DARK CHILD with Adina West

Today's guest is my friend, and fellow Momentum author, Adina West. She's written a wonderful Paranormal Romance serial called Dark Child. You can get the first episode for FREE (link below).

Dark Child is my debut novel, a paranormal fantasy initially published by Pan Macmillan’s digital-only imprint Momentum as a serialized novel in five parts starting 1 Feb 2013. With one episode released each month, it has gained a growing following, and on 1^st May, Dark Child: Episode 4 debuted at #1 on the Apple iBookstore charts in Australia and New Zealand, and #4 on the iBookstore charts in the UK.

The concluding part to the serial, Dark Child: Episode 5, will be released 1 June together with the Omnibus Edition which re-combines all five parts into one novel as I originally wrote it.

Dark Child: Episode 1, the novella length introduction to this series, is available for FREE. You can download it here.

I’ve been writing for years and years, but I have to admit it took me a while to get my act together. My usual MO was to get a whizz bang idea, and start writing, and then trail off…soon. I have fragments written of lots of projects. Projects I never finished.

There was something a bit different about Dark Child though. It was the first project I attempted after I had a major attitude change. After I decided that I did want to make a serious career of writing and I did want to be published. I’d been writing romance for years, and this time I decided to try something completely different. Well, not completely different – I wanted to keep the romance, but write something with paranormal elements. Yep, you guessed it. Twilight was huge at the time!

Write what you know, I remembered hearing. Write what you like to read. I loved reading paranormal, and without quite realizing it, I’d watched pretty much every vampire movie and TV series made in the last twenty years. Right now I’m a total True Blood and Vampire Diaries fangirl! J So I thought if I liked the genre anyway, it made sense to try something that would have a shot at publication. No more dilly-dallying around.

Anyway, I started with an idea about a human girl – an unusual human girl, who moved into an apartment building with a secret. An apartment building warded with magical runes, so she shouldn’t have been able to see it, let alone walk through the front door. And then my inspiration fired-up and I started embroidering the initial concept. I filled in what had come before that first scene I’d written. What had brought my heroine to this apartment building? Who was she? And I wrote about what happened next. The story of a unique young woman caught out in the wrong place, at very much the wrong time.

When I finally finished, I had the first book of what I thought could be a series, and it was a crazy mish mash of genres - closer to urban fantasy than anything else, but not quite fitting the mold. It had romance, and touches of epic fantasy, and suspense. A combination of all the elements I loved, in a somewhat unholy alliance. And that was Dark Child.

Dark Child - Omnibus Edition:

Perfect for fans of The Mortal Instruments series by Cassandra Clare, this intriguing urban fantasy follows the story of Kat Chanter, who discovers that the world she knows is controlled by ancient creatures who feed on blood. And she might just be one of them ...

Lately things have been getting weird for pathology technician Kat Chanter. She's been craving raw meat, and having dreams so realistic they're scary. When she accepts a job offer from the prestigious Hema Castus Research Institute, she hopes she'll have the chance to discover what's wrong with her, but instead, her move to New York thrusts her headlong into a treacherous hidden world, where the wrong move could be fatal . . .

Tarot, witchcraft and astrology all take on a frightening resonance in Dark Child's richly imagined alternative reality where vampiric beings live among us, hidden by magic. Dark romance tangles with paranormal fantasy and page-turning suspense in this enthralling tale of 'dark child' Kat Chanter, half-human and half-vampire, who has woken an ancient prophecy and must face a formidable destiny.

Available now from leading online retailers, Omnibus buy links are here.

Kat’s life is under threat, and she’s hiding out deep in the White Mountains, under the protection of the wild and dangerous unalil…one of whom doesn’t always make her feel completely safe. Meet Alek. J

He tilted his head, blue eyes suddenly shining with a slumberous, sensual light. She’d seen that expression before. It sent her imagination tumbling into dark and unfamiliar territory, making her face heat. One minute he had her wanting to flee to safety, and the next . . . She swallowed again, struggling to marshal her wayward thoughts. She didn’t want to be feeling this right now.

“Would it help if you knew I’ve never done anything to a woman that she didn’t want me to do?” Alek asked.

God, that she could certainly believe. A melting heat pooled in her belly, liquid and deep, and she tensed, fighting the unwelcome response. Damn him for the pictures he was putting in her head. He may have been gorgeous, but his behavior around her was so completely over the top. He really did take sexual aggressiveness to a new level.

“Alek, you don’t need to tell me about your . . .”

He laughed. “I meant what I said about fulfilling your desires Kat. If you’ll let me. So if you want a back rub one night . . .”

And here we go with the seduction routine, Kat thought. Maybe I am getting to know him after all.

“Umm . . . yeah, well if I don’t get murdered or kidnapped by the Directorate in the next little while I may keep that in mind.” She might have sounded a little sharp, but he was too intense for comfort, and she did find him unnerving, whether he was trying to intimidate her or turning on the charm. But if she was being honest with herself, what unnerved her most was her own reaction to him. Not to the Alek who was trying his damnedest to seduce her with his words; to the man she sensed hiding beneath the smart comments and overconfidence.

“You’re privileged, Kat. Usually I don’t offer. Usually they beg me. And then later, they beg for more.” He gave a wicked grin.

Kat didn’t smile. She eyed him thoughtfully. “I think you like trying to shock me.”

He shrugged in response. “I think you don’t want to believe the offer’s genuine.” There was an edge to his voice, as if she wasn’t responding the way he’d hoped she would.

Kat blinked. What offer? What in heck had they been talking about, before . . . Oh, that’s right, the back rub. If that was really what he had been offering, which she doubted.

“Okay. Whatever.” She took refuge in silence, and then realized he was holding his hand out in her direction – like he wanted to shake hands.

“Friends?” he asked, with a spine-melting smile, and at that moment Kat thought she could forgive him anything.

Adina West grew up on a remote property on Australia’s east coast, in country New South Wales. She spent most of her childhood curled up with a book, and her first teenage job was shelving books at the local library, where she was cautioned more than once for reading them instead of putting them away.

Her first stories were laboriously typed up with two fingers on her parents’ old typewriter. Her dream of one day being a published writer progressed much faster after she learned to touch type and switched to a computer.

Adina lives in Sydney’s leafy north-west with her IT guru husband, two children, and a couple of unwelcome possums who really don’t know how to take a hint. You can visit her online at www.adinawest.com.

 

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