Sunday, November 28, 2010

In the Author Spotlight: Terry Spear

Cate: Please welcome werewolf/medieval romance/paranormal/vampire author, Terry Spear. Terry, will you please share a short bio with us?
Terry: Thanks so much for having me, Cate! Here is my official bio:
With almost 56,000 copies sold, Terry Spear is a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserves. She received her MBA from Monmouth University. An eclectic writer, she dabbles in the paranormal as well as writing historical and true life stories for both teen and adult audiences. Spear lives in Crawford, Texas. For more information, please visit http://www.terryspear.com/.

Cate: Tell us about Wolf Fever and it's available in book stores and other online book stores.
Terry: WOLF FEVER by TERRY SPEAR—IN STORES DECEMBER 2010
She may be his destiny, but she's not his first choice…
Hospital nurse and newly turned red werewolf Carol Woods is being pressured by her pack leader to find a mate, but he's the only guy in the pack who remotely attracts her… Why is he playing so hard to get?

The fate of the pack rests on his shoulders…
Gray pack leader Ryan McKinley doesn't want anything to do with Carol unless she's willing to embrace her wolf nature—no matter how beautiful she is.

But when a virus infects the local lupus garou pack, Ryan realizes just how wrong he's been not to seize the moment with the woman he's come to love. And now, it may be too late…

For Wolf Fever’s Blog tour, Sourcebooks is doing this ebook promotion. The links will be on their site.
GREAT TERRY SPEAR eBOOK PROMOTIONS: Heart of the Wolf—FREE eBook from 12/7/2010-12/13/2010
• Heart of the Wolf

Terry Spear Backlist—eBooks ONLY 2.99 from 12/7/2010-12/13/2010
• Destiny of the Wolf
• To Tempt the Wolf
• Legend of the White Wolf

Cate: Very cool. Please tantalize us with a story blurb or excerpt.
Terry: Carol Woods has been playing a game of tag as part of the pack’s attempt at allowing the other males in the pack to get to know her. But when Chester Ryan McKinley shows up in town, she’s afraid her pack leader will be ticked off and make the gray wolf leave his territory at once. He has a mission, find out how she knew what she did about a murder that had taken place earlier. So here’s how she deals with her annoyance concerning it:

She glanced at the men standing about, including both Tom and Jake. Which made the situation worse. Why couldn’t any of the alpha males show any real interest in her? She was not a beta kind of girl. She supposed that was because her father had become so downtrodden by her mother’s treatment of him. She couldn’t see being married, um, mated to someone like that.
“Carol?” Ryan said, his deep baritone voice again yanking her from her faraway thoughts.
She really needed to get more sleep. She turned her attention back to Ryan. He thought she wasn’t being honest with him about her abilities, when he wasn’t honest about why he had been lurking in the woods last night, watching her window. She didn’t have to be psychic to know something more was going on between them. Time to turn the tables. Throw him off balance.
Trying to look like this was a perfectly natural way for her to act, she smiled, wrapped her arms around his neck, and leaned into the soft sweater covering his hard body, which instantly reminded her just how hard his body was when he wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothes. She only meant to give him a slow kiss on the mouth, just to prove to him that he had another agenda that he wouldn’t admit to. Or if not, then maybe Tom or Jake would finally show some interest in her. But more than anything, she wanted to get Ryan off the subject of her abilities before she said something in anger that she shouldn’t.
To her surprise, he eagerly captured her mouth with his. Not cautiously, building up the desire in slow careful increments, but judiciously, as if he had been starved for affection for a very long time. His hand cupped the back of her head, his free hand drifting lower on her back and holding her in place.
She hadn’t meant to respond so fully to the kiss either, but his unbridled need fed into hers. Forgetting they had an audience, she parted her lips to accept him, to open an intimate path between them, their tongues dancing, touching, exploring. Her hands fisted in his soft sweater at the back of his neck and held him even tighter. She pressed her body against his hard muscles, and shamelessly she wanted more.

Cate: Can you tell us why we're going to love your hero?
Terry: From Long and Short Reviews, here’s what Xeranthemum said she liked about the hero and I couldn’t have said it better:
Ryan is the hero. On top of that, he’s a yummy Scotsman as well as an alpha. I like that he did his own thing and is his own man but still respected the local alpha. Although he’s visiting and states that he’s tying up a loose end, he’s determined to keep Carol safe and he’s not quite sure why. I really enjoyed his slow fall into love. He actually got hit with Cupid’s arrow early on but he didn’t recognize the fact and that made me smile. He’s such a guy. He’s also a great protector and he’s tenacious, all good traits.

Cate: Great review - congrats! Tease us with one little thing about your fictional world that makes it different from others.
Terry: What I love to do is to show how werewolves behave in both their human and wolf forms, and how they have expectations of one another, which are easily shattered. In this scene, Carol wants to know who the wolf is who’s watching her window. And Ryan figures since she’s newly turned, he’ll horrify her if he shifts. But Carol doesn’t react anything like what he expects. And that’s the fun in their relationship!
A feeling of satisfaction swept through him that he finally had a private audience, although it didn’t do him much good while he was in his wolf form. He didn’t smell any indication that she was fearful, which could have gotten her in trouble if she’d come out here without worrying about his intentions.
“Who are you?” she asked, her brow deeply furrowed as she wrapped her arms tightly around her waist, defensive but firm in her stance.
He had half a mind to shift. She’d asked a question she knew he couldn’t answer any other way. What would she do then? Run screaming for the house to alert Darien and everyone inside? He’d shock the hell out of the woman, he was certain.
He swung his head toward the house in his wolf’s way, ordering her to return.
Determination etched in her brow, she shook her head. “Shift. Tell me what you want.”
Without his express permission, his jaw dropped again. He couldn’t believe she’d order him about. Him, an alpha male and pack leader. She smiled a hint, her eyes narrowing.
Devious. Appealing. She didn’t think he’d shift? She had asked for it. He stood taller, tail straight out, summoning the urge to change. Her brows lifted a little. Heat poured through every blood vessel, spilling through every vein and artery. His muscles stretched, reforming, and then in a flash, he was standing as a man before her. The cold breeze swept across his heated naked skin, and he expected Carol to vamoose or, at the very least, stare him in the eye to avoid looking at his nakedness.
A whisper of an intake of breath caught his attention, but she quickly recovered and took her fill of him, her gaze drifting all the way down to his bare feet, appraising him in an unhurried manner. He’d never had a woman peruse him in such an arousing way.
She snapped her gaze back to his face. “You look nice and healthy to me. I thought maybe you needed medical attention.”
[She is a nurse, after all. What can he expect?]

Cate: What's next for you?
Terry: Right now I’m working on The Wolf and the SEAL, book 9, and final edits on Heart of the Highland Wolf due out Jun 2011, next. And then I’ll be working on The Highland Wolf in Paradise, Book 10. Already some are asking for Ryan’s sister’s story in Wolf Fever, so she might need to have her own story also. And some of my critique partners want to see the story about a new character in The Wolf and the SEAL. She’s an undercover operative in the story, and she’s always packing.

Cate: What inspired you to draft your first story?
Terry: Years earlier I had read Jack London’s White Fang and Call of the Wild, which subconsciously stuck with me all those years and I loved how he had given the wolves personality. So when I wrote my first werewolf story, I based them on real wolves, rather than on the monster versions I had watched in movies when I was little. Also, I have a thing for the underdog, er, wolf, so I wanted to show that not all wolves/werewolves are bad. And no matter what you are, everyone deserves to be loved too.

Cate: Do you have a writing routine?
Terry: I work full time so I have to a goal of writing 5,000 words a week to keep up with word count on deadlines. I usually check emails and write blogs before I go to work, check emails and comments on blogs during my lunch break at work, and catch up at night, then write a little. On my two days off during the week, I have to get my writing in on my current wip. But for the blog tour, I’ve had to write a large number of interviews and blogs in addition to keeping up with my word count on my wip, and edits on Heart of the Highland Wolf.

Cate: Where can readers find you on the web?
Terry: www.terryspear.com

Cate: Is there anything you’d like to ask our readers?
Terry: I love hearing from readers about who or what they’d like to see me write about. With a mischievous glint in her eyes, one of my co-workers said I never wrote about poor werewolves. So I smiled back and said, “That’s a great idea!” She just gave me this wry smile back, not believing I’d make a poor werewolf. But Heart of the Highland Wolf was born. I’d been wanting to write about a Highland wolf pack, and so I made them broke! They’re about to lose their ancestral castle because of investments with a broker who took their money, which had just occurred in the real world as far as several investment brokers who had done this with powerful people’s money.
In another case, a fan wanted to see more of dream mating, and so Dreaming of the Wolf was born. It’s book 8. But many of my stories are showcasing characters that fans wanted to see more of. So what would you like to see?
Thanks again, Cate, for having me here today! It’s always a pleasure.

Cate: It was a pleasure having you, Terry! Thanks for being my guest.
Readers, Terry is giving away a book to a random commenter, US or Canada only... so start commenting. She'll pick a winner on the evening of Sunday, December 5 and post the winner’s name.