Monday, December 14, 2015

I've been neglectful again, with good reason...

So I've been neglecting the blog again, but I have a good reason, I promise. For one I've been both writing and editing on four projects and more at a time. Crazy right? Well I'm pretty sure this just might kill me, but I can at least give you a status update on each thing I've got going so here we go:

#1 - Cutter's Hope - The Virtues Trilogy Book I



It's written, it's edited, it's formatted, it's DONE and up for pre-order right now.

#2 Biker Chicks - Volume 1

 


It's written, been edited, has it's cover art, has been formatted for e-book, and is in it's final stages of proofing with the authors before being formatted for print book as well. You can get your copy, as it is up for pre-order, right here.

#3 - There But For The Grace - The Angel's Grace Trilogy Book II

 

It's written, in editing, cover art has been commissioned and I should see that by the end of this week. We have a target release date of March 8th, 2016 for this one, so keep an eye out for it.

#4 - Omega's Run - The Moonforged Trilogy Book II



It's in the final stages of being written, will go immediately into edits, has it's cover art (obviously) and no target release date as of yet, but it's looking like tail end of winter/beginning of spring. We know you've been waiting a long time for this one, but life happens.

#5 - Marlin's Faith - The Virtue's Book II



It's halfway written with a target release date of sometime early spring, but that's all I have to report on it right now.

#6 - Biker Chicks - Volume 2



Now taking submissions! Please read the guidelines thoroughly and submit accordingly. If you want to submit, and see how the process is going behind the scenes, (it's mostly just a bunch of controlled chaos) then friend request me on Facebook and I'll add you to the Biker Chicks group. (My submission for this one is finished being written and heading into edits.)

#7 - Unnamed Time Travelly Piratey Thing - Stand Alone.



Just finished shaking hands with co-author Eric Plume and taking the time out to do some cursory research with him to make this thing happen. It's starting to come together but we won't be writing on it until the following happens (at least on my end):

1. Omega's Run is finished.
2. Marlin's Faith is finished.
3. A Coup de Grace - Angel's Grace Trilogy Book III is started and finished.
(It will be started by the 2nd week in January.)
4. Charity for Nothing - The Virtues Trilogy Book III is started.

So, as you can see, I'm busy. What's more, is I'm overwhelmed. I am now going to go back to beating my face against my desk and wearing my fingers down to little nubbins. (LOL nubbins. That's a funny word.)

See you guys later.

XoXo
A.J.

Monday, November 23, 2015

ღೋ RELEASE DAY BLITZ ღೋ


You're invited to live, love, and ride with the SHMC. This boxed set includes all six books and novella at the deeply discounted rate of 60% off each individual cover’s price.





The Sacred Hearts Motorcycle Club is about more than just bad ass bikers. It's about loyalty and brotherhood. When the men of SMHC find love, the club celebrates. When they hurt, their brothers hurt with them. And when someone crosses them...watch out.

Shattered & Scarred
She’s living in a hell and is shattered by violence, Trigger is a scarred veteran, on his way home. When their paths cross, neither will ever be the same, but is that such a bad thing?

Broken & Burned
Dray was broken the day his mother was shot down in front of him, Evy’s been burned in one of the worst ways possible. When these two come together they seal and soothe each other’s hurts. Chances are sometimes worth taking.

Cracked & Crushed 
Crushed on her wedding day, left at the altar, Hayden simply can’t take anymore. Lucky for her, Reaver is there for the rescue. But can she handle his cracked psyche, or will they both implode?

Masked & Miserable
Squick has got a secret, and meeting Aaron is about to blow it wide open. He’s been masked and hiding miserable, but things have got to change. Will he be brave enough to come clean?

Tattered & Torn 
One violent act has left Shelly’s world in tatters, and poor Ghost is torn over what to do. Will his love be enough to stitch her back together or will he just rip her down more?

Fractured & Formidable
Mandy leads a fractured existence. Successful business woman on the surface, but broken underneath. When Revelator unearths her secret, someone is going to find out just how formidable he can be.

Damaged & Dangerous 
Dani Broussard is as damaged as one woman can be, and in the middle of one seriously bad situation. Red-XIII is as dangerous as they get, and he’s right there with her. Can he get them both out of the clutches of the SHMC’s rival’s hands, before anyone else winds up dead?
      












A.J. Downey is a born and raised Seattle, WA Native. She finds inspiration from her surroundings, through the people she meets and likely as a byproduct of way too much caffeine.

She has lived many places and done many things though mostly through her own imagination... An avid reader all of her life it's now her turn to try and give back a little, entertaining as she has been entertained. She lives in a small house in a small neighborhood with a larger than life fiancé and one cat.
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Tuesday, November 10, 2015

November ate my brain...




It's another year, and another NaNoWriMo project! Except this year, because I got so behind on other projects, I have three going at once. Not just the NaNoWriMo project it's self. Though I am only counting There But For The Grace, book two in the Angel's Grace trilogy as my NaNoWriMo project, I am actually writing it, Omega's Run with Ryan Kells (the second book in the Moonforged trilogy,) and Marlin's Faith (the second book in the Virtues Trilogy) concurrently.




The visual representation is so neat and pretty compared to the actual chaos that is ensuing in my brain. Adding to the crazy is the first two of these projects are co-written deals with two different people. It makes for interesting and fun times, I'm not even going to lie.  I'm also not going to lie about the fact that I feel like my writing may be suffering just a scotch. However, my co-authors have made no comment on that and one of the reasons I work with them and love them so, is they would be upfront and tell me if they thought I could be, and should be, doing better. At least I like to think they would.

As if three concurrent projects weren't enough on my plate this month, I am also running a weekly Monday day time write-in, co-hosting another weekly Wednesday evening write-in, organizing a post-NaNo workshop for people interested in self-publishing their NaNo projects, organizing Gifts for Geeks in December, and I have started work on the hosting duties of I <Heart> Books with the simultaneous launch party for Biker Chicks, slated for February.

This would be why I have been neglecting my blog, mailing list, Facebook, Pinterest and any other social media outlets I have gone dark on and should be posting to.

Hopefully I will catch up by the end of the month and be able to be somewhat social again between the holidays. Wouldn't that be nice? At any rate. I have pretty much taken enough time away from pouring words onto one of these three projects, so I am going to get back to it.

Much love,

XoXo

A.J.







Thursday, October 1, 2015

Only one week away!

Another quarter, another season, another book selling event! This time it’s just in time for my very favorite holiday, so I would like to welcome you all a little early to…



On tap for this event are several amazing authors, myself - A.J. Downey, Jeffrey Cook, Lee French, Sechin Tower, Tina Shelton, and a whole lot more. We’ll get to everyone in just a few.

Once again, the AFK Elixirs & Eatery will be hosting and as far as venues go, this one has it all! Great food, amazing atmosphere, games, and a certain notoriety for not only welcoming you, but inviting you to stay for a long while and get to know everyone.



The AFK E&E is conveniently located off Highway 167 at:

3750 E Valley Rd.
Renton, WA 98057

Reading in the Dark will run from 2:00pm to 9:00pm in the back left of the restaurant. Just come in the front door, turn left past the Fireplace, carry on past the game rental area and you’ll find us! If that’s too difficult, just follow the bloody footprints on the floor…

We’ll have a lot on offer back there, just have a look!



















The Fireworks Novellas – The Fireworks novellas are short (about 20-35K words) and spicy, duel POV New Adult romances with a touch of suspense. They all center around holidays throughout the year.

The Fireworks novellas feature real characters facing real concerns that New Adults face – money problems, boring jobs, college choices etc. They have sensitive rather than aggressive heroes and strong but flawed heroines. The sex is always consensual and responsible, though sometimes a bit impulsive! The suspense elements of the stories come from current issues such as drugs, sex trafficking and cyber-stalking. The Fireworks series include racial, cultural, religious, gender or body diversity in the main couple as well as supporting characters.

The Vikings of Vinland Saga – The Vikings of Vinland Saga follows the story of twin sisters Katla and Gull Grímsdóttir, and their slave, Frey, as they escape from their brutal father and find their destinies in Medieval Europe and America.














The Sacred Hearts MC series – Hot, alpha male bikers, a few damsels in distress, some really steamy love stories… In this series, the good guys wear black and the white knights’ armor is leather rather than metal.





















I Am The Alpha – The hero of this one puts the damsel in distress. Not only that, he turns furry once a month. Can William Reese, son of the murdered Alpha of the Pacific Northwest Territory make things right? He’s going to try, by kidnapping the daughter of the Pack’s sworn enemy… It was the perfect plan until it wasn’t. He never counted on falling in love with her.




















Airs & Graces – This is not a romance. Addy’s having a record bad morning which goes from bad to worse when she walks into work to find her boss dying on the floor. Now she’s entrenched in the mother of all supernatural power struggles… What do you do when both Heaven & Hell want you dead and the only being on your side is The Angel of Free Will, who, by all accounts, just finds you to be a nuisance?














Dawn of Steam – Dawn of Steam is a trilogy of alt-history, emergent Steampunk epistolary novels. It chronicles the adventures of Gregory Conan Watts and the crew of the airship Dame Fortuna: war heroes, respectable ladies, disreputable entertainers, and a wilderness guide of debated sanity. From 1815 to 1819, they face the historic Year Without a Summer, dangers on six continents, and vast imperial conspiracies in a world in transition between the Napoleonic wars and a new age of enlightenment.

Mina Cortez: From Bouquets to Bullets – She never said “I want to join the Secret Police when I grow up.” Mina Cortez hadn’t even known there were secret police. But after trading her ambition to be a ballerina for resignation that she’d be a florist, she found herself neither – riding through a post-post cataclysmic Seattle on the trail of smugglers, kidnappers and murderers.

Sound & Fury: Shakespeare Goes Punk – Punk Writers present a most curious and notable book! Sound & Fury: Shakespeare Goes Punk. We took the bard and shook him up with the punk genres of literature. Steampunk, cyberpunk, anything punk! Find renditions of such tales as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, The Winter’s Tale and much more. All decidedly more exciting and more adventuresome than their original inspirations!






















The Fair Folk Chronicles – Normality was always a struggle for Megan O’Reilly, a 16 year old artist with ADHD. But when she finds out her long-lost father is a Faerie king – and now more lost than usual – normality isn’t even an option. Somehow, living in a faerie story is a lot more complicated than Megan would have ever thought.





















The Mad Science Institute – What happens 100 years after Nikola Tesla founded a secret school for mad scientists? Robots! Rail guns! Jet packs! Lizard monsters! Fist fights! Doomsday machines!

If you need more explosions and mayhem in your life, come join the Mad Science Institute!




















Audacious & Capricious – Sixteen year old Raphaelle is that girl who says the wrong thing, who crosses the wrong person, who has the wrong hair, the wrong body, the wrong attitude, the totally wrong clothes. She can’t do anything right, but in these two verse novels readers get to learn from Ella's mistakes.

The Frail Days – Sixteen-year-old drummer Stella, guitarist Jacob and bassist Miles need a wild singer for their old-school rock band. When they discover nerdy Tamara Donnelly, who nails the national anthem at a baseball game, Stella is not convinced Tamara's sound is right for the band. Stella wants to turn Tamara into a rock goddess, but Tamara proves to be a confident performer who has her own ideas about music and what it means to be epic cool.

When their band, the Frail Days, starts to build a local following, Stella and Tamara clash over the direction the band should take, forcing them to consider what true musical collaboration means.






















The Gray Hat Series – In order to evade a long prison sentence, a con artist and a vigilante hacker must work together with the law to bring down a circle of body thieves that almost no one knows exists.
















Dragons In Pieces - Bobby's life isn’t awesome, but he’s okay with it. One thrown punch cascades into a series of events that culminate with him discovering he has a superpower. A weird superpower. Not only that, but he’s just one of thirty-five new superheroes. How did it happen? Why are there men in dark suits trying to grab them all? What good are hundreds of tiny robot dragons?

The Fallen - A fortune teller and a Seer, Chavali has the gift of prophecy and a growing talent with crafting illusions. Jaded and cynical, nothing surprises her...until it does. Fate drags her kicking and screaming into a battle for the future of her people and forces her to deal with far too many idiots.

Damsel In Distress - Swept into a high fantasy adventure that may save her even as it damns her, Sabetia must dig deep to find the courage to persevere--and to survive. She'll face demons of every kind imaginable as she learns that sometimes, damsels have to save themselves. Because no one else will.

Girls Can't Be Knights - The Spirit Knights have been a boys’ club for a long time–over a thousand years. No one, not even Claire, believes it when she shows all the signs of becoming one. Worse yet, she has to dive into this ghost-hunting job before she can get access to the Knights’ toys. Fortunately, she has Justin to learn from. Brash and prone to dumb ideas, he can handle taking her under his wing. With a little luck, they both might survive long enough for her to learn it all.

Al-Kabar - Without a Sultan, corrupt Fire Dancers and their pompous Caliphs abuse power and wage pointless wars across the parched sands of Serescine. The Waters choose only one Champion to stand against them, only one woman to serve justice on those who consider themselves above it. Fakhira might just settle for revenge. If she can survive long enough to dish it out.




















The Flower Fang Series - In the Kin-Jegera Empire the strength of your magic or your claws determines your destiny - too bad our heroes are short on both!

Prince Se’ls, one of the magical flower Kin and only child of Queen Se’uan, has a terrible secret – he has no magic. Forced by his mother, the Queen, to tour the empire to search for his magical companion, Se’ls is terrified of returning home empty handed.

Arara, long-furred runt and joke of her pack, is dreading the upcoming hunt, where the young Jegera show off their strength by taking down one of the fearsome armored hukra by claw alone. Arara is terrified that her superstitious pack will tear her apart if they learn her secret, that she was born telepathic and telekinetic.

With assassins and dark plots threatening the empire, Prince Se’ls and Arara must band together to save it, or perhaps to destroy it.


*¨*.¸¸.✶*¨`*.✫*¨*.¸¸.✶*¨`*


Well that's the full list of authors we will have on offer on October 10th, as well as a little taste of what they are bringing to their tables!

Speaking of tastes, the AFK has a lot of fabulous food and drink enough to whet any appetite or slake any thirst, so come on down, peruse some books, stay for a while and have some lunch or dinner and come play a game or two! If mother nature gets her act together, it's bound to be rainy and chill anyways. We all look forward to seeing you there! 

Saturday, September 26, 2015

ღೋ RELEASE DAY BLITZ ღೋ

Title: Damaged & Dangerous
Series: The Sacred Hearts MC VI
Author: A.J. Downey
Release Date: September 27, 2015









She’s Damaged…
Dani Broussard never imagined that her life would turn out like this. She always thought that her grandfather would be there for her into adulthood and that her high school sweetheart, Jared, would be the man she would marry. That isn’t what happened though. Instead, her grandfather got sick and passed away before Dani saw the age of nineteen. It was just her and Jared until he hooked up with a local MC, The Suicide Kings… Then it was just her. Pig-Pen claimed her body, rules her life, but he would never hold her heart. Kept because of her looks and a particular set of skills unique only to her, Dani has been with The Suicide Kings for the last three years… three long damaging years. She hates it, all of it, the pain the humiliation, the fear… and as strong as Dani is, as clever as she can be, she is quickly finding that death may be the kinder, gentler option rather than live through any more of this hell.
He’s Dangerous…
Red-XIII is, and always will be, a Sacred Hearts man. But for now, he’s a Suicide Kings prospect. Tasked with providing intelligence on the King’s inner workings to his real club, Thirteen has been slowly, quietly and carefully dismantling the King’s operation from the inside out. The situation is dangerous, good thing Thirteen is a dangerous guy but even he can’t be everywhere at once and a couple of missteps have cost the Sacred Hearts dearly. Doubly determined to finish this with no more wreckage or damage to the SHMC, Thirteen is blindsided by his heart when he lays eyes on Dani. A pretty, little thing with long black hair and striking blue eyes. She slays him with one look from her damaged soul and now Thirteen has tasked himself with two missions… Take down The Suicide Kings and get both Dani and himself out alive.
For now those missions run parallel to each other but what happens if they ever end up at odds? The bigger question is, how can he get close to the VP’s Ol’ Lady as a Prospect and not get them both burned?

  
https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.goodreads.com%2Fbook%2Fshow%2F25895137-damaged-dangerous&h=bAQHuoFds











“How the hell you get that?” he demanded.

“Came through on my personal cell, someone mass-texted it. I have so many goddamned contacts, I didn’t realize I still had anybody from the club in it. No worries, my cover is secure. No one saw shit. I don’t leave things like that lyin’ around.”
D grunted into the phone, “Cops‘re still sittin’ on us. They still watching you?” he asked.
“If by ‘you’, you mean The Suicide Kings, then yeah. Unmarked tan cargo van when we pulled in from the run. It’s a good thing Gordy’s a paranoid fucker and sweeps for listening devices on the regular. Pretty sure they only got visual. They’ll get tired soon enough and fuck off onto something bigger and better.”
“Yeah. With our history, they ain’t investigatin’ or cryin’ too hard about our plight.” Dragon sounded both tired and downright pissed off at that. I didn’t blame him. Chandra deserved a lot better. Reave, too! Don’t get me wrong. But as a brother, you expect this shit to happen. No women and no children had been the SHMC motto from the beginning, even before our reformed ways. We did some gnarly and seriously rancid shit back in the day. Guns, drugs, gambling – you name it. But we always left the women and children out of it.

No prostituting, no hitting. Rape was liable to get your dick chopped off – which is why, no matter how fucking hard, no matter how often the Suicide Kings tried to get me to join in on one of their trains, it was no fucking dice. Because very rarely, if ever, were the chicks they were fucking at all clear-headed or into it.

It bothered me, a whole fuck of a lot, the way these animals treated their women and I found myself spilling it all. I told D everything I’d seen going on, everything I could garner about their operation, in effect, unburdening my soul from all the awful shit I’d been a party to in the name of the greater good. In the name of spying out our enemy. He was quiet for a long time on the other end and finally let out a sigh that made him sound like he felt every single year and every single mile. It’d been weeks since I last talked to him beyond a short text. The deeper I got in with these fuckers, the more I was around them, the less opportunity there was for full on communication.
“Do you need out?” he asked.
My thoughts drifted to Raccoon, to her sharp and calculating stare as she’d passed me my face mask.

“No man, I’m good. My work ain’t over yet. Not by a long, flat, mile. It’ll be done when every one of these fuckers is in the ground and the Suicide Kings ain’t nothin’ but the dust of fuckin’ memory.”



Text Copyright © 2015 A.J. Downey
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
All Rights Reserved




Trailer made with 100% stock free images and music made specifically for this trailer by
Luis Caballero at Caballero Music Ltd



  












Now   0.99














  
 

A.J. Downey is a born and raised Seattle, WA Native. She finds inspiration from her surroundings, through the people she meets and likely as a byproduct of way too much caffeine.

She has lived many places and done many things though mostly through her own imagination... An avid reader all of her life it's now her turn to try and give back a little, entertaining as she has been entertained. She lives in a small house in a small neighborhood with a larger than life fiancé and one cat.

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