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Teresa Noelle Roberts: Cougar’s Courage (Contest)
Monday, November 4th, 2013

tnglamour me croppedThanks, Delilah, for letting me visit today and talk about my new book, Cougar’s Courage (Duals and Donovans: the Different, Book 3).

I love world-building. Long before I fell in love with romance novels, I was a fantasy reader, and I loved escaping my little central New York hometown by immersing myself in the lush, vivid exotic worlds of Middle Earth, Pern, Narnia, and more. And of course, since then I’ve become engrossed in many other imaginary worlds. In creating the paranormal Duals and Donovans: the Different series, I looked for inspiration not to the complex mythological realms of  Tolkien and other epic fantasy but to  the nearly real worlds of urban fantasy authors such as Jim Butcher and Patricia Briggs, worlds that might pass for ours…for a few pages, before the weirdness hits again.

I didn’t steal their worlds. But I did shamelessly adopt the notion that little touches of reality highlight the oddity of a dangerous world where magic is part of life and beings out of mythology might just end up either eating dinner with you or eating  you for dinner.

Thus Cara, my heroine in Cougar’s Courage, starts out in the very real city of Toronto. She has a smart phone and isn’t thrilled when it doesn’t work in Couguar-Caché, the mysterious village where she ends up. (Turns out her cell phone coverage stops when she left this dimension. Important safety tip: check your contracts for this detail if you’re planning to plane-hop!) Jack is a shape-shifting cougar Dual who’s also a shaman—not exactly the guy next-door— but he attended Queens University, a very real place where my college roommate did her graduate work. The characters miss Tim Horton’s coffee because they can’t get it easily where they are. Cara’s grandfather is a magical powerhouse…who loves old school Saturday morning cartoons and flannel shirts.

But the real-life details, in the long run, don’t matter as much as real-life emotions. Cara and Jack may have powers most of us lack, and may spend a lot of time in an alternate dimension. But they’re people, if not exactly humans. The most important challenge was to keep their path from uneasy allies to a couple looking forward to Happily (and Crazily) Ever After believable.

I think I succeeded. I hope I also succeeded in making even the most bizarre residents of Couguar-Caché emotionally accessible. Even an ancient nature spirit can mourn a lost lover and regret a disastrous relationship with an evil ex. In this case the evil is on a scale beyond “ran up your credit cards and slept with your best friend” or even “beat you up.” More like “wants to destroy everything you hold dear including the land and has the power to do it.” But the pain of loss is universal, as is anger at being duped and regret for bad decisions that come back to haunt you years (or in this case centuries) later.

Let me know if I succeeded in making the bizarre believable!

Series blurb: Welcome to an America where the non-human Different and magically gifted humans live among ordinary people. Witches are both feared and honored, but shape-shifting Duals are treated as second-class citizens. The Agency, a government agency that’s supposed to monitor illegal uses of magic and Different abilities, has developed its own dangerous agenda. But when Duals and witches join forces, the Agency and other bad guys aren’t going to know what hit them.

And neither are the witches and Duals. Witch magic grows from the positive energy of love and sex–and the only thing better than one Dual is two of them! And then there are shamans, who work their chaotic magic to comfort the afflicted and shake up the comfortable. Once shamans get involved, everything gets weirder…and sexier.

tnCougarsCouragesmallerBlurb: Toronto cop Cara Many-Winters Mackenzie is still reeling from her fiancé’s murder when her orderly life takes a turn toward the weird, complete with voices in her head and phantom bleeding wounds.

This violent awakening is the rise of her Different gift—a chaotic, Bugs-Bunny-on-crack magic that she must learn to control before it destroys her. There’s only one place to get help: her mother’s ancestral village, and a mentor who seems to have stepped straight out of the smoke of her erotic dreams.

Cougar Dual Jack Long-Claw reluctantly agrees to take Cara under his wing, though he’d much rather take the beautiful city girl into his bed. As he guides her through a crash course in shamanic magic, sparks fly—some sexy, some snarky. But when an ancient enemy attacks the village, they must work together to hone a magical weapon against certain destruction.

Common sense tells them it’s a terrible time to fall in love. Their spirit guides have other ideas. And shamans who don’t listen to their spirit guides are dead shamans…

Warning: Hot shape-shifting feline hero. Strong but shell-shocked heroine. Snarky, meddling spirit guides. And lots and lots of sex: angry sex, crazy sex, magical sex, and just plain sexy sex.

Amazon US/Amazon UK/Kobo /Barnes & Noble Nook/Samhain

Like the sound of this? I’m running a contest on my own website for a chance to win this book and the first book in the series, Lions’ Pride. Commenting here or at my site enters you. Comment here and there, get two entries.

12 comments to “Teresa Noelle Roberts: Cougar’s Courage (Contest)”

  1. Teresa Neolle Roberts
    Comment
    1
    · November 4th, 2013 at 8:43 am · Link

    Thank you for hosting, Delilah. It’s great to be back, though as usual I’m finding a few titles of yours and other friends I missed earlier and now HAVE to buy. 😉



  2. Gayle Latreille
    Comment
    2
    · November 4th, 2013 at 8:51 am · Link

    I do enjoy my shifters. and this sound very interesting.
    Thanks for the giveaway.

    Gaye



  3. Anne
    Comment
    3
    · November 4th, 2013 at 11:40 am · Link

    Sounds like the series is packed with lots of different types of paranormal characters and action, just what I like.



  4. Anne
    Comment
    4
    · November 4th, 2013 at 11:44 am · Link

    BTW, there seems to be a problem with your website. I tried 2 different internet programs and can’t access the site from either.



  5. Michelle - Snarky Mom
    Comment
    5
    · November 4th, 2013 at 1:38 pm · Link

    Delilah thanks for helping Theresa promote her Duals series — shifters are one of my favorite genres & I’ve now put it onto my TBR pile. Theresa, LOVE the humor of them missing Tim Horton’s coffee LOL!



  6. Toni Whitmire
    Comment
    6
    · November 4th, 2013 at 3:34 pm · Link

    I liked what I read of the excerpt and can’t wait to read the rest bibbiesparks@yahoo.com.



  7. Teresa Noelle Roberts
    Comment
    7
    · November 4th, 2013 at 4:32 pm · Link

    Thank you for the comments, folks. Anne, I’m not sure why you’ve been having trouble connecting to my site, but clicking “website” in the orange text above (“Like what you see here” etc) took me right to the contest post and typing in http://www.teresanoelleroberts.com goes to my homepage, from which you can navigate. Hope you can catch up there.



  8. bn100
    Comment
    8
    · November 4th, 2013 at 10:47 pm · Link

    Intriguing characters

    bn100candg at hotmail dot com



  9. Susan W.
    Comment
    9
    · November 4th, 2013 at 11:04 pm · Link

    I’m very interested in this series! I love new takes on the shifter/paranormal theme.

    suz2(at)cox(dot)net



  10. Teresa Noelle Roberts
    Comment
    10
    · November 5th, 2013 at 9:19 am · Link

    Susan and BN, thank you for stopping by and commenting.



  11. Anne
    Comment
    11
    · November 5th, 2013 at 10:53 am · Link

    Weird, I clicked the “website” again today and it popped right up. I tried IE and Chrome yesterday with no luck. Thanks.



  12. Teresa Noelle Roberts
    Comment
    12
    · November 5th, 2013 at 11:04 am · Link

    Anne: Maybe you caught it during the ten minutes I was doing site maintenance yesterday? Otherwise, we’ll chalk it up to “computers are insane sometimes.”



Comments are closed.