LitRPG Week

It’s LitRPG week here in the Summer Reading event, so to celebrate I’ve put the first book in my Second Age of Retha series, The Luckless, up for free from today through the 18th! If you haven’t heard about The Luckless before, it’s likely because it’s under my not-so-secret pen name, A. M. Sohma.

Lately I’ve had a few people ask why I have the two names. The difference is this….A. M. Sohma books have a bit less romance. More correctly, I should say A. M. Sohma books have slow burn romance, meaning it takes more than a few books to develop. In just about every book/series I’ve written under K. M. Shea, the romance is solved in a single book–maybe two, tops. The only exception to this rule is my King Arthur and Her Knights series. (Which that still might not count because the first six books are all novellas.)

So A. M. Sohma books still have the same humor, same characters, same morals, same standards…it’s just that the romance is a little slower to develop.

Some of you are still a little leery of A. M. Sohma books, considering the only series–The Second Age of Retha–I have out is something called “LitRPG,” which is basically a fancy genre name that mean the story takes place inside a video game. But although the setting is a video game, you do not have to be a gamer to understand (and laugh at) the story! Check out the images to see what some fellow Champions had to say about the series.

Personally, the way I (Kitty) would describe Second Age of Retha to my faithful Champions, is to say that I wrote it with the desire of doing to Epic Fantasy what I did with the MBRC series and Paranormal romance/urban fantasy: lovingly make fun of it. Though admittedly, the Second Age of Retha has a more complex and danger-filled plot. But it’s basically what would happen if you dumped a modern 20-something-year-old girl who is a big fantasy fan into an Epic Fantasy storyline. (A lot of sarcasm ensues.)

So why am I pushing this series right now? Because, as I mentioned at the top, The Luckless is free today through the 18th! That means you can try this series for free! (Or tell your friends/kiddos/significant other about the book and they can try it for free!)

If you still decide to pass, no hard feelings. 😉 I do understand that this series won’t be for everyone.

So I do hope you’ll give The Luckless a try, and if you do I really hope Kit and her crew make you laugh. Until the next post, thanks for reading!

Interviews and Fan Art

Happy weekend, Champions! I have some fun stuff to share with you in this post.

For starters, aspiring author M L Moos interviewed me via email, and last week posted the interview on her adorable website! She asked me some really good questions, so if you want to check it out, click here! (Turns out we’re, like, book buddies!)

Next, we have some new fanart!

Dylan and her Kelpie by Tori Rose

This picture of Dylan and her Kelpie is by Tori Rose, and I actually laughed out-loud when I read the caption and saw Dylan’s expression. (Such a Dylan thing!) She really nailed Dylan’s hair–and the Kelpie of course. But even the wave is really awesome! (I mean, water–to me–seems like it would be impossibly hard to draw, so hats off to you for that one, Tori!)

I’m actually quite chuffed, Besides Cami’s painting of Dylan, no one has done fanart for Dylan before, and she’s one of my favorites to write given her playful personality and her preoccupation with food. So thanks again, Tori, for the fun artwork–it has joined the place of honor with all the other amazing stuff you Champions have sent me in the Fanart gallery!

And to wrap up the post, I finished the first round of edits on the STILL-as-of-yet-unnamed-sequel-to-Red-Rope-of-Fate, so now it’s off to the jumble of editors who will help me find all the errors! I am hoping for a mid July release if all goes well. Next, though, I have to work on a secret mini-project….buwahahah! (More on that to come.)

Thanks for reading today, Champions! I appreciate your faithfulness and support. Have an amazing weekend–I hope you have time to read a good book!

K. M. Shea Quotes

Hellooooo Champions! Today we’re talking about Pinterest again…and I intend to beg you for help.

For those of you who don’t know, in the last few months I joined pintrest! I have a board for fairy tale retellings, beautiful castles, fairy tale dresses, and more. Myrrhlynn (my cover artist) has done most of the work as she creates the graphics for the book quotes board–my most popular board. The book quotes board features images like the one below.

Myrrhlynn selects favorite quotes from each book and makes a graphic to match them. As I mentioned, these are the most popular things I’ve pinned. There’s just one problem…we’re running out of quotes.

The easiest way for Myrhlynn to select quotes is to go to the book’s Goodreads page, and go through the quotes you guys have underlined there. (She can’t use every quote–some are too long, and quotes that have two people talking are a little more difficult to convey–so it’s useful to have a bunch in a list like that.) Unfortunately, she’s worked her way through most of the favorited/underlined quotes. (If you have a goodreads account, if you underline a book quote on your Kindle, it automatically links up and populates on the book’s goodreads page.)

In particular there are NO favorited quotes/lines in Goodreads for Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, Frog Prince, and Twelve Dancing Princesses! So, here is where we could use your help. Tell us your favorite quotes–you can either add them to Goodreads via the underline method on your Kindle, or you can share them in the comments down below!

And while we’re looking for book quotes from the later Timeless Fairy Tales books, you can submit a quote from any story–Princess Ahira, King Arthur, Robyn Hood, all of them!

I’ve had a lot of fun going through the quote images to see what lines you Champions like best–and it’s also fun to see how Myrhrlynn designs the graphic to match the quote. It’s also been a big surprise to see how popular the quote images are on my pintrest account. I thought for sure the fairy tale retellings board would be a huge hit, but what’s the most popular thing I’ve ever posted? A book quote from Rumpelstiltskin! (Stil would feel much better about losing out to Merlin if he knew about the book quote, I’m sure.)

Thank you so much for your help–and I can’t wait to see what lines you like the most! Thanks for reading, Champions!