Showing posts with label time travel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label time travel. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Irish recipe and spotlight on Dark Brew by @DianaLRubino!

St. Patrick's Day comes a wee bit early on The Maze with Dark Brew by Diana Rubino and an Irish recipe! In Diana's words:

Dark Brew is set on modern-day Cape Cod, when Kylah isn’t traveling back in time to 1324 Ireland. I have a home on the Cape, and spend as much time there as I can when the weather cooperates. The Cape Cod Irish Village is a restaurant/pub/hotel where my husband and I have been going for many years. We have a traditional Irish dinner there and dance up a storm to the live Irish music they always have. I mention the Irish Village in DARK BREW and their great Irish cuisine.

Traditional Irish fare has been a long-standing theme at the Irish Village where Chef Chris Lynch has headed the kitchen for the better part of 16 years. New American cuisine with a slant on old Irish staples is how Chef Lynch would characterize the menu at the Irish Village. Having spent many years honing his craft in kitchens all across the Northeast, Chris realized that most of the guests who come to the Cape and have frequented the Irish Village for decades in some cases want to feel at home and his team tries to match the daily specials to their memories of meals taken at the tables of their own families. Simple and plentiful is a formula that has kept many repeat customers coming back to the Village year after year.

Here’s a recipe from Chris for “Breadan Eireann.”

This recipe serves 4 people

Preheat oven to 375 degrees
4 ea. – 6oz Salmon Fillet
4 ea. – Jumbo Shrimp
12 oz. – medium sea scallops
4 cups mashed potatoes
1 cup sauteed onions & mushrooms, sliced thin
6 oz. dry sherry
8 oz. clarified butter

DIRECTIONS

In a baking dish or in individual casserole dishes arrange salmon, scallops & shrimp closely together.  Pipe mashed potatoes around salmon and seafood encircling all of the fish.  Pour 1 ½ oz. of sherry and 2 oz. of butter over the fish and potatoes.  Bake in oven for approximately 20 minutes or until salmon flakes under the touch.  Remove and top with ¼ cup sautéed onions & mushrooms.  Return to oven for 2-3 minutes to finish browning the potatoes and to heat the onions & mushrooms.  Serve immediately.


Dark Brew
by Diana Rubino
Genre: Time Travel Romance

Accused of her husband’s murder, Kylah McKinley, a practicing Druid, travels back through time to her past life in 1324 Ireland and brings the true killer to justice.

Two months of hell change Kylah’s life forever. On her many past life regressions, she returns to 14th century Ireland as Alice Kyteler, a druid moneylender falsely accused of murdering her husband. Kylah’s life mirrors Alice’s in one tragic event after another—she finds her husband sprawled on the floor, cold, blue, with no pulse. Evidence points to her, and police arrest her for his murder. Kylah and Alice shared another twist of fate—they fell in love with the man who believed in them. As Kylah prepares for her trial and fights to maintain her innocence, she must learn from her past or forever be doomed to repeat it. 



Excerpt:

Kylah shut Ted’s den door. She couldn’t bear to look at the spot where he gasped his last breath. His presence, an imposing force, lingered. So did his scent, a blend of tobacco, pine aftershave and manly sweat. Each reminder ripped into her heart like a knife. Especially now with the funeral looming ahead, the eulogies, the mournful organ hymns, the tolling bells . . .

These ceremonies should bring closure, but they’d only prolong the agony of her grief. She wanted to remember him alive for a while longer, wishing she could delay these morbid customs until the hurt subsided.

Throughout the house, his essence echoed his personality: the wine stain on the carpet, the heap of dirty shirts, shorts and socks piled up in the laundry room, the spattered stove, his fingerprints on the microwave. But she couldn’t bring herself to clean any of it up. Painful as these remnants were, they offered a strange comfort. He still lived here.

“I’ll find that murderer, Teddy,” she promised him over and over, wandering from room to empty room, traces of him lurking in every corner. “I’ll do everything in my power to make sure justice is served. Another past life regression isn’t enough anymore. I know what I have to do now. And I promise, it will never, ever happen again—in any future life.”

She inhaled deeply and breathed him in. “Go take a shower, Teddy.” She chuckled through her tears as the doorbell rang. She cringed, breaking out in cold sweat when she saw the black sedan at the curb.

“Not again.” No sense in hiding, so she let the detectives in.

“Mrs. McKinley, we need your permission to do a search and take some of your husband’s possessions from the house,” Nolan said.

“What for?” She met his steely stare. “I looked everywhere and found nothing.”

“Mrs. McKinley, the cupboard door was open, four jars of herbs are missing, and the autopsy showed he died of herb poisoning. Those herbs,” Nolan added for emphasis, as if it had slipped her feeble mind. “Foxglove, mandrake, hemlock—and an as-yet unidentified one,” he read from a notebook. “The M.E. determined it was a lethal dose.”

Sherlock Holmes got nothin’ on him, she thought.

“Where’s this cupboard, ma’am?” Egan spoke up.

“Right there.” She pointed, its door gaping exactly the way she’d found it that night. Nolan went over to it and peered inside.

“Ma’am, it would be better if you left the house for a half hour or so. Please leave a number where you can be reached,” Egan ordered.

Nolan glanced down the hall. “Where is your bedroom?”

What could they want in the bedroom? “It’s at the top of the stairs on the right. But we didn’t sleep together,” she offered, as if that would faze them. It didn’t.

After giving him her cell number, she got into her car and drove to the beach.

An hour later, she let herself back in and looked around. They’d taken the computer, her case of CDs, her thumb drive, her remaining herb jars, Ted’s notebooks, and left her alone with one horrible fact: This was now a homicide case and she was the prime suspect.

Buy links: Kindle US | Amazon Paperback | Barnes & Noble | Wild Rose Press |


Contact Diana via Website | Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Goodreads |

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Monday, September 26, 2016

#VirtualFantasyCon2016 guest post: Family Paranormal Experiences by @KimHeadlee


This year I'm trying something different: I'm a participating author in Virtual FantasyCon 2016! If memory serves, I have signed up for the following fantasy subgenres:

What is Virtual FantasyCon2016?

Virtual FantasyCon is a fun and interesting online event happening in October, and best of all it’s free. The location is your computer; Facebook, specifically. You can drop by any day during the event and check out the booths for that day. There will be authors, bloggers, editors, artists, and publishers to list just a few. There will be a Cosplay booth, Blog Hop Hunt booth, panel discussions, and a new booth this year, the Author Cache Sale booth.

The Author Cache Sale booth is only for the participating authors on the day of each event. Books on sale for $1.99 or 0.99 will be listed in the comment section for guests to find and buy. It is put together by lovely people like Carol March, Raven Williams, Denise Garrou, and others who have worked behind the scenes to make this event happen.

It’s a place to catch up on your favorite author and discover new authors. There is epic fantasy, urban fantasy, dark fantasy, children’s fantasy, and YA fantasy to name just a few of the different types of authors that will have a booth during the event.

To find out more about Virtual FantasyCon 2016, check out the following social media links:

Reader’s Corner Facebook event | Virtual FantasyCon website | Blog Hop Hunt website
List of blog tour participants courtesy of Diane Riggins

I hope to connect with you there!


Family and personal paranormal experiences

My mother was psychic, I am psychic, and my daughter is psychic, so my personal paranormal experiences are legion and far too complex to describe here. Corner me at a con some evening, buy me a drink (anything with Peach Schnapps will do, thanks!), and I'll make it worth your while, I promise. :)

From my dad's side, however, comes an honest-to-God ghost story involving one of my great-grandmothers, a lady in the court of Tsar Nicholas II. She died about a week before the start of the October Revolution of 1917, and at dinner a few evenings later—before all hell broke loose and the family lost everything to the godless Bolsheviks—her ghost was seen standing next to her husband my great-grandfather, elegantly attired and with her hand resting upon his shoulder. It took him a few moments to understand why his daughters (my grandmother and her younger sister) and the family servants were gaping, speechless. Finally he turned in his chair and saw her too.

I have to imagine that the memory of that experience, as weird and frightening and confusing as it must have felt at the time, helped the grieving family through all of the bloody horrors of the years to come.


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— Leave a comment on any page of The Maze, especially if you have done the Twitter, Pinterest, and/or YouTube follow<

… and each action this month is good for one chance to win a copy of any of Kim's e-books.

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Friday, July 22, 2016

Congratulations @DianaLRubino on #Newrelease DARK BREW! time travel romance

Today on The Maze I am pleased to spotlight Dark Brew, a brand-new time travel romance by my longtime author-friend Diana Rubino!


Learn from the past 
or forever be doomed to repeat it.


Worldwide release date 22 July 2016 via The Wild Rose Press.

An interview with Diana about Dark Brew

[The Maze (TM)]: Where did the story come from?

[Diana Rubino (DR)]: This story took 11 years from start to finish. I’m a longtime member of the Richard III Society, and in the spring of 2004, I read an article in The Ricardian Register by Pamela Butler, about Alice Kyteler, who lived in Kilkenny, Ireland in 1324, and faced witchcraft charges. After her trial and acquittal, she vanished from the annals of history. I couldn't resist writing a book about her.

[TM]: How did you decide to make it a paranormal?

[DR]: I’m a believer in reincarnation, and I go on paranormal investigations whenever I can. I’ve gone on several past life regressions. Cape Cod has a lot of history and paranormal activity. I’ve been on many ghost walks and ghost hunts there. I wanted to connect Alice in the past with someone in the present, her reincarnation.

[TM]: Was Alice Kyteler famous in 14th century Ireland?

[DR]: Not at all but she was the richest woman in Kilkenny, and for that reason the villagers hated her, especially the men. They accused her of killing her first husband, but she was acquitted. Then they accused her of killing her fourth husband, John LePoer, with witchcraft, the accusations more absurd than those of the 1692 witch hysteria in Salem, Massachusetts. Chancellor Edward de Burgh arrested Alice because her stepsons claimed she had murdered John by casting a witch’s spell with malefecia… and she used the enchanted skull of a beheaded thief as her cauldron.

She went to trial and her dear friend Michael Artson had her acquitted, but she vanished into the annals of history. According to legend, she went to England. But no one knows for sure.

[TM]: Why did you make it a time travel?

[DR]: Because my heroine, Kylah McKinley, is a Druid and has done many past life regressions, she knows she’s the reincarnation of Alice. So she has to go back and find out what happened to Alice, because too many weird things are happening to her in this life that parallel Alice’s life.

Kylah lives on my beloved Cape Cod. She’s a Druid, a ghost hunter and owns a new age store in a restored Revolutionary War-era tavern. She was also the target of a hit-and-run. Another hit-and-run crippled her husband Ted. That’s no coincidence—she’s convinced someone’s out to get them both.

She brews an ancient Druid herb mixture, goes back in time and enters Alice’s life to find out exactly what happened and who killed her husband.

These two months of hell change her life forever. Kylah’s life mirrors Alice’s in one tragic event after another—she finds her husband sprawled on the floor, cold, blue, with no pulse. Evidence points to her, and police arrest her for his murder. Kylah and Alice shared another twist of fate—they fell in love with the man who believed in them. As Kylah prepares for her trial and fights to maintain her innocence, she must learn from her past or she’s doomed to repeat it.

[TM]: Have you ever spoken to Pamela Butler, who wrote the article about Alice?

[DR]: Yes, we’ve corresponded. She lives in New Mexico, so we’ve never met in person. I asked Pam what inspired her to write about Alice. I’d never heard of Alice until I read her article, “Witchcraft & Heresy. She replied:

“You asked why I wrote about Alice Kyteler, who preceded Richard by a century-and-a-half. I only wrote it because others on the listserv encouraged me to write about witchcraft, a subject about which I knew very little. I ordered three books from Amazon.com on the subjects of witchcraft, heresy, Satanism, etc. for research reasons. That was my basis, plus I searched the Internet. The Malleus Malleficarum was published in 1487, just two years after Richard's death, so it's almost contemporary. I chanced across Alice in this reading and thought that it was an interesting case. Witch burning was fairly rare in Ireland, and wasn't as bad in England at that time as it had been on the Continent. I wish that the M.M. had never been published; still, the fact that it was published and accepted may reveal the mindset of those times.”

An excerpt from Dark Brew

Kylah shut Ted’s den door. She couldn’t bear to look at the spot where he gasped his last breath. His presence, an imposing force, lingered. So did his scent, a blend of tobacco, pine aftershave and manly sweat. Each reminder ripped into her heart like a knife. Especially now with the funeral looming ahead, the eulogies, the mournful organ hymns, the tolling bells...

These ceremonies should bring closure, but they’d only prolong the agony of her grief. She wanted to remember him alive for a while longer, wishing she could delay these morbid customs until the hurt subsided.

Throughout the house, his essence echoed his personality: the wine stain on the carpet, the heap of dirty shirts, shorts and socks piled up in the laundry room, the spattered stove, his fingerprints on the microwave. But she couldn’t bring herself to clean any of it up. Painful as these remnants were, they offered a strange comfort. He still lived here.

“I’ll find that murderer, Teddy,” she promised him over and over, wandering from room to empty room, traces of him lurking in every corner. “I’ll do everything in my power to make sure justice is served. Another past life regression isn’t enough anymore. I know what I have to do now. And I promise, it will never, ever happen again—in any future life.”

She inhaled deeply and breathed him in. “Go take a shower, Teddy.” She chuckled through her tears as the doorbell rang. She cringed, breaking out in cold sweat when she saw the black sedan at the curb.

“Not again.” No sense in hiding, so she let the detectives in.

“Mrs. McKinley, we need your permission to do a search and take some of your husband’s possessions from the house,” Nolan said.

“What for?” She met his steely stare. “I looked everywhere and found nothing.”

“Mrs. McKinley, the cupboard door was open, four jars of herbs are missing, and the autopsy showed he died of herb poisoning. Those herbs,” Nolan added for emphasis, as if it had slipped her feeble mind. “Foxglove, mandrake, hemlock—and an as-yet unidentified one,” he read from a notebook. “The M.E. determined it was a lethal dose.”

Sherlock Holmes got nothin’ on him, she thought. 

“Where’s this cupboard, ma’am?” Egan spoke up.

“Right there.” She pointed, its door gaping exactly the way she’d found it that night. Nolan went over to it and peered inside.

“Ma’am, it would be better if you left the house for a half hour or so. Please leave a number where you can be reached,” Egan ordered.

Nolan glanced down the hall. “Where is your bedroom?”

What could they want in the bedroom? “It’s at the top of the stairs on the right. But we didn’t sleep together,” she offered, as if that would faze them. It didn’t.

After giving him her cell number, she got into her car and drove to the beach.

An hour later, she let herself back in and looked around. They’d taken the computer, her case of CDs, her thumb drive, her remaining herb jars, Ted’s notebooks, and left her alone with one horrible fact: This was now a homicide case and she was the prime suspect.

Purchase Dark Brew on Kindle.

Contact Diana via


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— Subscribe to Kim's YouTube channel
— Leave a comment on any page of The Maze, especially if you have done the Twitter, Pinterest, and/or YouTube follow<

… and each action this month is good for one chance to win a copy of any of Kim's e-books.

Please enter often, and good luck!

Tuesday, July 12, 2016

Julianna cannot refuse King Richard in For Love and Loyalty by @DianaLRubino time travel romance

Today on The Maze I am honored to present the "reverse" time travel romance by Diana Rubino, For Love and Loyalty.

In Diana's words:
Can a 15th century king and a 21st century woman find love and rewrite the past, or will time tear them apart? Time travel has always fascinated me, and this story had a strange birth: my long-time critique partner Bonnie and I were tossing around ideas for my next book, and she asked me to picture Richard III in modern times blow-drying his hair. The rest is history!

Synopsis:
England, 1476: A wizard’s charm sweeps Richard, Duke of Gloucester far, far away.

England, 2014: The Richard III Society’s annual séance doesn’t go quite as planned.

Julianna Hammond believes their mysterious visitor really is Richard. As a loyal Ricardian, she feels obligated to educate him on past and present. In dismay Richard learns of his destiny in a certain battle, and his depiction in a certain play. Julianna and he wonder: can history be rewritten?

Back in the Middle Ages, Richard’s brothers King Edward and George Plantagenet are determined to find him­-wherever he is­-with the help of a little magic conjured up by a wizard. Since the wizard can’t say no to money or a lady, Edward-infatuated Elizabeth Woodville isn’t far behind them.

Changing one’s destiny is complicated. So is falling in love. When the two collide, three brothers, three women, and history will never be the same.

Excerpt:
“Come here, Julianna.” The way he opened his arms to her, she couldn’t refuse. One warm embrace can’t hurt. But once she was in that embrace, and his lips sought hers, it felt as natural as breathing. He kissed her lovingly, gently and thoroughly. Stopping him would be as wrong as telling the sun not to shine.

Her heart beat the same primitive tattoo as the music surrounding them.

When his hand slid to her breast, she knew she had to take charge or nature would. “Richard—” She hadn’t meant to sound so whispery, but her voice was nowhere to be found. She cleared her throat. “We can’t get involved. It’ll be too much heartache if something happens and you get sent back.” She wondered how convincing she really sounded, with her fingers still wound through his hair and her body half pressed up against his.

“I’m not going back, Julianna. I’m resigned to my fate. I’m not like Ned, I don’t rake every wench that crosses my path. I keep my desire firmly in check. But right now my desire is about to burn a hole in these thin trousers so I’ll have to go back to wearing that torturous denim castrati garment.”

She let out a deep sigh and tried to calm her breathing. There’d been some pretty heavy breathing till now. “Richard, I’ve been fighting my feelings all along and doing a pretty good job of it so far. Don’t let me weaken. Don’t let me fall in love with you. There’s enough weird stuff going on here already. We’ve got enough to do.”

“I’ve grown very fond of you, Julianna.” He stroked her cheek. “And I’m still growing.” He relaxed his embrace and brushed her lips with his before sitting back. “However, you must lead and I follow, as this is your domain. I’m also a gentleman. If this were Ned sitting here, you’d have been ravished thrice already, in six different ways, and on your way to fetch him a beer.”

“Doesn’t he take no for an answer?” Her hand still played through his hair.

“He doesn’t even ask.”

“Looks like he doesn’t mind never going back to his own time. After tonight, George might not, either.”

“Well, Ned covered his arse quite well. He informed me he left the kingdom in good hands with no detail unattended to, and George will go anywhere there’s wenches and booze, even if it’s back to the stone age.”

“I wonder if you can go back by sheer force of will. Our minds are so much more powerful than we think.” A jumble of thoughts entered her head and vanished. This wasn’t the time to ponder telekinesis, as he tickled her earlobe and ran his thumb over her bottom lip. All she could do was close her eyes and let the exquisite sensations take over. She instinctively moved closer. Their bodies touched, his skin against hers. One more kiss, just one more of those delicious warm kisses, and I’ll call it a night, she convinced herself. Their lips met.

The door knocker pounded.


Purchase For Love and Loyalty:

Visit Diana:


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I'm running a giveaway for an e-copy of Raging Sea: Reckonings!
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All this month, you are invited to…

— Follow Kim on Twitter
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— Subscribe to Kim's YouTube channel
— Leave a comment on any page of The Maze, especially if you have done the Twitter, Pinterest, and/or YouTube follow<

… and each action this month is good for one chance to win a copy of any of Kim's e-books.

Please enter often, and good luck!

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

#KASIWC by Mark Twain and @KimHeadlee great new book trailer! #MFRWOrg #IARTG

King Arthur's Sister in Washington's Court
by Mark Twain as channeled by Kim Iverson Headlee.
Check out its great new YouTube book trailer!

If a picture is worth a thousand words,
then a video is worth a million. :D
See for yourself:




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All this month, you are invited to…

— Follow Kim on Twitter
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— Leave a comment on any page of The Maze, especially if you have done the Twitter, Pinterest, and/or YouTube follow<

… and each action this month is good for one chance to win a copy of any of Kim's e-books.

Please enter often, and good luck!