I want to thank everyone for their support during the Geek & Sundry Fantasy Contest! We didn’t win, but we did fantastic! I think we finished in about 12th place out of over 400 entries!

Because of your faith in me, I asked the Inkshares folks if we could have an extension of our funding period to try and reach Quill (We’re already halfway there!) or even beyond! 

And Guess what?! We now have until February 21st to get the next 124 copies sold! So share with your friends, order a copy for your family members, print flyers, Let’s get the word out even further! 

Thank you all again for your support. I’m so excited to share this news with you. Let’s get Brand’s story out there! Thanksgiving is coming up, and I have so much to be thankful for! 

You’ll hear from me again soon! 

Tara

Greetings to all my Sparks, Flames, Wildefires, and followers! 

Well I tried setting a goal of hitting that elusive 100 Reader mark this week. We haven’t gotten there yet, but we made it to 91, so as further incentive to those of you who haven’t taken the plunge to order your own copy, I uploaded Chapter 2! I really hope you enjoy this closer look at the Wilde family as they work through the revelations from Chapter 1. 

I want to thank all of you again for your support thus far. I am closer to publication every day because of you, and closer to having my dream of a story of mine being in print than ever. 

Please keep giving that feedback of what I have uploaded thus far. Every time you like a section, or recommend a passage it pops up on Inkshares Buzz page which gets more publicity for the project! 

I want to invite you again to follow me at

https://www.facebook.com/TRFlamesintheDark/

and on Twitter @andra_tara

Please continue to share the link to the book, talk about it with your friends and family. There are 46 days left in the funding campaign and we need 135 more copies ordered to reach the Quill publishing goal. I believe we can do it, but I need your help.

If you have any ideas for how I can market further, I’d love to hear it! You can DM me here on Inkshares, or at the links above. 

Thank you all again for the support, for believing in me. 

Light and Love Always,

Tara 

Hey everyone! Just a quick update to let you know that there’s a new blog post up about the contest! And this time, I got to answer the question. Check it out here: 

http://blog.inkshares.com/post/150368022920/top-10-authors-in-geek-sundry-fantasy-contest-on

They had to edit my original response down, so I’ll give you the whole of it here. I got a little carried away. 

If you could live in any fantasy world, which would you choose? Caveat: the choice is permanent - you can’t leave! 

 I’ve thought about this question a lot over the years. There are so many wonderful worlds I’ve played in over the years. I’ll have to start with some favorites that I wouldn’t want to live in and narrow it down that way. My favorite current author is Brandon Sanderson, and his Stormlight Archive is just fascinating but I’m not sure I could live in a world like Roshar, with all of its stone and lack of trees. I love thunderstoms, but high storms are another thing all together. I don’t think that’s the place for me, especially since, at the moment, it seems to be breaking apart. 

I’m a long time fan of Harry Potter and the Wizarding World, but really that is just the same as here, and I’d probably be a muggle. Boring and in general, safe. If I did know about wizards and magic there, I could probably get pretty good ’fiction’ stories out of that, but then I’d get Obliviated so that wouldn’t be much fun. 

My favorite epic fantasy series is Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. If I could make sure it was the fourth age, then I could probably make my way there as a caregiver or even a storyteller. It would be great to play in Randland for real for a while, but since peaches are poison I couldn’t stay forever. Plus there’s the Dark One’s Touch business that didn’t work out very well for the ordinary folk. 

Xanth from Piers Anthony could be a ton of fun. Butterflies that look like flying sticks of butter, sunflowers that shine as bright as the sun when they bloom... puns might stop being funny though. Not to mention the Florida aspect. That would be a great place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

 I’m going to have to stick with my oldest favorite. Tolkien, the father of the fantasy genre caught my heart as a child with The Hobbit. Middle Earth was so rich with meaning and warmth, I could fall right in. I wouldn’t need to live in the grand cities though. If I could somehow have a home in the Shire, that’s where I would want to be. The comfort of good food, good friends and a safe home would be wonderful, especially if I had to stay forever. I’d be the weird human lady down the road who wrote stories and baked cakes, but I’m okay with that. Most of the upheaval in those books never touched the Shire, so no matter what point in history I dropped into, I’d be okay. The best part would be the option to go adventuring, to see Rivendell, Rohan, or even Gondor, but still have the beauty of the Shire to come back to, with tales to tell. I always identified with Bilbo about that. Getting used to the comforts of home, but having that wanderlust tickle you in the middle of the night until you just had to go somewhere. Traveling, then writing about it at my desk, and adding a dragon or two for color would be the very best kind of fun.

The hardest adjustment would probably be the lack of modern conveniences. I have a love affair with my air conditioner, and of course modern medicine. But I have always transplanted well when I move. I’ve studied history a bit, so living without electricity would be possible. I’ve always preferred writing with pen and paper, and candle or lantern light would be soothing without the hum of fluorescent lights. Adjusting to all the manual labor required to live that way would be the rest of the hard part. But I would do it. Those little round doors and rolling hills were always comforting to me, even when the adventure tried to keep my interest elsewhere. I could make a home there. Home is where your story begins after all. 

I hope you enjoyed this peek into my favorite worlds. Have a good night! 

Light and love,

Tara

Hey everybody! I have uploaded Chapter One, Prophecy of Sparks. I hope you enjoy this further introduction to the Wilde family and where we’re going to go from here. Flames in the Dark is currently 6th on the leader board. Please keep reading and sharing. Let’s keep this moving and pick up that momentum back up. I am so grateful for all of your interest, and your willingness to share my dream. 

Please highlight sections you like and comment on the chapter at the bottom of the page. When you talk about the book, it pops up on the front page of Inkshares.com as a recent event and gets the chatter going. 

There’s some confusion about how the contest works. Individual readers are what count. So the more people who are interested in the book, all the better. The number of copies pre-ordered does not count towards the contest. They do count for Inkshares. 250 orders earns a light publishing of the book, 750 earns a full publishing deal with marketing and graphic design. 

What this means is that the more people we share the book with, the better we’ll do in the contest. 

I say we, because I could not do this without all of you. Thank you again, and may you always have light in the darkness.

Sincerely, Tara