Greetings!

 This blog is going to be all about my new YA Paranormal novel A Strange Fire which is now available to buy from Amazon. Below is the synopsis, if you care to have a gander…

Flo has always had problems. Her stammer prevents her speech and her dad’s abuse makes her life a living hell. Not to mention she sees colours other people don’t. 

When her dad decides to ship her off to live with her grandma in the sleepy town of Chesterport, Flo thinks that this is her chance for a better life. But on her very first day at her new school she is ridiculed and laughed at for having a stammer. One student sticks up for her and his name is Frank. 

Frank’s body is surrounded by an aura of fire, but Flo is the only one who can see it. He lives in a foster home for troubled teenagers. Flo is drawn to him because he’s different and so is she. 

Things are about to get scary, because Chesterport is not your ordinary suburban town. It’s infested by a coven of dark witches who prey on the young and the elderly. Soon Flo discovers that she’s next on their list of victims, and finds herself fighting a battle she never would have imagined possible
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I’ve put my blood, sweat and tears into preparing this novel for publication and I’m still nervous as hell about putting it out there. I feel like I was very young when I started writing it about three years ago, and this is in fact the first novel that I ever finished, even though I released Tegan’s Blood before it. My other concern is that readers aren’t going to like Florence because she stammers and her dialogue might get on their nerves. I have always wanted to portray underdogs in my stories, characters who have been through bad experiences, because I like to show how situations help them to heal and get over their past. I also like writing characters who start out weak and then fight to become strong. I think I did this in A Strange Fire, by the end of the novel Flo is definitely not the same girl she was at the beginning.
This book is set in the same fictional world as Tegan’s Blood, so I suppose you could call it a spin off of sorts. Flo has moved from Tribane, the city where Tegan lives, out to a town called Chesterport, and coincidentally, the town where Tegan grew up. Their paths are going to cross eventually, I just haven’t figured that out yet. I chose to set both of these novels in places that don’t exist, in a country that is neither here nor there, because it felt more comfortable that way when I began writing them. I guess it made it easier for me to suspend my disbelief. The city I know best is Dublin, however it’s almost too familiar to me, I know every nook and cranny of it, and I suppose this familiarity means I couldn’t imagine supernatural things happening here. So I decided to create a place where I believed these things could happen.
Another novel that I’m working on, which I hope to have out before the end of the year, is set in London, but this city is hazy to me, I was born and grew up there for a while, but I don’t know it like the back of my hand in the way I know Dublin, so it was easier for me to write a fantasy story set there. Just a side note.

So back to A Strange Fire, I designed the cover myself by using the image of smoke which I got from Dreamstime. I really love that site, I could spend hours looking through all the gorgeous pictures. This is also where I got the image of the bleeding heart flower for the cover of Tegan’s Blood. Designing book covers is relatively new to me, but I think I did an okay job of it. It’s actually really fun to sit there and play around with different colours and fonts.

This book is a little more subdued and spooky where Tegan’s Blood was all action and shock. If you like a mixture of romance, the supernatural, and a certain degree of horror, then you will probably enjoy A Strange Fire. In fact, it is quite disturbingly scary and a little bit stomach turning in some parts. The witches they are pure eeeviilll. But don’t let that put you off! I plan on writing another book about Florence at some stage, but it will probably be the end of this year or next year before I get around to it. Next up will be the sequel to Tegan’s Blood, Tegan’s Return, and then after that I want to publish the novel I mentioned earlier that is set in London, but I won’t divulge too many details about that just yet. I also plan on writing a third book about Tegan, and I have quite a lot of the plot for that already mapped out in my head.

Also, I’m having a giveaway of five copies of the book to celebrate its release. So if you want to win a copy all you have to do is answer the following question (the answer is in the synopsis above) and email the answer to lhcosway@gmail.com, also state whether you would like a mobi or pdf copy of the book. I’ll select five winners at random.

Question: What supernatural beings have infested the town of Chesterport?

A. Vampires
B. Witches
C. Werewolves

Anyway, if you do happen to download A Strange Fire, please do rate and review it on Amazon and Goodreads or whatever other site you might be on. I’m an indie author so I need all the help I can get from my beloved readers.

With that I will leave you, and I really do hope that you enjoy this novel and fall away into an imaginary world for a while, and forget about the over-rated real world (only joking)…

The Umbrella Girl.