The Mystery of Egypt

My guest is award winning author who describes herself as a woman with a varied and checkered past. And boy, oh boy, she has. Nina Bruhns writes about dangerous passions whether it is in her romantic thriller trilogy Passion For Danger series (Berkley Sensation), Nocturne, or romance for Silhouette and Harlequin. It’s her trademark or brand, if you will. She does an excellent job with it.

Nina admits, “…I like to push the envelope in my stories. I think much of the appeal of romance is the seductive fantasy it allows women to indulge in safely. A woman whose days are filled with diapers or spreadsheets, PTA or sales meetings, wants to be swept away in a romantic fantasy for a few hours, into a world where she can quench her thirst for love and romantic adventure, and fulfill her dreams of a man who instinctively satisfies her deepest yearnings. I love writing about feisty heroines who do things I would never dare to do in real life. My heroes are dark and dangerous men who ooze sensuality–but who know how to treat a lady.”

I had the opportunity to attend a workshop she was part of about writing danger. It was a lot of fun and I learned so much. Applying the knowledge is a bit more difficult, but I’m getting it down. I had the opportunity to meet Nina. She has a lovely smile, a savvy knowledge of writing and the market. Nina is also a fun person to talk to with a great sense of humor—which is also reflected in her writing.

Nina says the trilogy she’s written for Nocturne is one she’s wanted to write for sometime. And by the way, she really is an archaeologist (an Egyptologist).


Thank you so much to Sia for having me as a guest here at Over Coffee!

Many of my readers don’t know that I am an Egyptologist—-I’d say in real life, except that it’s kind of the other way around. Writing novels is my real life these days, and despite the three college degrees, traveling around Egypt doing archaeological digs and surveys has been relegated to the realm of my imagination. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing...

This week the second book in my IMMORTAL SHEIKHS trilogy, SHADOW OF THE SHEIKH, was released by Harlequin Nocturne (book 1, LORD OF THE DESERT, came out in August).

The series takes place in modern Egypt, in a setting filled with all sorts of fun mythological and paranormal elements. These are truly books of my heart. You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to write these stories! But when I first started writing romance my editor would not even look at ideas with exotic settings, let alone ancient gods, immortals, and shape-shifters. Wow, how things have changed!

In this series, I have absolutely loved being able to use my knowledge of this amazing ancient culture to bring it back to life for my readers...with a cool twist. It is all still happening today. My strong, independent heroines, three American sisters, become immersed in the mysterious world of the last surviving Egyptian demigods. And boy, do they find things they never imagined existed. Including, of course, love.

Did I mention the vampire?

When I was on my first archaeological expedition to northern Sudan (which was part of Egypt in ancient times) we stayed in a tiny village on the Nile. The area around this village was supposed to have the most vampires in all of Africa. Okay, then. Freaked out? Me? Just a little.

Trust me, I’m no vampire expert. But when my editor suggested I make one of my lead characters a vampire (the hero of book 3, VAMPIRE SHEIKH, coming in February, who appears in all three books), I remembered that village (who could forget!), and thought how interesting it would be to incorporate the incredibly sexy archetype of the vampire lord into the ancient Egyptian pantheon. So I took the few references I found to vampirism in Pharaonic times and shaped them into a plausible addition to the existing mythology, which I then used to build the paranormal world in the trilogy.

The result is a blend of vamp and Egyptian mystery which I think make the stories really unusual and interesting. When you combine that with three hunky shape-shifting sheikhs and three sizzling hot romances, I think my readers will really enjoy this trilogy!

I hope you’ll let me know what you think!
~*~*~*~

Series Premise: The Immortal Sheikhs…

The three Haliday sisters are not afraid of mummies. Nor of silly ancient Egyptian curses. Get real. This is the twenty-first century! Besides, anthropologist Gemma, historian Gillian, and archaeologist Josslyn Haliday spent their childhoods sharing their sleeping tent with mummies and telling each other stories of fantastic shapeshifters and vampires, as they accompanied their Egyptologist father on his digs…ever since the fateful day their mother mysteriously disappeared into the sands of Egypt twenty years ago.

Brave, modern women all three, it would never occur to any of them to fear the dead…or the living dead.

But that is all about to change…

Shadow Of The Sheikh Back Cover Blurb:


Sheikh Shahin Aswadi—the harbinger of death, a ghostly figure who rides the wind in the form of a powerful black hawk. No mortal has dared approach his hidden oasis encampment for nearly a century. They are all terrified by the ruthless legend of al Shahin.

All but intrepid anthropologist Gemma Haliday. Determined to find her missing sister, Gemma has foolishly disregarded the dire warnings of local villagers…and walks straight into a trap Shahin has laid for her.

He takes the beautiful mortal captive, determined to use her, then gift her to his vampire lord, Seth-Aziz, as a blood sacrifice.

But one taste of Gemma’s lips and he knows he must possess her for fully and for all time. And he wants her to burn for him as he burns for her, with a desire as hot and vast as his desert home. Excerpt  TRAILER



Buy: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Chapters Indigo.ca

Is an avid world traveler and adventurer with two graduate degrees in archaeology -- all great fodder for her stories, giving them broad dimension, vivid settings and characters that are out of the ordinary. Her novels have earned two RITA nominations, and won numerous other awards, including three prestigious Daphne du Maurier Awards of Excellence for Overall Best Mystery Suspense Novel of the Year, five Dorothy Parker Awards, several RT BookClub Awards and a National Readers Choice Award.

A native of Canada, Nina grew up in California and currently resides in beautiful Charleston, South Carolina.

Balancing Work and Passion

Today my guest is award-winning and bestselling author Caridad Piñeiro. Caridad is also an attorney, wife and mother. When not writing, Caridad teaches workshops on various topics related to writing and heads a writing group. She leads a very busy life. Like many writers and authors in today's world, she works full time and does a balancing act between life and writing. How does she do it?

I get asked a lot of questions along a similar vein, namely:

1. Do you ever sleep?
2. Are you a vampire?
3. Do you ever take a break?

The answers are:

1. Yes
2. No
3. Yes

I will say, though, that if I had to categorize whether I was a Type A, B or C, I’d answer, I’m a Type AAA. Fact of the matter is, my grandfather used to say there would be time enough to rest when he was dead and I guess I really took that saying to heart. Which explains my Type AAA personality.

I definitely have a busy life, although I prefer to think of it as a full life. I work in New York City as an attorney, have been happily married for many years, have a great daughter who is also my best friend, enjoy other family and friends and have been blessed to be able to fulfill a lifelong passion – to write.

You are probably wondering how I do all that and still have time to rest. For starters, I get to write on my commute to and from work every day. It’s my “alone” time where I get to escape into the worlds and characters I create with my writing. Sometimes I am so into the story that the train pulls into New York without my realizing it. Luckily I’ve never missed my stop on the way home, although I have had a hurried shut down a number of times.

I also get up early on weekends – at six – and write for a few hours. That gives me the remainder of the day to hang with family, meet up with friends, and get some chores done and rest.

What’s my favorite kind of rest? Sharing time with family. Even if it’s something as simple as having a video fest, just being with family brings me peace. If we’re not just hanging out, we all love to travel and explore new places. I think I inherited that from my grandpa as well. He grew up in a very poor area of Spain and decided when he was a young man that he would seek his future elsewhere. His fortunes took him to Cuba and then to the United States. I was born in Cuba, not that I remember anything about it, but his love for adventure, and my jobs as an attorney and writer, have taken me to over a dozen countries and many more states, often with my family to share the adventures.

What’s my next favorite kind of rest? Hanging with my friends, especially my writing buddies. I love that my writing has brought me together with such a creative and unique group of individuals as well as the many fans who take a moment to chat with me or send me an e-mail.

In fact, my friends and I love spending time together and writing so much that we founded a new writing group recently – the Liberty States Fiction Writers. It’s been an amazing experience to start something from scratch with my friends and very rewarding because we’re busy sharing what we know, learning new things and meeting lots of interesting people who love writing as much as we do!

So now you know about my passions – family, friends, travel and writing. What’s great is that I’ve somehow found a way to meld and balance all of these. Granted it takes a little work and some juggling every now and then – especially when I’ve got a writing deadline – but all in all, I’m not complaining.

You may be wondering what I’m busy with now. Well, I’ve been doing some promotion for my February and March releases, HONOR CALLS and FURY CALLS respectively. They are a Nocturne Bite novella and Nocturne novel that are part of my popular THE CALLING Vampire series. I’m also waiting for the copy edits on my November release, SINS OF THE FLESH. I’m really excited about SINS because it’s my first single title paranormal romantic suspense release from Grand Central Publishing. While I’m waiting, I’m working on the second book in the series, tentatively titled STONE COLD SINS as well as two other books in THE CALLING, which will be out next year.

Which is probably making you ask again, “Don’t you ever rest?”

Of course I do, but who wants to spend too much time resting when you’re having so much fun?

***

Caridad Piñeiro is a multi-published and award-winning author. From the start, Caridad’s novels have received acclaim and have helped redefine the landscape of modern romance novels. In 1999, Caridad was published by Kensington as part of Encanto, the first line of bilingual Latino romance novels. In 2000, Caridad was one of the first Latino authors featured at the launch of BookExpo America’s Spanish Pavillion. In December 2006, Caridad helped Silhouette launch its successful Nocturne paranormal line with DEATH CALLS, one of the novels in the award-winning THE CALLING Vampire series. DANGER CALLS and DEATH CALLS were selected as the Top Fantasy Books of 2005 and 2006 by CATALINA magazine and Cataromance Reviewers Choice Award for Best Nocturne in 2006. Caridad’s eighteenth novel, MOON FEVER, a paranormal anthology with Maggie Shayne, Susan Sizemore and Lori Handeland, debuted in late September 2007 as #32 on the New York Times Extended Bestseller list.
Caridad’s CHICAS novels, including her seventeenth release, SOUTH BEACH CHICAS CATCH THEIR MAN from Simon & Schuster’s Downtown Press.

Caridad was born in Havana, Cuba, and settled in the New York Metropolitan area. She earned her juris doctor from St. John’s University and became the first female partner of Abelman, Frayne & Schwab, an intellectual property firm in midtown Manhattan.

You can visit with Caridad at her website http://www.caridad.com/ or visit
http://www.thecallingvampirenovels.com/