I released Books 2 and 3 of the FIRE Trilogy on December 4th, bringing the series to an end. You can find the buy links to "Dancing with Fire" and "Living with Fire" here. And you can download Book 1, "Playing with Fire", for free almost everywhere. If you want to grab all 3 books in one, download "The Complete FIRE Trilogy".

To give you more of an idea what the paranormal romance novels are about, I'm sharing my Pinterest boards.

Pinterest Board for "Playing with Fire"
Pinterest Board for the sequels
​
You can read exclusive excerpts from all 3 books here.

​And you can get an idea about the characters - fire witch Felicia and ice wizard Joshua - here.

​I may be a Buddhist, but I’ve never been able to resist a good Christmas romance. There’s just something about the mix of Christmas magic, year’s end and people meeting (again) that is perfect for a romance story. And I got 7 times of exactly that irresistible mix with “Hot Christmas Nights”. I loved each and every story set in Australia, and I find it impossible to pick a favourite. So let me just mention what I liked most about each steamy read.
 
ALL SHE WANTS FOR CHRISTMAS by RACHEL BAILEY
 
A hunky, brooding author as the hero? Yes, please! I loved the first story in the set, dealing with Maddy and Samuel on their island. It was just the right mix of bitter, sweet, sensual, emotion-laden and fast-paced to make me grip my mouse tighter and tighter. The memories contrasting with the present and the haunting secret that Samuel has been hiding gave the story real power.
 
CHRISTMAS WISHES, NEW YEAR KISSES by MICHELLE DOUGLAS
 
I love animals (I have 4 dogs and 2 cats), so reading about a team of vets was a treat. I also enjoyed the whole shift from friends to lovers, it was absolutely credible. Sometimes I wanted to just pick Josh and Erin up and throw them closer together. Erin’s mother as the ‘sort of’ villain was a great idea, as was having them experiment with a holiday.
 
BABY, IT’S HOT OUTSIDE by LOUISA GEORGE
 
This story was another perfect example of how it’s sometimes better for two people to be apart and grow up and find their place in life before being thrown together again. Emma and Danny had to face each other and their tumultuous past at their friends’ wedding, and the whole set-up seemed perfect. I loved how the hero had changed, and how spunky the heroine was.
 
HER CHRISTMAS COWBOY by HELEN LACEY
 
A cowboy and Christmas? Yes, please! At first Brett and Elyse seemed an unlikely couple, but I quickly warmed to them, and their chemistry was incredibly hot. The ending was also perfect after all the yes-no, up-down emotional ride that had me on tenterhooks.
 
SLEIGH BELLS IN THE SAND by STEFANIE LONDON
 
I really liked the start of this story, it caught me completely by surprise. And the emotional background and dark past of both characters was so believable and heavy, it pulled me right in. I was rooting so hard for Neve and Damien to get their happy ending. The sparks between them were sizzling, and I loved Tilly the dog with all my heart too.
 
MILLIONAIRE UNDER THE MISTLETOE by KANDY SHEPHERD
 
Kitty-sitting on Christmas? I’d happily say yes to that – especially if that’d give me a chance to run into a hunky hero like Dylan. This story also started off with a bang and surprised me many times. I loved the dynamics between Dylan and Carly and never wanted the story to end (it did end perfectly, though).
 
HER SMALL-TOWN CHRISTMAS WISH by JENNIFER ST GEORGE
 
This story was incredibly emotional and heart-wrenching. I was constantly swinging between all kinds of emotions, and the power of the story hardly let me breathe. Giselle with her glamorous present and painful past and Jake as the simply perfect hero I’d have fallen head over heels in love with were a wonderful pairing. The story was the perfect ending to the set, lighting the dark with the rays of hope that Christmas magic can sometimes bring.
 
I’m giving this set 5 stars out of 5 because it was indeed scorching hot, wonderfully filled with second chances and new beginnings, past hurt overcome and small miracles happening. Out of the contributing authors, I had previously only known Kandy Shepherd’s books, but I fell in love with all the other authors too, and will definitely check out their novels in the future.

Rating: 5/5

​BESTSELLING AUTHOR INTERVIEW SERIES
KIRTIDA GAUTAM HOSTS THE INTERVIEW OF SCOTT HOWKINS
Other Authors who host interviews for the series
Rasana Atreya, Neil D'Silva, Devika Fernando, Aindrila Roy, Debashish Irengbam
​
Scott Hawkins is born in Idaho in 1969, grew up in South Carolina. He graduated from the University of South Carolina with a B.S.C.S. in computer science in 1991 and an M.S. in 1993 and works as a computer programmer.  He’s been a member of Absolute Write since 2006. Scott has also been deeply involved in keeping Absolute Write’s server running for close to ten years now. He lives in the Atlanta suburbs with his wife and seven dogs. The Library at Mount Char is his first novel. He has also written several technical books. 

​1) At first we would like to know, what inspired you to write your first fantasy Novel “The Library at Mount Char”? Were there any books or movies that inspired you to write this brilliant Novel or do you remember any moment when the idea first struck your mind? 

It wasn’t really any one thing.  When I’m working on a new project, I tend to just jot things down—scenes, character sketches, whatever—until I have half a dozen snippets that feel like they’re working. I don’t worry too much about narrative flow or even making sense until much later.  In the initial stages I just want stuff that’s interesting in itself.
 
I’ll be a little vague here to avoid spoilers.  In the case of Library at Mount Char, the core scenes were one where a guy goes out for a jog, a neighborhood picnic that went bad, and a guy meeting a strange woman at a bar.  I truly didn’t have much of an idea of how to string them together, or even what order they’d be in, but each scene felt lively in itself, and I figured I could come up with some way to string them together.  What ultimately became the story sprang from trying to figure out a way to string those three scenes together.
 
So, like—what is this guy doing in the neighborhood?  Why him and no one else?  What happened after they left the bar?  Stuff like that.  I try to keep the reader interested first, then go back later and make up plausible reasons why stuff happened.  Well, semi-plausible. 

2) Do you follow the same process of writing a Novel and technical books? If not, what is different about writing a Novel? Please tell our reader more about your writing process. 

They don’t have much in common, at least for me.  A computer book is very similar to an academic research project.  First I read everything I can on the subject, then I set up a lab and start experimenting for myself.  It’s a lot like writing twenty or thirty term papers in a row.  That can be rewarding in its own way, but it’s not the sort of thing I would do for fun.
 
Novels, when they’re going well, are much more fun to write.  I talked a little bit above about how I get started.  Those initial stages can be a lot of work, and sometimes frustrating.  It’s also very time-consuming.  I usually throw out more than half of what I write.  But once I’ve gotten past that and have the story and characters sorted out in my mind, I get very immersed in actually putting it on paper.  That’s really fun.  At that point there’s really nothing I enjoy more.  

​3) As we all know, your wife has been instrumental in shaping up your writing work and giving you objective feedbacks. Can you please tell us more about her contribution in your Novel writing? 

It’s simple but hugely valuable.  She’s not a writer herself, but she’s an avid reader.  She doesn’t give detailed feedback, she just looks at my stuff and gives me a “thumbs-up” or “thumbs-down.” She’s ruthless, and she doesn’t mince words.  She’s literally thwapped me on the head with manuscript pages a couple of times.  “This sucks!  Fix it!”
 
If I can get a scene past her, I’m pretty confident that it’s working.  It’s not necessarily going to be for everybody, but I’m confident that at least I won’t embarrass myself too badly by sending it out into the world.

4) I have heard that you have a playlist for The Library at Mount Char. Can you tell our readers, how music helps you in writing?

​I be happy to tell you, but I bet it’s not in the ways you expect.  I’m really not a very musical guy.  I’ve got almost no aptitude for it, and I don’t even listen to it much.  When I’m in the car driving by myself I keep the radio off.  Most of the stuff on my iPod is audio books.  All my musical friends say that what I do listen to is garbage. 
The thing is, though, I’ve got a lot of dogs in the house.  They bark every time the neighbors slam a car door.  They bark at squirrels, deer, and the cat that hangs out on the front porch.  They can be very persistent.  So a lot of times when I’m working I put headphones on to drown out the noise. 
I’ve also found that having one song play over and over when I’m working on a particular scene helps get me in the mood—kind of a conditioned response. I will never be able to hear Dead Man’s Party without thinking of the big showdown about 2/3 of the way through the book.  I’ve probably heard that song more times than Danny Elfman at this point.   I’ve got at least one for each chapter.  If I ever want to get into that frame of mind again, all I have to do is put on the headphones.

​5) What kind of research or ground work you did before you started writing The Library at Mount Char?  

There wasn’t a whole lot.  That’s the beauty of writing fantasy—if you need a fact, you can just make it up.
 
I did spend a bit of time reading up on uncontacted tribes, or at least trying to.  The problem is with isolated tribes is that there’s really not much to say about them.  There are some guys called the Sentinelese that have an island in the south Pacific.  Whenever anybody tries to land there, they attack, so people tend to leave them alone.  If anybody discovers oil on the island I’m sure we’ll learn more about them, but as it stands we don’t know much.  They’re not really hurting anybody.

Years ago I read an article about some Brazilian tribes from the amazon that got displaced by deforestation.  These guys have basically been living in the Stone Age their entire lives, but then all of a sudden they’re in downtown Sao Paolo.  Everybody was talking on cell phones, ordering pizza, that kind of stuff.  That had to do a number on your head.  That article wasn’t research, exactly, but that may have been one of the things that sparked the idea for the book.
 
There was a religious aspect to the book, obviously.  I didn’t do a whole lot of reading specifically on that topic when I was writing, but I’ve read quite a bit about religion over the years—I got Greek and Roman in school, Christian stuff from my mom, I picked up a bit of Hindu lore somewhere, and Polynesian stuff from somewhere else.  I tried to think about the things that they all had in common.  They all do seem to be scratching the same itch. 
 
For instance, a few years ago I was reading about angelology while researching a previous book.  There are only a half-dozen or so angels named in the Bible, but in Catholic tradition there are probably a couple of thousand.  Somebody must have felt a need for them to invent that many.
 
I noticed that the angels had a lot of similarities to modern superheroes—there’s Uriel the fire angel, and Barnabas the ice angel.  Maybe there’s another one that has adamantium claws, like Wolverine.  I remember a set of liner notes in some medieval manuscript speculating about whether the Metatron could beat up the Archangel Michael that would sound familiar to any comic book fan.  If memory serves, there was even something analogous to trading cards the young monks would pass around the monastery. 
 
So with Mount Char I was trying to come up with a new mythology that scratched the same itch as the others without borrowing explicitly from any one of them. 

6) What kind of books you like to read in general and what kind of movies you like? 

I grew up reading a lot of science fiction and fantasy.  I still do, but I’ve also branched out in my old age.  I’ll buy anything by Joe Haldeman, Ursula Le Guin or Stephen King.  I don’t write a lot of short fiction—it’s a different skill set, and I want to stay focused on novels—but I love to read it. I’ve got most of the Gardner Dozois annual Year’s Best anthologies, and I love Ellen Datlow’s fantasy anthologies. 
 
That said, these days about half of what I read is non-fiction.  I like non-fiction books about complex systems falling apart—disasters, basically.  At one point I read a lot about airplane crashes, but it turned me into a white-knuckle flier, so I stopped. Financial disasters are interesting, so I got a lot of reading pleasure from the 2008 debacle.
 
There’s a book about the collapse of Enron called Conspiracy of Fools that I absolutely love.  I’ve been through it at least half a dozen times.  I read all of the Richard Rhodes histories of the Cold War.  Dark Sun is a favorite.  I’ll buy anything by Michael Lewis.  I was kind of hoping for a bumper crop of nuclear doom books after the Fukushima thing, but evidently the Japanese don’t revel in postmortems the way we do.  Or maybe the books just haven’t been translated yet.
 
As far as movies—I love them.  I go to the movies almost every weekend.  If you can’t get me and the wife to buy a ticket to your flick, you aren’t really trying.  I’ll go see pretty much anything with an effects budget, all the fanboy stuff.  You probably could have guessed that from reading Mount Char.
 
Less stereotypically, Remains of the Day is one of my all-time favorite movies.  I was amazed at how much I liked the Reese Witherspoon movie Wild—no disrespect to anyone involved in making it, mind you, but the ads for it didn’t make me feel like part of the target demographic.  One day I checked it out on pay-per-view and I loved it. 

7) Please tell us also about your future work.  
​
Right now I’m working on one that’s got elements of noir mystery and fairy tale wrapped up in a science-fiction premise.  Imagine Humprey Bogart in the Maltese Falcon was instead a slightly crazy middle-aged woman who is prone to killing sprees.  The premise is that she gets hired by Dr. No to investigate a school shooting that may have been perpetrated by Peter Pan.  Then it gets weird.  

​8) Do you have any message or piece of advice for our readers and new authors, which you wish you would have got before you got into writing your Novel? 

I do!  This is something I don’t remember hearing said much, and I really wish I’d had more people clobber me over the head with it.
 
If you’re one of those people for whom language comes easily, you may actually be at a disadvantage in trying to make it as a novelist.  All those years of easy A’s in English class and good standardized test scores may have given you a false sense of security.  It certainly did me.
 
I had kind of gotten in the habit of thinking in terms of “good enough.”  As in, “this scene isn’t really working, but the next scene kicks so much ass it’s probably good enough.” 
 
There is no “good enough” when you’re trying to get a novel published.  Maybe if you’re Shakespeare or somebody like that, but for mere mortals such as myself, it is never going to be okay to let anything slide.  I’m bad at evaluating my own work—it all seems good to me, you know?   I finally got it through my head that if I spot a problem, even a small one, it probably means that whatever I’m looking at is actually a trainwreck.  
 
These days I’m trying to train myself to be completely unforgiving.  The flesh is weak and all that, but that’s the goal.

December 4th - FIRE Friday - is the release day of Books 2 and 3 of the FIRE Trilogy, my first paranormal romance series. I'll also be releasing The Complete FIRE Trilogy with all 3 novels in one eBook. So this Teaser Tuesday, whet your appetite with one excerpt from each book!

​Joshua took a last step closer until there wasn’t more than an inch or two of space between them and she could feel her heat and his coldness warring with each other, testing the boundaries for a chance to leap and attack – or to leap and dance.
When he leaned his face down, Felicia’s breath hitched and her pulse started racing. Inside her belly, the flames shot higher and higher, wanting the kiss that was surely about to happen.
“Don’t,” she whispered despite the almost aching desire to feel that connection again.
Stopping a hair’s breadth before her face, he whispered back, “Why?”
His cool breath that smelled as minty and wintry as the whole man brushed over her trembling lips.
Struggling to put her conflicting feelings into words, she blurted out, “You’ll get burned.”
That purely masculine, dangerous grin tugged at his lips which were so enticingly close that she could almost taste them.
“What if I enjoy playing with fire?” he asked, voice deep and low and full of promise.

​Felicia narrowed her fire-spitting eyes at him, snorted and turned on her heel.
“I’m going. I’m done with whatever child’s play or craziness this is,” she announced, scanning the afternoon sky for her zooming dragon way up high and sending out a silent call to it.
In an instant, Kyle was by her side, his heat more intense than ever. He grabbed her arm and wouldn’t let it go when she tried to yank it away. She glowered at him, unsettled by the dangerous flash in his amber eyes and by the way her body reacted to his touch.
“You’re absolutely gorgeous when you’re all fired up…pardon the pun,” Kyle said, his gravelly voice a predatory growl. The heat from his fingers would have singed her arm right through the blouse and blazer if she hadn’t been so fuelled by her own heat and magic running rampant. Somehow, part of her anger diffused, which was strange because she wanted to be angry, she rather liked it in defense to how confused Kyle made her and how exhausted the training session had left her.
“Flattering me won’t get you anywhere,” she said drily, but her voice didn’t come out half as harshly as she wanted it.
He raised his eyebrows at her, a little of his serious and furious mask slipping away to slink off until it was needed again.
“What will get me somewhere with you?” he asked, and there was no humor in his tone although his choice of words made it sound like a joke.
“How about honesty?”

​Joshua was gaping at her, his mouth opening and closing silently like a fish out of water. There was a sudden increase in icy coldness, and he froze into a statue, his face now expressionless and his eyes drawn and unfathomable as always when he was deeply distressed or too emotional for his own good.
“Can you hear yourself? You sound like some fatalistic, maniacal sect member or the leader of a dangerously foolish occult movement,” he said with that unnerving, neutral calm of his.
To cover up the disappointment and hurt and anger at his reaction, Felicia threw her head back and laughed coldly, mirthlessly. She tossed her hair over one shoulder, stood up straight and stared into his eyes.
“Thanks for the suggestion. I think I’d rather like that. An occult movement revolving around the power of fire. I’ll be the terrifying fire goddess ruling mercilessly, with everyone falling at their feet and offering me their heart on a platter. I’ll make the world burn until it puts the sun to shame. Want to stick around and watch, snowman?”
As soon as the words had left her mouth, she wanted to take them back. What had she just said? This wasn’t her, this wasn’t normal, this wasn’t right! This was her Joshua she was wounding and repelling…and yet, she would not take the words back. Didn’t she have every right to behave like this?
The choice is yours. Rise and shine. Go out and rule!
The voice inside her mind was so powerful she half thought she had spoken the words out loud.
Beside her, Kyle was cackling and clapping his hands, and her fire dragon was turning cartwheels a little ahead. There was so much heat around her, inside her. It needed out.