Birthday celebration week: Day 2

Hiya!
Today, I have a guest post from author Cara d'Bastian aka KS Augustin :)


Firstly, a huge thanks to Tamara for letting me rant at you today! Hi, my name's Cara and I write urban fantasy. Allow me to just jump right in....

Hubby and I had been moving around the world a bit. One of our children was born in the United States, for example, another in Australia. When we settled in south-east Asia four years ago, I felt a bit disconnected. You see, I was born in Malaysia but the person that had left Asia a long time ago was not the same one that returned and while everything seemed to look familiar on the surface, there were undercurrents and mores I realised I knew nothing about.

That sense of "not belonging", however, got me thinking about other people who, for one reason or another, feel like they don't belong either. And what happens if you feel that way in an environment where you should feel like one of the crowd?

This idea knocked around my head for a few years. In the meantime, I discovered Urban Fantasy. And I began reading a lot of UF books. And it struck me that the mythologies presented were overwhelmingly Anglo/Celtic. And I thought to myself, wouldn't it be interesting if I shared some knowledge of other mythologies? Of monks and jinn and demons and vampires, but not like any vampires you're probably used to.

That love of UF combined with the "on the outside, looking in" vibe to produce the first in an intended series of books about a quirky little Singaporean business called The Check Your Luck Agency. As our heroine, fish-out-of-water Ursula Formosa, points out, the business does exactly what it says it checks your luck, more often bad than good. After all, who questions good luck? ;)

It's bad enough that the world Ursula comes back to is more unfamiliar to her than she'd expected it to be, but then circumstances conspire to push her even further out of her comfort zone. There's a handsome, young ex-model she's been thrown into contact with, a witch doctor with kindly eyes, fraud, robbery, colonial-era history...and that's just in the first book!

THE CHECK YOUR LUCK AGENCY, while set in an exotic environment, is essentially about people. No matter the colour of our skin, we all have the same basic dreams and desires. The only difference is in how we try to make those dreams and desires come true. And, for Ursula, who just wants a quiet life, she's going to find that things are going to get much more excitable and dangerous for her before it gets any better. Much more dangerous.

THE CHECK YOUR LUCK AGENCY, Book 1 of the Check Your Luck series, is available from Amazon and other leading etailers.

Its page at Sandal Press is here.
You can read the full first chapter here at the Check Your Luck Agency website:
And I blog every Tuesday at http://caradbastian.blogspot.com


Okay, so, today I have TWO giveaways.

First one is for .pdf copy of THE CHECK YOUR LUCK AGENCY

The novel is labeled as Adult, but Cara told me that there is nothing in there that can't be read by a teenager. :)






And the next one is coming very, very soon. Little bit later today, that is :)