Tasha's (aka Beren) Journal

It's finally time to go live! Yay!

The first chapter of my new novel


is now published and ready for reading.


The really good news is I'm serialising it on Wattpad so it's totally free! You'll need a Wattpad account, but you can set one up in seconds using your Facebook login, your Google login or an email and password combination. Wattpad also has apps so you can read straight from your phone or tablet - just go to your app store and search for Wattpad, it will pop up.

If you enjoy the story I really would appreciate it if you added it to your library on Wattpad (the little + button) and gave it a vote - it helps the story be seen on Wattpad so helps me build a readership. Many thanks if you do.

Also, if you follow me you will be notified as soon as new chapters go live every Tuesday and Friday.

Please LMK if you are on Wattpad so I can follow you back.

I have just visited 79 Facebook groups to see which ones are worth posting my book to on launch day (21st Feb) and this morning I was doing the same with Twitter.

Yesterday I submitted the book to at least 80 book sites, who may or may not list it, and I have another 13 or so to submit to actually on launch day.

Book launching is a pain in the bottom - not to mention that I have to write blog posts for here, my blog and the Wittegen blog at some point too. Writing the book was the easy part, I tell you, easy! :)

Thank you for listening to me whine.

So Google are planning to implement a strategy that down rates your website in their searches and marks it unsafe if it isn't HTTPS, i.e. uses SSL so it is secure when talking to your browser.

In some ways this is good, in many, many ways, very, very bad. You should hear what some of my network and security expert friends have to say about it. There are so many problems with this when it comes to legacy systems.

Now really the only thing I can think of that needs to be secure on WittegenPress.com is possibly the comments section, but thanks to Google I now have to change over anyway. Luckily a company called Let's Encrypt are giving out free SSL certificates and Dreamhost have signed up to their scheme so they will automatically put one on your domain if you ask them to, making it much easier than it used to be. We used to have to pay for one if we wanted it to work without showing messages about the SSL certificate being self-signed, which is why we've never done anything about it before.

Still, changing over is a royal pain. Getting the host to use HTTPS is easy - I just change the base URL of the WordPress site, but now I am having to trawl through the whole site checking for mixed content. For those not in the know that means plugins or images that are being served over HTTP because they were put in with full URLs.

Our book table plugin is already showing a bug where some of the content is blocked thanks to the fact they didn't think of this. So we are waiting for them to fix it. It will be in the next update thank heavens. Still means I have to go through every single book and edit it - so not what I wanted to be doing today.

Thank you for listening to me rant, this post has been brought to you by the letters HTTPS and the number billion (as in the number of links I have to change). :P

For anyone interested I used this post to help me switch over: 
https://css-tricks.com/moving-to-https-on-wordpress/

Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year to One and All

I wish you all the joy, blessing and peace of the season. As my dear Papa would say, may the joy of the shepherds and angels, the love of the holy family and the peace of the Christ child be with you this Christmas time. I very much hope you are happy and well however you keep the season (even if it is just to stare at the rest of us as if we're bonkers :)).

To my friends who I know are struggling with bad things, all my love. This time of happiness for others must be incredibly hard. I wish you survival and the hope that the coming New Year will bring you everything you deserve and life will be better.

I am just off to make Last Minute Christmas Chutney ready for Boxing Day lunch, then I have to make a galette from Mary Berry's recipe for those of us who don't like Christmas pud and after that I will be on to the veggies to make sure they are all prepared for tomorrow's feast. If that's not enough, it's also my dear daddy's birthday, so we will be going round there for dinner this evening.

I've been roped into singing in the choir for Midnight as well, which I am so looking forward to. I love singing carols and descants. They're down a few members this year because of various things so they asked if anyone would mind standing in. Can't wait :). Then on Christmas morning Daddy is taking the 10:30 service, yay! It doesn't feel like Christmas until Daddy has taken a service (CofE vicars never really retire, they just take services for other vicars now that they don't have their own parish ;)).

So I promised FREE eBooks didn't I :). Here is the public service announcement ;)

~*~

FREE eBooks from Wittegen Press

Those of you already subscribed to our mailing list will remember us asking you to vote on your favourite genres and now the two books based on the top two genres are ready for you to enjoy :).

Genre: Paranormal




Assassin's Blood
by Natasha Duncan-Drake

Meet Kira Roltof, or rather Jasmin Welby at the moment because she’s undercover. Kira’s an assassin with a sense of humour that’s almost as dangerous as she is. When hunting down her targets it helps that she's a vampire/werewolf hybrid and has been at the killing game for over seventy years. Practice makes perfect and all that jazz.

Of course her combined species status could just as easily get her killed as help her out. If either the vampires or the werewolves figure out she’s both, she’ll never be safe again.

Her latest target is a Mafia big shot. Nothing she can’t handle easily, except she runs into a little snag of the vampire persuasion at the end of the job.

Assassin’s Blood is a short story full of paranormal intrigue and action with a little bit of romance to round it off.

Genre: Contemporary Fantasy




Curse of a Banshee - (The Darwell [Magical] Cleaning Services #1)
by Sophie Duncan

B, a djinn/banshee low fae, runs Darwell Cleaning Services, a business that specializes in tidying up magical crime scenes. She's managed her company with her friend and business partner, Jean, for over one hundred years without any complaints, or problems. She keeps her head down and offers a job to those whom higher fae look down on for their lack of personal magic.

B and her team are expecting an ordinary night of clean-up when they arrive at the aftermath of a spell battle in the middle of an English woodland. However, when a terrified djinn boy appears in the middle of their job, B finds the mix of her djinn and banshee instincts, which she normally keeps under strict control, beginning to rise. The boy is not alone, he is being chased by criminals intent on selling him to become a genie, the same gang who took B's father a century earlier.

B must struggle with her own unsettled powers and fight the slavers for the boy's freedom, risking her own life and those of her friends in the process.

Curse of a Banshee is fast-paced fantasy taking a fresh look at ancient powers in a contemporary British setting.

~

Existing subscribers to our mailing list will have received our Christmas Newsletter containing the links to the books, for anyone else, you can get the books as well. We'll send you the links in the confirmation email when you sign up to the Wittegen Press mailing list here.

Keep the bunny safe! Vote for The Avebury Legacy over at Cover wars or the vicious kitty will attack!

• click here to go to the Cover Wars page
• check the radio button next to The Avebury Legacy
• click vote
• repeat daily until Sunday (if you would be so kind)

So I spent most of Friday and the weekend designing a cover for Soph's short story (which she hasn't finished yet, but is getting there). I'm really pleased with it.

Sorry, I can't show it to you because that's her privileged and she hasn't decided on a title yet so it's incomplete, but I'm very happy with the way it turned out. It's dramatic!

The more covers I make, I think, the better I am becoming and I keep looking back at the older ones and thinking I need to redo some of them. I love making the covers, which is why I do it and don't pay someone else (other than the fact that it's cheaper).

I use every resource and piece of advice I can find to improve. My latest find is this site: Creative Indie. It is truly awesome and I found it because I was trying to decide what font to use and Derek Murphy (the designer and owner of the site) has a post called 300+ Fool-Proof Fonts to use for your Book Cover Design (an epic list of best fonts per genre) and it's so, very, very useful.

I also have a new book called Digital Manga (picked it up in The Works in town, but have linked to their website) which has some very useful techniques that can be applied to all sorts of digital design as well as manga. I love The Works, they have all sorts of wonderful art books for such reasonable prices.

YouTube is also wonderful for techniques. So many wonderful artists out there ready to share their knowledge. I have learnt so many new things since starting this whole cover design stuff.

Soph and I have used WordPress to rebuilt our website and so I thought I might put together the odd blog post about things I am discovering as I go. This is the first. The is a complete list of plugins and what steps we took to build the site over here (How We Built This Site (wittegenpress.com) With WordPress), but my other post will be more detailed.
For a very long time I thought WordPress was just a blogging platform because we used it once on a site we had running and that was all it was at the time. However, when Soph and I rebuilt our website (WittegenPress.com) we found out just how wrong we were.
( Click to see the rest of the article )

We at Wittegen Press are in the middle of a revamp of our website, and in order to launch our New Look, we're planning a discount event where we're reducing all the books in the Wittegen Press Library to 99c.

This blitz is taking place on 5th and 6th August 2014, and we're currently looking for folks to help with publicising it both before and after the event.

So, if you're willing, firstly THANK YOU :), and secondly, there are two ways to help out:

WAY #1 (before the blitz): If you're willing to spread the word before the event here's button code for sharing anywhere you fancy.

Please copy the code to add our button to your blog/website, or share it in a post



WAY #2 (during the blitz): if you'd be extra fantastic and put out a publicity post for us on 5th, or 6th, then please fill in the form at the link below and we'll be in contact when all the material is finished.

Click to go to the form at my Tasha's Thinkings Blog

Trick or Treat :)
Last year Soph and I created a book for All Hallows Read and this year we are continuing the tradition.

What is All Hallows Read I hear you ask? This is what their website says:

All Hallows’ Read is a Hallowe’en tradition. It’s simply that in the week of Hallowe’en, or on the night itself, you give someone a scary book.

It was started by Neil Gaimen and we think it is a wonderful idea. So Sophie and Tasha have each written a spooky short story and we have put them together in a book called In The Even of Death.

Last year we put the book on Amazon because we wanted as many people to see it as possible, but the restrictions of KDP Select (the only way to have a free book when we actually need it) were uncomfortable so this year we have put it on Smashwords and on our website for free download. The link below will take you to the main page for the book so you can choose where you would like to download it.

We very much hope you like the stories and would greatly appreciate it if you would tell your friends about the book. Many thanks.

It's launch day! Yay!
Cat's Confidence is out today and for one week until 8th Oct is is $2.99, after that it's going up to $3.29, so get in early for the better deal.

It's available on Amazon, Smashwords, Apple, B&N and Kobo at the moment and will be on other sites shortly (thank you Smashwords aggregate program).

All the buy links are here at the main book page.

Summary:
The Seer says that a Questor is always prepared for the Task for which they are chosen and Charlie has been a Questor long enough to know the Seer is always right. Still, it never occurred to him that being ready would mean specific training for a specific Task. Charlie, Kaelyn and Alexander are given six weeks to become a Dragon Warrior team: all they need to do is master magical telepathy, archery, flying and, the trickiest of all, how to put on a dragon-harness in under five minutes!

Once through the portal in the land of Snijela, they must pass as veterans, make friends with other dragons and figure out why they've actually been sent on their Task in the first place. Add in a volatile young queen, two feuding nations either on the verge of peace or all out war, as well as spies, sexism and an alarming acceleration in Charlie's premonitions, and nothing is ever going to be straightforward.