My St. Patrick's Day Regret

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Now, I could always talk about Ireland, Irish traditions, my Irish heritage, being green… but instead, I’m going to tell you about my St. Patrick’s Day regret.

Once upon a time, back when I lived in Toronto, The Pogues were playing on St. Patrick’s Day. I couldn’t find anyone to go with me and I should have just gone on my own. The stars have yet to align to put me in the same place as them doing a show on St. Patrick’s Day, and boy, do I regret not going when I had the chance.

Now, in case you’re unfamiliar with The Pogues, their Irish-based folky, punky Celtic music is absolutely perfect for the season, and I can’t think of a better way I’d like to spend March 17… sometime!

The band name was inspired by the Gaelic term for “kiss my ass” (or so says Wikipedia) and their music, especially the earlier stuff that’s all Shane McGowan, has a great edge to it, lives up to that motto and is so damn catchy. There’s even a Subaru commercial that uses one of my favourite songs, and it makes me want to run right out and buy a Subaru, while listening to The Pogues.

They’ve got a *fantastic* Christmas song, Fairytale of New York, but that’s no good for St. Patrick’s Day. Take a listen to a couple of my favourites (some are NSFW) and see if you aren’t ready to go out and quaff a green beer or a Guinness, maybe dance a little jig…

The Haunting

The Wake of the Medusa

Hell's Ditch

If I Should Fall From Grace With God -- this is an early version, not the kick-ass one on the Subaru commercial :(

KC Burn

Flash fiction

One of my friends writes Flash Fiction -- check out Flash Fiction Online for awesome examples of what I'm talking about.

Agog at the brilliance of her mind, I declared I could never write that short. The shorter the piece, the more challenging for me. Seriously, my natural length is a multi-volume epic saga. After a bit of reflecting, I realized I do write flash fiction. I call it blogging. :)

Have you recently discovered any hereto unsuspected talents?

Time Again For...

In what is fast becoming my favorite ohmygodIhaveablogpostdue posts, I'm back again this month with yet another photo and another opportunity for you to win a free ebook from my backlist. Last month was pretty tough, even I admit that.

Oh! And our winner, Adnil, never claimed her selection from my e-backlist! Adnil, please feel free to choose a book. It's not too late.
This month is to give us the final line(s) at the end of the climactic middle chapter. So not the last line of the book, but the line of the chapter where all hell breaks loose.

(Heh. I can't wait to see what you came up with.)

Here's your photo:

A Hot Guy In Uniform + A Foodie With a Secret= Cooking With Sin

I think its a pretty known fact that women love a man in uniform, especially military men. According to a recent poll on Hub Pages, pollsters favored military uniforms by more than 40% than the twelve other examples.

Of course, I wasn't all that surprised by the survey's results because I also have a thing for men in uniform. So much so, the hero in my book, Cooking With Sin, is a non-commissioned officer and master diver in the U.S. Navy.

Senior Chief Petty Officer Cole Rodriguez is a man of action, who also looks good in a uniform. So good he has the heroine of my book, restaurateur Sinclair Fletcher eating out of his hand shortly after they meet.

Good thing Sinclair is the one doing the eating because the former food show host and restaurateur can’t cook. But that doesn’t stop her from turning her restaurant into the toast of Savannah, Georgia. Armed with her late Aunt Bernie’s Low Country recipes and a hundred-year old spell, Sinclair has cheated her way to the top.

Of course, all empires must fall. And Sinclair falls had when she crosses paths with Cole Rodriguez setting off a sequence of events that will change Sinclair’s and his life forever.

***

COOKING WITH SIN by Koko Brown
GENRE: PARANORMAL, MULTICULTURAL
RELEASE DATE: MARCH 13, 2012

Official Blurb:
From the moment Senior Chief Petty Officer Cole Rodriguez lays eyes on celebrity TV chef-turned- restaurateur Sinclair Fletcher, he realizes his celebrity crush is something more. But convincing the petite dynamo, who's harboring a secret that could ruin her career and reputation, into his bed proves more difficult than a six-hundred- meter dive for the Naval master diver.

Out of the frying pan into the fire. Sinclair Fletcher has rested her laurels on a hundred-year- old spell that makes everyone fall in love with her cooking. The only drawback? They fall in love with her as well. So it only makes sense she doesn't allow anyone to get close, not even
mouth-watering SCPO Cole Rodriguez. But when she gets one taste of the sexy sailor, things start to heat up, and he leaves her hungering for more.

Author's Note: This book also contains six mouth-watering recipes straight from Sinclair's menu that will whet your appetite!

To read an excerpt of Cooking With Sin, visit the book's official page.

***
COOKING WITH SIN GIVEAWAY

For the official release date of Cooking With Sin, I’m hosting a tie-in giveaway. One lucky winner will win a set of personalized 2GB USB Dog Tags with a free copy of Cooking With Sin already downloaded on the internal jump drive and a $12 gift certificate to have the tags engraved. To enter, all you have to do is click this link, which will redirect you to my website, and answer the question in the comment section!

Koko Brown
http://www.kokobrown.net/

Friend Me

They saw a swing set. I saw a dinosaur.

I watched this video the other day, and all I kept thinking was how interesting it was that I saw regular, everyday pushpins, but the artist saw something very different.

Here’s the video:



Or you can view here on YouTube

It got me thinking that perhaps that’s how non-writers must look at writers.

People who don’t spend their days writing fiction often ask me how I can create a story out of nothing. How I can take a blank document and come up with a 100,000-word story that makes sense and is engaging for readers (or so I hope). My answer is usually a quick comment about there being little else I’d rather spend my time doing. Which of course tells them nothing about the process of writing or how I come up with ideas, but there’s only so much you can get into standing in your aunt’s kitchen on Christmas Eve, balancing a glass and a paper plate filled with three crackers and some funky cheese spread you’re not sure you want to finish.

A longer response might include references to the vast amount of story ideas and “what if” scenarios running through my head, and that if I didn’t feel like I had an outlet for some of those, I might drive myself insane.

It might also include mention of my nutty color-coded index cards and post-it note system, but that just makes me look crazy organized to non-writers (and many writers).

 
Another, simpler answer might be that the desire to make up stories, to play in worlds of my own imagination is something I was born with. A part of me that made me different from the other kids in school who preferred sitting on the swings at recess rather than climbing to the top of the swing set and making up their own elaborate fictional words where ordinary playground equipment turned into dinosaurs that could be controlled as they roamed in search of defectors of the forest lands.

Yeah, I was that kid on the playground.

My imagination may have made me a bit different from the other kids, but I’m okay with that. In fact, I’m more than okay with that. I celebrate it every time I sit down at my computer to work on another story. 

What do you celebrate about yourself?