purge, throwing out stuff that has hidden in corners and collected dust and just not been very useful.

I was cleaning out my VHS tapes. Yes, I HAVE been carrying around VHS tapes with very specific movies that I taped when I was in high school until I found DVDs of their contents. That's how much these movies were part of who I am and the stories that I tell.

Upon those VHS were three of my favorite movies taped from FOX: Generation X (a miniseries of junior X-men complete with Jubilee), Newsies (which i was able to get on DVD- no one can resist a singing Christian Bale), and White Dwarf.

Ah White Dwarf. How do I describe you? It was sort of like Northern Exposure in space. Now, how was that for dating myself? It was about a fancy city doctor who was sent to a planet at the edge of nothing for his service year before he could go back to the city and live the fancy life. Pretty simple concept.

But there were aliens, and Typhoid Mary, and red oceans. There was a boy who had shifter sickness, and a prison, and creepy twin girls who aged at different rates. It was crazy and I understand why it might not have been the most popular thing on the planet. And I was pretty sure I was the only person in the world who saw it, but then I found this.

I think it was the world building that really captured me. This planet did not rotate on its axis like earth and as it orbited its white dwarf sun, one side was perpetually light and the other perpetually dark. The light was civil and there was a princess and the technology was on that side. The dark side was unknown and the people were seen as savages and there was a constant war between the light and the dark.

And then, it caught you with a right hook when the spirits of the planet, Lady Light and Lady Dark, appeared to the young doctor to help heal the divide of their people.

Bam. Story. Done.

I loved it. I still love it and have maybe watched the pirated version on YouTube. I still think about the planet and its people, and the main characters arc that is so simple but perfect for the world it was placed in. The characters were like nothing I'd seen before and I wanted to be on that planet exploring with that doctor. Sounds like maybe another doctor that I love now who travels in his big blue box.

So I carry it with me that even simple can be elegant, even with terrible production values. You don't need a lot of bells and whistle to resonate with a story teller decades later.

And if you find it on DVD, let me know.



Until Next month...
Amanda

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Amanda Arista,
Author, Diaries of an Urban Panther
www.amandaarista.com