PBW Holiday Giveaway #8 -- Golden Things

We're running behind again time-wise, but at last we've solved the upload/download problem.

First, the winners of PBW Holiday Giveaway #6 -- Cool Characters are:

Maithe (whose comment began with: Oh, there are several characters i just love reading.)

Kayla (whose comment began with: Talyn, from Holly Lisle's TALYN. Her first-person narrative is as much intriguing as it is entertaining.)

Laughing Gecko

Carissa

Holly M (whose comment was: Richard..nuff said :-))

JK (whose comment began with: Sayuri from Memoirs of a Geisha is one of my all time favorites, but it's very hard to pick just one.)

Michelle W. (whose comment began with: Faythe Sanders from Rachel Vincent's Werecat series and Luna Wilder from Caitlin Kittredge's Nocturne City Series are among my favorite characters right now.)

Winners, when you have a chance please send your full name and ship-to info to LynnViehl@aol.com, and I'll get your copy of Master of Shadows out to you now (just a reminder, your copy of Stay the Night will be mailed out to you as soon as my author copies arrive here, which will be sometime between now and January 6th, 2009.) Thanks to everyone for letting us know who some of your favorite characters are.

About five years ago I wrote a short story about the most unlikely and unlikeable character to ever hit my pages. She was based on a myth I didn't care for, involving a critter that usually scares the wits out of me in real life. She was dark, mouthy, lethal, obnoxious and pretty much everything you else don't want in a protagonist.

I fell instantly in love with her, of course, and wrote in a couple of days what is arguably the best short story I've ever written: Red Branch. Some of you may remember her from one of my LB&LI workshops that she taught over the summer (she'll never admit it but she wanted to, and like I was going to argue with her.)

Since 2003 I've written other tales set in Akela's world of Ravelin, always for my own enjoyment. Writing for yourself is a golden thing because you can ignore all the rules and really play. When you have a place like Ravelin that seems to keep building itself in the back of your head, I think that's important to do. As much as I respect making the Almighty Buck, sometimes this gig just needs to be fun.

Stories are also meant to be shared, so for the eighth PBW Holiday Giveaway, I have for everyone:



Click on the cover art to go to the Scribd document page, where you can read online, download or print Ravelin, my free e-book collection of five short stories set in the Red Branch universe, including Black Queen, the follow-up to the first tale of Akela and Jalon. And happy reading. *Note 9/3/10: Since Scribd.com instituted an access fee scam to charge people for downloading e-books, including those I have provided for free for the last ten years, I have removed my free library from their site, and no longer use or recommend using their service. My free reads may be read online or downloaded for free from Google Docs; go to my freebies and free reads page for the links. See my post about this scam here.


Cover art credit: © Bertrandb | Dreamstime.com