Want to meet authors Gena Showalter and Jill Monroe? Want to get your copy of their new magazine-style book Dating the Undead autographed? Live near Oklahoma City?

If so, you are in luck! Tomorrow, Gena and Jill will be doing a Dating the Undead booksigning Full Circle books. Here are the details via Gena’s website:

Time: January 10, 2012 from 6:30pm to 8pm
Location: Full Circle books
Street: 1900 NW Expressway
City/Town: Oklahoma City

Gena will also be giving away poster sized covers for The Darkest Seduction and Wicked Nights by raffle for those who stop by the event.

Plus, check out this  special Author Talk video where Gena and Jill, along with their friend Sheila, talk vampires, werewolves and dragons and Dating The Undead.

More about Dating the Undead:

They’re drop-dead handsome–and we’re not kidding!

Welcome to the first and only guide devoted to loving the immortal man in all of his furry, feathery, fiery glory. Here is a forbidden-fruit salad of features, fiction, fashion, and more, including:

–Lipstick on His Collar
Is your immortal just a little bit…immoral?

–Angel in the Kitchen
Heavenly dishes that don’t take an eternity to prepare

–A Kiss Is Not Just A Kiss
Immortals we crave divulge their lip-smacking turn-ons

–Undead & Well-Read
What’s hot between the covers this month

–A View from a Guy
Zombie Jack’s turn

–Immorstrology
Our indispensable guide to heavenly bodies

All Things Urban Fantasy is holding their third annual paranormal cover art awards! Until December 29, vote for your favorite UF covers of the year here.

Included among the nominees are the following Harlequin titles:

• For Best Foreign Cover, the UK edition of Rachel Vincent’s Blood Bound (Mira Books)
• For Best Steampunk, The Girl in the Steel Corset by Kady Cross (Harlequin Teen)
• For Best Duo or Group Cover, Laurie London’s Bonded by Blood (HQN Books)

To cast your vote, click the button below!

RT Book reviews has announced their Reviewers’ Choice Award nominees for 2011! Congratulations to the following Harlequin paranormal authors nominated in various categories:

Best Vampire Romance:

• Twilight Fulfilled by Maggie Shayne

Shapeshifter Romance:

• Body of Sin by Eve Silver

Best Urban Fantasy:

• Aftertime by Sophie Littlefield

Best Harlequin Nocturne:

• Lord of the Wolfyn by Jessica Andersen
• The Beholder by Connie Hall
• Ashes of Angels by Michele Hauf
• Fallen by Michele Hauf
• Lord of the Abyss by Nalini Singh

Best Science Fiction & Fantasy:

• Cast in Ruin by Michelle Sagara

Best Digital-First and Indie Press:

• Altered Destiny by Shawna Thomas

Career Achievement Award:

• Maggie Shayne
• Nalini Singh

Winners will be announced in the May 2012 issue of Romantic Times, just before their conference April 11-15. For the full list of categories and nominees, click here.

Are you attending New York Comic Con this weekend (Oct. 13 – 16, 2011)? So is Harlequin and Carina Press!

Stop by our booth, #2021, for a ton of goodies, author appearances and other things to do such as:

• Enter to win a Kobo eReader Touch Edition and a library of 50 free eBooks from Carina Press
• Friday is zombie day! In homage to Sophie Littlefield’s post-apocalyptic zombie series, Aftertime, we have makeup artist Edward O’Rourke.on hand to “zombify” attendees
• Meet authors on Saturday, October 15! Luna author C.E. Murphy will be signing in the booth from 11-12, and Harlequin Teen author Julie Kagawa who will be signing from 2-4 pm.
• On Sunday, steampunk yourself with items from our costume trunk for a photo.
• And all week, pick up stickers, book samples, and more!

Here’s a sneak peek of what our booth looked like after set up last night (can’t wait to see it teeming with readers!):

Be sure to follow @HarlequinBooks and @CarinaPress on Twitter for more news from #NYCC (pssst, that’s the Twitter hashtag for the event ). Hope to see you there See you there!

One of my friends mentioned to me the other day that she hates when paranormal romance authors have “destined mates” in their books. Color me shocked. Really? I write those kind of mates all the time. I do it with my shapeshifters, with my vampires, with my demons, with all kinds of supernatural beings. I don’t always write the fated mates, but quite often I do. I had to ask my friend why she hated destined mates so much, and she told me that authors use it as an insta-relationship maker and they bypass all the hard parts about falling in love. Poof! True love, the end.

Okay, I can understand why that would be frustrating, but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater!

When it comes to destiny in my stories, I take a page out of Robin D. Owens‘ book. She posted on her blog at one point (back when I first started writing) that magic should have consequences, that it shouldn’t make everything easy and solve all the hero and heroine’s problems. With my characters, I take it a step further and usually make the paranormal destiny part of the problem they have to overcome. When my people find their fated mate, it’s usually the most inconvenient person I can think of for them. The person who will make the heroine grow the most, because the hero embodies her worst fears and makes her confront the parts of herself that need to change.

In the case of my current book, WANTON, I took my widowed heroine, a woman who thought she’d never have a mate again, who’d given up too much of herself to please her deceased mate and was just learning to know herself again. What did I do to her? Oh, yeah. I gave her another mate. So she has to deal with being strong enough not to give herself away too easily, to remain her own person, but still be part of a couple. She has to learn to trust herself and trust her mate, all while her instincts are urging her to give in and mate with the guy already.

I admit, part of the fun of destined mates is getting to torture my characters a little more, but it’s also about the fantasy that there’s a True Love for each person. Most people can only guess and hope they picked correctly, but that’s the excitement of paranormal. My characters can have their True Love staring them in the face and they know it for sure. No guessing, no hoping, but something powerful inside them claiming the truth. It’s both an exhilarating and terrifying thought, isn’t it? Now, what if that person were the Romeo to your Juliet? Your greatest enemy? Or what if you’re terrified of deep water and he’s a merman? The possibilities are endless.

While I don’t think that fated mates should solve all the issues in a relationship (more likely, I’d want it to make trouble, but I’m evil like that), I do think that like any other relationship in a romance novel, we as readers should believe that they would have chosen to be together without the whole destiny bit. We have to believe they really love each other, that they’re a good fit for each other, and they really will live happily ever after. That’s romance, right? It doesn’t matter what species the character is, we want the real deal. True love, the end.

Last week I blogged about Harlequin TEEN’s new Steampunk series The Steampunk Chronicles (lead by the prequel ebook The Strange Case of Finley Jayne and book one, The Girl in the Steel Corset) by author Kady Cross – as well as the series’ awesome book trailer.

Today I have even more steampunk goodies to share — this time from Harlequin’s digital first imprint, Carina Press. In the last week of April, Carina Press released a slew of Steampunk books for our own “Steampunk Week”, including a free ebook Photographs & Phantoms by Cindy Spencer Pape. We also made this awesome video to highlight them and the genre. Take a look:

Learn more about the books featured in this video (plus a couple additional titles), click the links below:

• The Mysterious Lady Law by Robert Appleton
• Badlands by Seleste deLaney
• The Twisted Tale of Stormy Gale by Christine Bell
• Photographs & Phantoms by Cindy Spencer Pape (FREE!)
• Island of Icarus by Christine Danse
• Steam & Sorcery by Cindy Spencer Pape
• Like Clockwork by Bonnie Dee
• Journeyman’s Ride by Marie Hart
• Alchemy of Desire by Crista McHugh

If you’ve been anywhere near the YA section of a bookstore lately, you might have noticed a new trend cropping up: stories based on Greek mythology, especially the myth of Hades and Persephone. In the past few months, they’ve been growing like weeds on the shelves.

Why is that? I have no idea. No one told me Meg Cabot was writing a Persephone story when I started THE GODDESS TEST in 2007, and I’m sure no one told Gwen Hayes  either. The Jungian theory of the collective unconscious aside, I chose to write about the myth because it fascinates me, and I wanted to explore Hades’ side of the story. But I didn’t want to write the same story everyone knew—where was the fun and creativity in that? Instead I needed to find a balance between honoring the traditional myth of the Lord of the Underworld kidnapping an innocent girl while she played and putting a new spin on it.

I had decisions to make. Did I want Hades to be a villain, love interest, or both? What about Persephone? And most important, how could I make my story original and worth reading without straying so far from the myth as to be unrecognizable?

Eventually I opted to forego retelling the myth and instead wrote a sequel of sorts that takes place in present day. In THE GODDESS TEST, Persephone left Hades, and he can’t rule his realm alone anymore. Now he must choose: find a replacement or forfeit his reign and therefore his immortality. Enter the test to find a new Queen. But the candidates keep dying, and Kate, the book’s protagonist, is his last chance—and unfortunately for her, Hades is still in love with Persephone.

The difference between THE GODDESS TEST and the other Persephone tales out there is in the choices each writer made. Is Hades a villain? Is Persephone a victim? And in my case, is she a character at all? But the beauty of adaption is that even though our novels each deal with that myth, we’ve all put our own unique spin on it, making them very different stories.

It isn’t the source material that makes each book worth reading. After all, who wants to read the same story again and again? What makes a retelling compelling is the unique elements the writer brings to the table, and no matter how many retellings of Persephone’s tale pop up, none of them will be the same.

What are some of your favorite adaptations and retellings?

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The Romance Writers of America have announced the finalists for the 2010 Rita Awards! Harlequin is fortunate to have a number of our paranormal and fantasy authors nominated this year. Congratulations go out to:

Sins of the Heart by Eve Silver (HQN Books) – Paranormal Romance

The Iron King by Julie Kagawa (Harlequin Teen) – nominated in 2 categories, Best First Book and Young Adult

Renegade Angel by Kendra Leigh Castle (Harlequin Nocturne) – Contemporary Series Romance: Suspense/Adventure

“Love Me to Death” by Maggie Shayne in Heart of Darkness (HQN Books) – Romance Novella (Maggie is also a double nominee with her novel Kill Me Again in the Romantic Suspense Category)

The Dead Travel Fast by Deanna Raybourn (MIRA) – Novel with Strong Romantic Elements

Click here to read the full list of nominees, along with the Golden Heart awards nominees for unpublished authors.

If you missed any of these books, remember they are all available digitally wherever ebooks are sold!

What was your favorite paranormal read of 2010?

Here’s our roundup of paranormal romance and urban fantasy reads for March! Look for them in North American bookstores now, as well as for ebook preorder. We’ve got vampires, futuristic YA, even zombies…so take a look

American Vampire by Jennifer Armintrout (MIRA Books)

Buried in the Heartland is a town that no one enters or leaves. Graf McDonald somehow becomes its first visitor in more than five years…and he was only looking for a good party. Unfortunately, Penance, Ohio, is not that place. And after having been isolated for so long, they do not like strangers at all.

Jessa’s the only one to even remotely trust him, and she’s desperate for the kind of protection that only a vampire like Graf can provide. Supplies are low, the locals are ornery for a sacrifice and there’s a monster more powerful than Graf lurking in the woods. New men are hard to come by in this lonesome town, and this handsome stranger might be Jessa’s only hope for salvation.

Even if she has to die first…

Aftertime by Sophie Littlefield (Luna Books)

I’m contrarian by nature. I get a perverse satisfaction from doing things I shouldn’t; in fact, my first published story was written on a dare. So when I saw a review on Dear Author that mocked the idea of sexy mermen, I decided to set my next paranormal romance novella in the seaside town of Annapolis.

The merfolk-hating reviewer wrote, “I’ve never been enchanted by merpeople and honestly the thought of getting up close and personal with someone who has a fishtail weirds me out.”

Now, everyone is entitled to their own literary tastes, but since I love to weird people out in all the best ways, this smelled like a challenge! If a good writer can make readers overlook the furry lower anatomy of werewolves and the bestial implications thereof, surely I could do the same for mermen. The challenge was, if you will, my own personal Siren Song…

Since my Mythica seres for HQN Nocturne revolves around war and Greek mythology, it wasn’t difficult to imagine my hero as an ancient guardian of the sea turned modern-day Naval officer. (I defy anyone to watch Dead Calm with Sam Neal and tell me that sailors aren’t manly!) I loved the idea of a hero who is so starchy and uptight that it would take the wild call of a siren to make him snap and claim her as his own.

Which brings us to the heroine of my new novella.

What if the monsters of ancient mythology still walked the earth…and what if you found out that you’re one of them? That’s the tagline of my series, which is based on the premise that war can make men into monsters…sometimes literally.

Even though my heroes and heroines are modern day monsters, I’ve found a way to make them sympathetic. Gorgons, hydras, chimeras, minotaurs…I’ve redeemed them all. But when I decided that my newest heroine was a siren–those sinister creatures who lure innocent sailors to their deaths–I thought I might have finally bitten off more than I could chew. Especially since I knew that her transformation into a monster of mythology would have been because she was the victim of an unspeakable crime.

It was going to be a dark story and I worried that the heroine’s pain would weigh everything down. As it turns out, however, as a powerful siren and aspiring young rock star, Chloe Karras transformed into the freshest, most charming heroines I’ve ever written. As a veteran of the Iraq War, Chloe isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, but she’s a true heroine in every sense of the word, capable of saving the hero and herself besides.

I’m really proud of the final result and this is a lesson to me that the way to make a splash as an author is to always keep reaching. Take risks. Try to rise to a challenge, even if you’re the only one who hears it being made.

So what do you say? Willing to give merfolk a chance?

Note: Siren Song is on sale now wherever ebooks are sold. Previous titles in Stephanie Draven’s Mythica series include Poisoned Kisses, Wild, Tethered, Bound and Midnight Medusa.