Banish the Darkness – Available on Nook!

Greetings, lovely readers!

Although iBookstore has yet to post my book, Barnes & Noble has – here is the link.

Unfortunately I have one rating on the B&N site, it’s for “Banish the Darkness”, and it is only a three star review, with no text! So if you’re a Nook reader, I would really appreciate it if you would take a moment to head over to the site, rate one of the books and give an honest review. It’s so bizarre that the only book that has a rating is the fourth in the series!

Some progress anyway… now to push on iBookstore!

Best regards, and Happy Halloween!

Holly

 

UPDATE: I should add that I have sold NO COPIES of “Banish the Darkness” on the Barnes & Noble site – up until yesterday it was only available on Amazon (where I have only received four star reviews and above), and Lulu’s own site, through which I have also sold no copies. As a result I am concerned that this is someone who has deliberately tried to give my book a poor rating, for unknown reasons. =( That’s what is so troubling! I’ve sold no copies at B&N and then receive a blah rating. Very odd.

Halloween!

I don’t usually do too much for Halloween – it’s a pretty busy time and I generally save my culinary craziness for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

This year, after watching too many cooking shows at night during supper, I decided I was going to take the plunge and make some dessert type things. I settled on cake pops, with the idea that I would give them to friends and waitstaff at my favourite restaurants (I’m friendly with owners of several nice lunch time eateries), and enjoy a few small little treats myself. I thought I’d even pawn some off on my boyfriend for him and his friends, hoping for a best girlfriend of the year nomination.

Since it is a spooky time of year, I thought I would make ‘eye ball’ and ‘spider’ cake pops. In preparation I made some lovely semi-sweet chocolate ganache and stayed up late night before last making vanilla buttercream frosting. I had my boyfriend try it and he said it was one of the best things he’s ever tasted.

So to-day I was going to make the cakes – a yellow one for the ganache and a dutch-chocolate one for the vanilla buttercream.

I was ALMOST done adding the flour to the creamed butter and sugar for the yellow cake when… I saw something in the flour. Upon closer inspection it was an insect wing.

I was just about out of cake flour and so bought a new box yesterday and made my dry ingredient mix. Well, I guess it must have been contaminated – it happens sometimes, it’s not the first time I’ve seen it – but I have a lot to do, no more cake flour (I threw it all away), and time is ticking away.

So instead of being able to post pretty pictures of bloodshot eyeball cake pops and black-widow spider pops, I’m stuck with six cups of the most sublime vanilla buttercream frosting and four and a half cups of chocolate ganache.

I guess I’ll just get a mix, make sure there’s no wings, and bake a cake from a box so I can at least enjoy the frosting! Halloween treats were not meant to be this year.

 

“Banish the Darkness”, iBookstore and Nook

Just to keep you updated… Lulu has approved the book and sent it to Barnes & Noble and iBookstore so that it can go through their approval process. I am still waiting (albeit not very patiently!) for them to give it the green light. The moment the book is live, I will post links.

Thanks for stopping by and remember, I am also on Twitter: (at)HollyBlackstone .
All the best,

Holly

Changes to Commenting Policy

Hopefully this topic doesn’t sound too intimidating!

I get spam – a LOT of spam. I have a tool installed that tries to cull out spam comments but even so it only gets about a third of them and every few days I have close to 1000 junk comments I have to sort through – I still have a backlog from when I was finishing “Banish the Darkness” and didn’t check my site much!

So in order to comment you will need to register and log in to post; this should eliminate all the bot spam. I’m really sorry about the change and hope it doesn’t adversely affect anyone. If there is a problem or you have a concern, please feel free to email me at holly (at) hollyblackstone.com and we’ll chat about it.

Thanks! =)

Holly

Banish the Darkness – Q & A (Part 1)

One of my wonderful readers, Tanja, sent me an email with some questions about ‘Banish the Darkness’ and I thought you all might be interested in seeing my answers as well. So with her permission I’ve edited it and submit it below for your perusal. =)

It may contain some light spoilers or intimations of things that will happen so, FAIR WARNING! If you don’t want any hints of what’s to come you may not want to read.

That being said, here we go! =) I’ve labeled this as part one because she had some other smaller questions which I might include later in a separate post.

By the way, if you have any questions you’d like to see answers to, feel free to email me or add them as comments to this post!

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Tanja: He (Stuart) is growing really darker by the page and I can not help but feel he will loose it at some point…

Holly: So Stuart *is* getting darker; things are finally getting to him. Lily is so close to being his and he is absolutely determined to have her but the pressure of the job, getting stabbed, trying to juggle it all has made him a bit manic, possessive, intent on holding on to Lily no matter what.

We all have dark parts of ourselves that we keep at bay and as Stuart once said he isn