Merry Christmas to those who celebrate! If you’re looking for some great fantasy romance holiday reads, here is a list of bargain, free and KU fantasy romance books for you: https://bookqueendom.com/yuletidesale/
Category Archives: Giveaways
Mistress of the Wind: Free until Oct 23 2021
Those of you who love fantasy romance and fairy tale retellings will be thrilled to hear that Mistress of the Wind, my fantasy romance retelling of East of the Sun, West of the Moon, is free on Amazon until October 23rd.
And the giveaway winners are . . .
Congratulations to the two randomly-drawn winners of my birthday giveaway 🙂
Sky Raiders Free: 8 – 12 September
I’ve had new covers designed for my SKY RAIDERS series, and to celebrate, I’ve made Sky Raiders free from today until September 12th. To get your copy on Amazon, you can click here.
New Release (with giveaway): Interference and Insurgency: Two Novellas of the Verdant String
Very happy to announce that my new book, Insurgency, has just released, and I’ve packaged it together with Interference, the novella that was included in the Orphans in the Black anthology in June 2017.
For all my new release notification subscribers, please feel free to enter the following Rafflecopter giveaway. There are five copies of Interference & Insurgency up for grabs!
The Verdant String Series
The seven planets of the Verdant String, the green, fecund sources of life spanning five solar systems, comprise the Verdant String Coalition. This is the setting for a new science fiction romance series from award-winning science fiction romance novelist Michelle Diener. While the people of the Verdant String know they have a common ancestor, a group of explorers who colonised the planets at the same time a thousand or more years ago, the mysteries of who they were, and where they came from, persist.
Buy the box set of Inference & Insurgency: Amazon | iBooks | Kobo | Nook
Interference (A 25,000 word novella introducing the world of the Verdant String)
Interference can go either way . . .
The tiny moon of Cepi is on a countdown to destruction, and while Nyha Bartali has been persuaded to take her four wards for a final look at the archaeological wonder, now she’s eager to leave. The only problem is, someone has other plans–plans to exploit Nyha and her girls’ status as the betrayed orphans of the Verdant String in order to give them time to steal Cepi’s secrets.
Nyha and her wards’ value as survivors of the destruction of Halatia means it would be political suicide for any leader of the Verdant String to endanger them again–something the hostage-takers know very well. What the hostage-takers don’t know is that Nyha and her girls have more help than they realize.
Mak Carep knows his team’s presence on Cepi is the last flex of Arkhor’s muscle before the moon is blown to bits. Arkhor has interfered on Cepi since it discovered the ruins four hundred years ago, but sometimes, interference can have unexpected consequences. When Nyha and her girls are taken hostage, Mak and the rest of his special forces team are the only ones who have any hope of rescuing them, and they’re ready and willing to do what Arkhor does best . . . Interfere.
Interference was first published in the Orphans in the Black Anthology in July 2017.
Insurgency (Insurgency is a 45,000 word short novel set in the Verdant String series)
The Parnian city of Var is under siege. Buildings are being targeted by insurgents whose only aim seems to be destruction. Nick Bartega is part of the Protection Unit team investigating the explosions, but with no discernible pattern, and no one taking responsibility, he and his colleagues have hit a blank wall.
That is until his neighbor, Tila, is caught up in the first real mistake the insurgents have made. Cornered, forced to take Tila’s whole office hostage, the insurgents are surrounded and out of options, until they use Tila as their shield.
Tila sees herself as Parnian first, Halatian second, but her dark blue hair, and the strong emotions her very existence provokes in others means the insurgents see her as the perfect hostage. No one on Par wants to give the order that might catch her in the crossfire. They’d rather let the insurgents get away.
But Nick, and his commander, Drake, see the first glimpse of a pattern in the insurgents behavior. Not that long ago, Halatians were used as hostages in another incident on the tiny moon of Cepi, and the parallels are hard to ignore. So is this attack on Var an isolated incident, or is there a bigger conspiracy at play?
Whatever the truth, Nick isn’t prepared to leave Tila in the insurgents hands. And he’s prepared to break any rule, and disregard any order to do it.
NEW IN THE VERDANT STRING SERIES:
To receive notification when the next Verdant String novel, BREAKAWAY, becomes available, please sign up to my new release notification list.
DARK HORSE Free: Dec 25th-29th
Dark Horse is free on Amazon from December 25th to December 29th.
Dark Horse Free Until 30 Dec
Dark Horse is free on a special holiday promotion until 30 Dec. If you haven’t read it yet, now is the chance to pick up your copy!
Release Celebration for Sky Raiders (with giveaway): Day 2
Welcome to the Release Celebration for Sky Raiders
Sky Raiders is the first book in Michelle’s new space opera series. Michelle has a message below and if you miss the Friday post, you can go HERE, and on Tuesday, December 20th, you can go HERE to read about how the book came together. Definitely check out the giveaway below as well. Enjoy!
Sky Raiders
(Sky Raiders #1)
by Michelle Diener
Adult Sci-Fi, Space Opera
ebook, 349 Pages
December 15th 2016
First they flew their mysterious sky craft through the skies of Barit. Then they started attacking. Finally, they began to raid.
Garek’s one year of duty as a guard walking the walls of Garamundo was extended to two when the sky raiders appeared. Two long years away from home and his lover, Taya. When he finally returns, the town is empty. While Garek was protecting Garamundo, the sky raiders were taking their victims from his hometown.
Taya can’t bear looking into the night sky. All she can see is Barit, her home planet. Impossibly, the sky raiders have brought her and their other victims to Shadow, the planet that shadows her own, and looking up makes her aware of everything she’s lost. Garek is out there somewhere. She knows he’ll look, but he’ll never find her.
She and the other captives have to find a way to escape. Without the food and clothes the sky raiders bring them from their raids on Barit, they’ll starve on the almost barren wastes of Shadow. And when they’ve given the sky raiders enough of what they want, that’s exactly what the sky raiders will leave them to do.
What Taya doesn’t realize is she’ll have some help with her plan. Because Garek isn’t giving up on finding her. And he’s even more resourceful than she could ever have imagined.
Nothing is going to keep him from Taya. Not even space itself.
Star-crossed Lovers Who Won’t Bow to Their Fate
The official definition of star-crossed lovers is two people who love each other deeply but cannot be together because fate is against them. Whatever is written in their stars means they are doomed to never find happiness, never be together.
Obviously, this is not a HEA or even a HFN situation 🙂
Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde . . . they’re the gold standard of star-crossed lovers, but when I was writing Sky Raiders, I thought a lot about the concept, because I kept thinking of Garek and Taya, my hero and heroine, as star-crossed, but only to a point. They love each other, and fate keeps them apart, but neither of them accepts this.
Garek throws caution to the wind and never lets the obstacles in front of him even slow him down in his determination to get to Taya. And she, equally, is driven not only to survive, but also to work a way out of her situation, because she will not give up her desire to be with Garek again.
It was so much fun, but also really poignant, to write a love story like Garek and Taya’s, and I loved every minute of it. I hope my readers enjoy it just as much. Tristan and Isolde, but without the downer at the end 🙂
–Michelle
Michelle Diener is the award-winning, bestselling author of the Class 5 series. She writes historical fiction, fantasy and science fiction and lives in Australia with her husband and two children.
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Release Celebration Giveaway
10 winners will receive a ebook of Sky Raiders
Open internationally
Ends December 22nd
Release Celebration for Sky Raiders (with giveaway): Day 1
It’s a fun coincidence that the SFR Brigade Showcase (click link for more giveaways & posts from other great SFR authors) coincided with my release of SKY Raiders, so for those on the SFRB Showcase trail, please read on for more information about my new release, and enter the Rafflecopter giveaway below!
Welcome to the Release Celebration for Sky Raiders
Sky Raiders is the first book in Michelle’s new space opera series. Michelle has a message below and you can come back on Sunday, December 18th, HERE to learn about her leading characters, and on Tuesday, December 20th, HERE to read about how the book came together. Definitely check out the giveaway below as well. Enjoy!
Sky Raiders
(Sky Raiders #1)
by Michelle Diener
Adult Sci-Fi, Space Opera
ebook, 349 Pages
December 15th 2016
First they flew their mysterious sky craft through the skies of Barit. Then they started attacking. Finally, they began to raid.
Garek’s one year of duty as a guard walking the walls of Garamundo was extended to two when the sky raiders appeared. Two long years away from home and his lover, Taya. When he finally returns, the town is empty. While Garek was protecting Garamundo, the sky raiders were taking their victims from his hometown.
Taya can’t bear looking into the night sky. All she can see is Barit, her home planet. Impossibly, the sky raiders have brought her and their other victims to Shadow, the planet that shadows her own, and looking up makes her aware of everything she’s lost. Garek is out there somewhere. She knows he’ll look, but he’ll never find her.
She and the other captives have to find a way to escape. Without the food and clothes the sky raiders bring them from their raids on Barit, they’ll starve on the almost barren wastes of Shadow. And when they’ve given the sky raiders enough of what they want, that’s exactly what the sky raiders will leave them to do.
What Taya doesn’t realize is she’ll have some help with her plan. Because Garek isn’t giving up on finding her. And he’s even more resourceful than she could ever have imagined.
Nothing is going to keep him from Taya. Not even space itself.
My Roots Are Showing
My latest novel, SKY RAIDERS, the first book in a new space opera trilogy, is in many strange ways a return to my writing roots.
While I wrote fantasy and even time travel novels before I was published by Simon & Schuster in 2011, my first published books were all historical novels.
I’ve always been a voracious reader of historicals, fantasies and science fiction, and I’ve always felt that they sit together comfortably because they are all, to a greater or lesser degree, true escapism. I find it as challenging, technically, to write a historical scene as a science fiction scene, needing to draw on the world I’m working with and its rules to create something believable. In historicals, this means research and in science fiction or fantasy, this means the rules and backstory I have made up.
As I worked on the Sky Raiders series, with SKY RAIDERS the first novel, and it was only after a while that I realized I was writing a novel that easily mirrored the invasion of Kwa-Zulu Natal by the Victorian Empire that I’d written about in my historical novel DAUGHTER OF THE SKY, as it was about a planet, Barit, invaded by aliens who were far more technically advanced.
That Victorian theme continued when I was thinking hard about the way one of the cultures on Barit treat their women. The idea of putting women on a pedestal as a way to disempower them is extremely Victorian. The Victorians pretended they were honoring the feminine, but instead were condescending to women by denying them experiences and power ‘for their own good’. But I obviously like to mix things up, because rather than a Victorian level of technology on Barit, the level is more analogous to the Renaissance, with walled cities. But I didn’t stop there. Into the mix, I threw the Hallstatt Culture. This Celtic culture which gets its name from Hallstatt, near Salzburg in Austria, has always fascinated me, and there are definite threads of this culture in the people of Barit.
Another fun tradition I incorporated was the Viking Clap – although it isn’t exactly the same in Sky Raiders, the inspiration definitely comes from this. (Those who want to see it in action, performed by 100,000 Icelanders on the triumphant return of the Icelandic soccer team after a big win during the European Cup, can check it out here. The Viking Clap wasn’t actually invented by the Icelanders, it’s from Motherwell in Scotland, but whoever is doing it, it’s awesome to watch. And staying with Iceland, I also used their real women’s Day Off, which happened in 1975, where over 90% of Icelandic women took a day off and didn’t do any work to protest their lower pay (60% of what men were earning) and the general inequality of women in the workforce. Laws were past the following year guaranteeing gender equality in the workforce (the Day Off literally shut the country down for the day) and although true change was a little slower, Iceland does now have one of the highest levels of gender equality in the workforce in the world.
I think it was inevitable that my years of writing historicals would find a way to touch my science fiction work, and I had a lot of fun, and gave a lot of thought, to the use to which I put my historical background. I think fictional cultures with some basis in real culture, however much of a mix they are, make for a more believable, more interesting world, and I hope my readers think so, too.
–Michelle
Michelle Diener is the award-winning, bestselling author of the Class 5 series. She writes historical fiction, fantasy and science fiction and lives in Australia with her husband and two children.
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Release Celebration Giveaway
10 winners will receive a ebook of Sky Raiders
Open internationally
Ends December 22nd
Dark Minds Release Book Blitz: Day 3
On tour with Prism Book Tours
Welcome to the Release Celebration for Dark Minds by Michelle Diener
Dark Minds is book three in the Class 5 Series. Michelle is sharing about the Class 5 world today. If you missed Michelle’s release-day message, go read it HERE, if you missed about the rise of the genre, go check that out HERE, and don’t forget to check out the entire series and enter the giveaway below!
Dark Deeds
(Class 5 #3)
by Michelle Diener
Adult Sci-Fi
ebook, 331 Pages
July 22nd 2016
The mind is the most powerful weapon of all . . .
Imogen Peters knows she’s a pawn. She’s been abducted from Earth, held prisoner, and abducted again. So when she gets a chance at freedom, she takes it with both hands, not realizing that doing so will turn her from pawn to kingmaker.
Captain Camlar Kalor expected to meet an Earth woman on his current mission, he just thought he’d be meeting her on Larga Ways, under the protection of his Battle Center colleague. Instead, he and Imogen are thrown together as prisoners in the hold of a Class 5 battleship. When he works out she’s not the woman who sparked his mission, but another abductee, Cam realizes his investigation just got a lot more complicated, and the nations of the United Council just took a step closer to war.
Imogen’s out of her depth in this crazy mind game playing out all around her, and she begins to understand her actions will have a massive impact on all the players. But she’s good at mind games. She’s been playing them since she was abducted. Guess they should have left her minding her own business back on Earth…
Creating the World of the Class 5 Series
A few days ago, DARK MINDS, the third and final book in my Class 5 series was released. I have had a lot of readers express disappointment that this is the final book. They love the world and they want to keep exploring it.
Nothing is sweeter to me than hearing that the world I’ve created in my head is a place people want to linger. I am working on a new series, though, and hope everyone loves the new one just as much.
When I started the Class 5 series, it wasn’t really with a series in mind. The main character in DARK HORSE, the first book in the series, Rose, came to me so strongly, with such a compelling story, I set aside the historical I was working on and jumped right in to write it. It was only near the end of DARK HORSE that I realized there was still a lot of the story left to tell, and the Class 5 series was born.
I know the fact that Rose and the world she found herself in was so clear in my head and so vivid in my imagination helped me create such a strong world for the series as a whole. I had invented way more in my head than ended up on the page in DARK HORSE, and that gave me scope to include the greater world of the Class 5 series or explore things I only touched on in DARK HORSE in the other two novels.
The part of the universe where my heroines Rose, Fiona and Imogen find themselves is run by a coalition of five races. I only go into detail about the culture of the Grih, the race my human heroines have the most affinity for, but I do lightly touch on aspects of the other four’s cultures. It was fun creating the worlds and customs, the look and feel of the places my heroines are forced to go, and I like to think that while they’re there unwillingly at first, I’ve made the places interesting enough, sometimes even magical, so that they can see good in their new part of the universe, as well as bad.
If you are already a fan of the world of the Class 5 series, I hope you love DARK MINDS, and if you haven’t tried the series yet, I hope you’ll consider giving it a go. If action, adventure, and romance appeal, you won’t be sorry you did.
— Michelle Diener
Other Books in the Series
Dark Deeds
(Class 5 #2)
by Michelle Diener
Adult Sci-Fi
ebook, 340 Pages
January 4th 2016
Far from home . . .
Fiona Russell has been snatched from Earth, imprisoned and used as slave labor, but nothing about her abduction makes sense. When she’s rescued by the Grih, she realizes there’s a much bigger game in play than she could ever have imagined, and she’s right in the middle of it.
Far from safe . . .
Battleship captain Hal Vakeri is chasing down pirates when he stumbles across a woman abducted from Earth. She’s the second one the Grih have found in two months, and her presence is potentially explosive in the Grih’s ongoing negotiations with their enemies, the Tecran. The Tecran and the Grih are on the cusp of war, and Fiona might just tip the balance.
Far from done . . .
Fiona has had to bide her time while she’s been a prisoner, pretending to be less than she is, but when the chance comes for her to forge her own destiny in this new world she grabs it with both hands. After all, actions speak louder than words.
Dark Horse
(Class 5 #1)
by Michelle Diener
Adult Sci-Fi
ebook, 381 Pages
June 15th 2015
Some secrets carry the weight of the world.
Rose McKenzie may be far from Earth with no way back, but she’s made a powerful ally–a fellow prisoner with whom she’s formed a strong bond. Sazo’s an artificial intelligence. He’s saved her from captivity and torture, but he’s also put her in the middle of a conflict, leaving Rose with her loyalties divided.
Captain Dav Jallan doesn’t know why he and his crew have stumbled across an almost legendary Class 5 battleship, but he’s not going to complain. The only problem is, all its crew are dead, all except for one strange, new alien being.
She calls herself Rose. She seems small and harmless, but less and less about her story is adding up, and Dav has a bad feeling his crew, and maybe even the four planets, are in jeopardy. The Class 5’s owners, the Tecran, look set to start a war to get it back and Dav suspects Rose isn’t the only alien being who survived what happened on the Class 5. And whatever else is out there is playing its own games.
In this race for the truth, he’s going to have to go against his leaders and trust the dark horse.
Copyright Veronika Kahrmadji
Michelle was born in London, grew up in South Africa and currently lives in Australia with her husband and two children.
When she’s not writing, or driving her kids from activity to activity, you can find her blogging at Magical Musings. or online at Twitter, at Google+ and Facebook.
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Release Celebration Giveaway
$25 Amazon eGift Card
Four ebook sets of Dark Horse, Dark Deeds, and Dark Minds
Open internationally
Ends July 31st