My true love gave to me “Widow’s Walk” by Meredith Holmes, which previously appeared in Needles & Bones. Meredith is also the author of Unseelie, a contemporary faerie fantasy, and another book in the same world, which is coming soon. Meredith, along with Joely Sue Burkhart, Angela Korra’ti, Cindy Lynn Speer and Michael F. Stewart are donating the ebook reader that will be given to some lucky entrant at the end of this extravaganza of good reading.
You must be registered on the blog to download a story. There’s no limit to the number of stories that can be downloaded, but you are only entered into the drawing for the ebook reader once for each story you choose 
(void where prohibited). In other words, if you download both of today’s free stories, you are entered twice. If you also buy a book in the bookstore (the holiday sale has been extended through January 5!), you’ll be entered again.
Download: Widow's Walk
About Meredith Holmes +/-
| Proud to be a bookworm, Meredith has written several short stories for online e-zines under her “other name” and is a writer for a local alternative news weekly for one of the largest cities in the U.S. Long fascinated with world cultures and mythology, Meredith’s work tends to skew heavily into the world of fantasy with a rather liberal dash of erotica and romance.
Not ashamed to admit she reads romance novels (at a rather discerning and voracious pace, at that), Meredith is also an avid collector of illustrated books in the vein of Edward Gorey. Her love of the macabre and Gothic also influences another aspect of her life: belly dancing. Involved in the art since the age of sixteen, Meredith now dances with one of her area’s premiere Gothic belly dance troupes and teaches lessons in dance.
Growing up in the South, Meredith was very drawn to folklore and the Southern Gothic style of story telling and hopes that carries through in her writing. She has had the opportunity to travel to several European countries and a large part of the United States and in each new place she visits, collects local tales and lore and brings them back home to join her muses in collaborating on new story ideas.
When not involved in a book or shaking her coin belt, Meredith is usually telling a long and involved story that somehow ends up including the most random facts you can ever imagine. Visit her blog to see what’s new with her writing and what’s going on! |
About Unseelie +/-
| The darkness tasted like bitter bark and earth, sharp berries, and cold water. I could not feel it as it came over me but I could smell it, taste it, hear it . . .
When Alfhild was a little girl, her grandmother called her a fairy princess and told her all of her favorite tales.
She’d never imagined they were real.
Anxious to avoid the swarming reporters and ghoulish souvenir hunters who won’t leave her alone when her brother Gulliver is tried and acquitted for multiple murders he almost certainly committed, a grown up Alfhild changes her name to Lorelei and flees Louisiana to the sanctuary she inherited from her grandmother, the ancestral home in England.
All is well until she wakes one morning to find a naked man in her rosebush.
And the games begin …
Lorelei’s inauspicious introduction to Cadfael, the seductively beautiful Unseelie prince, does not prepare her for becoming a pawn between the ancient queens of the faerie courts, Iseult and Mabd. Her big mouth and smartass attitude turn tension into war between the faerie clans: the Seelie, hiding behind golden lies and their resplendent beauty; and the Unseelie, long considered the fearsome things that go bump in the night.
Her brother works for the Seelie queen. The man she loves is in line to inherit the Unseelie throne. And both of them are determined to have Lorelei on their side. The real world thinks she’s been murdered, her house has been turned into a crime scene, and there are creatures on both sides of the war who call her a traitor. She doesn’t want to know what they do to traitors. Too bad the excitement didn’t end at a naked man in her rosebush. Things are a lot weirder now. |
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About Needles & Bones +/-
| Needles & Bones is a collection of poems and short fiction by a double handful of brilliantly creative artists-with-words. It begins gently, with fairy tales, but its tendrils of surreality spread from the stories of our childhood, into our adult world, and on to places beyond our own. We visit heaven, and hell, and places we might never imagine, peopled by creatures who are only sometimes like us.
Each story is described individually here. |
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