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UNDERCOVER SUPERHERO is Now Available on ALL Platforms!

UNDERCOVER SUPERHERO is Now Available on ALL Platforms including Google, Apple, Kobo, B&N, Scribd, and more!

 

Undercover Superhero
Humorous Contemporary Fantasy Romance 
Word Count: 21.6K
$2.99 e / $6.99 p

Wally Finkelstein is your average Joe. Your typical underdog—not super attractive, not super wealthy, but he does have stability and happiness to offer. And to his girlfriend’s surprise, he turns out to be super in other departments.

He’s always been very attentive to the opposite sex, never leaving them unsatisfied. But having not found “the one” yet, Wally hasn’t been ready to give himself fully. April Daily has changed that, and when they finally do the deed, he wants to shout it from the rooftops…and somehow finds himself soaring above them.

Turns out Wally has a history he knew nothing about. Can this ordinary Joe live up to extraordinary expectations? More importantly, can his relationship with April survive the kind of demands this revelation will bring?

Excerpt and Buy Links

Cozies and Comfies

 

Please Welcome Hollie Smurthwaite as She Tells Us About Her Paranormal Romantic Suspense, THE COLOR OF BETRAYAL

The Color of Betrayal

The Psychic Colors Series

Book Two

by Hollie Smurthwaite

Genre: Paranormal Romance, Suspense

Publisher: Hollie Smurthwaite

Date of Publication: 10-31-2022

ISBN: 978-1-7371189-6-1

ASIN: B0BD2NYV8W

Number of pages: 344

Word Count: 98,000

Cover Artist: Sarah Hansen at Okay Creations

Tagline: No Secret is Safe . . . 

Book Description:

As a memory surgeon, Jolene can slip into other people’s memories. She can see them, experience them, even steal them. To atone for her past, she’s been using her gift to help the Agency, a secret government entity, taking out drug lords across the US. After a screw-up on an assignment, she’s back in Chicago, where her own worst memories live.

The last thing she needs while trying to make up for her mistake is a sexy distraction.  Cass is a little sweet and a lot gorgeous.  The only problem: she can’t have him and the job.  But when he offers his friendship, she can’t resist. 

While Jolene and Cass try to pretend there is nothing beneath their friendship, her mission spins out of control. Now, both their lives are on the line. Will her growing powers be enough to save her? Or will secrets send her right back to the darkest depths of her past?

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Excerpt:

After only three weeks of dating, Jolene and Colton had fallen into a routine: dinner (both) and drinks (him), binge-watching various flavors of CSI at his downtown Boston condo (him), and a few hours of surreptitiously delving into Colton's memories (her). Jolene's practice run as a spy in the field was going well.

The late August night was cool enough for Colton to crack open the sliding glass door to the balcony to let the night air clear his lingering cigarette smoke. Jolene kicked off the stiletto heels and inwardly sighed. After some complex maneuvering, she managed to tuck her aching toes under her too-bright skirt.

The next part of the evening promised to be worth the discomfort of a thong up her ass crack to avoid panty lines.

Without asking Jolene what she would like, Colton switched on the obscenely large TV and pulled up Hulu, lounging like a czar on his pristine white couch, which was a stupid color for anyone but particularly ludicrous for a smoker who drank too much and worked with dangerous people.

In another life, he would have been regal with golden hair, long limbs, straight nose, and a boyish, charming smile. But this wasn’t another life.

As a midlevel lackey in the Red Flames criminal organization, he was not proper boyfriend material, even if he made enough cash to buy a downtown place on a high floor and have it professionally, if foolishly, decorated all in white.

Jolene wiggled her toes into the plush cushion and ignored the stale-smoke smell mixed with Colton’s spicy cologne. Any moment, Colton would slip into a CSI coma, and she would slip into his memories.

“This looks like a good one,” she said. What she always said, because why mess with what worked?

“Yeah,” Colton agreed, as he always did. He lit a cigarette and “politely” blew the smoke toward the balcony doors, tapping the ash into an antique crystal ashtray on the glass coffee table already holding three butts.

The first week, she'd been terrified he'd somehow feel her inside his mind, though she'd never had that happen before or heard of anyone sensing the process. Not that Jolene still had contacts in the memory-surgeon community, small as it was, but that sort of revelation would put memory surgery back in the 24/7 news cycle, like when they’d first been legitimized. Semi-legitimized.

This first assignment was nothing more than an exploration of what she could do on a real mission. Since Colton was a gangster and she had no close backup, fear nibbled, but confidence had outpaced her worry.

Jolene rested her head on his shoulder, slipped her arm through his, and slid her hand down his button-down shirt to rest on his hand. As soon as skin-to-skin contact was made, she mentally reached out to him. Colton's mind rose up inside her own. To boost her concentration, Jolene closed her eyes.

Within the blackness, bubbles sharpened. The different shapes and colors bobbed and slid around one another. In her mind's eye, she moved into the middle, staring at them as if in an aquarium. The memories never touched her, but she could reach out and sink into any of them. If she did, she experienced the memory in its entirety, exactly as Colton had lived through the event at the time. If she wanted, she could remove memories, but that was a level of violation she resisted unless absolutely necessary. Besides, if she took something, she had to keep it, and she didn't want to keep anything of Colton's.

Jolene already had an entire dossier in her head of all things Colton. She’d cataloged his fears: multilegged insects like millipedes terrified him, as did his brother when his eyes went icy, and his jaw shifted to the right.

Shame occupied its own section: bed-wetting for a month when he was twelve. The time he'd slapped his girlfriend after she'd gotten pregnant and decided she didn't want it. Red Flames passing him over for job after job.

Still, inside, people were infinite, and she had more to learn. She avoided the pink bubbles, as they were filled with his worst memories, and her reactions to living them were difficult to hide. Reds gave her the best intel so far. Angers, suspicions, smackdowns.

Truthfully, she should have wrapped up the mission a week ago since she wasn’t finding anything new. But playing spy and the unfettered access to Colton's recollections had been too enlightening to quit quite yet. Her skills had grown, and she didn’t feel guilty about messing in his brain because of his criminal history. She was three weeks into her two- to three-week mission, so she needed to skip out soon.

Jolene decided to make a game to test her memory-reading skills. She had recently learned how to peek and not immediately experience a memory. It allowed her to see more since she didn’t need any emotional recovery time, and she processed what she encountered more quickly.

Tonight, she wanted to test how many memories she could scan during commercial breaks, since Colton was too cheap to pay for the commercial-free version of Hulu. She’d hop through his memories like jumping into puddles.

Commercial.

A mahogany memory: his brother, Walther, stood over him, watching over his shoulder as Colton did algebra homework. Whenever Colton squirmed in his chair, Walther flicked his ear. It didn’t hurt much, but Colton’s face burned every time, and his muscles shook with the stress of not moving to avoid Walther’s attention. “Knock it off,” he grumbled, earning another sting. Colton tensed—

A buttercup-colored memory: “Mama, Mama, Mama,” Colton said, running around his mama as she walked in the park. If he ran fast enough, he would fly, his head already lightening. He stumbled and giggled, his mama laughing. Something shiny glinted in the sun. What was it? His mama scooped him into her arms before he grabbed it. She smelled of flowers and oranges.

What is it about this book that makes it special?

The Color of Betrayal is the second book in the Psychic Colors series. I came up with my take on psychic powers a few years ago, thinking about how a person would be impacted if they could literally experience someone else's worst pain, and then I added on the caveat that they could take away that memory for a person, they'd have to hold onto it, as if it were their own. In the first book, the main character uses that gift to help a Chicago police detective find a serial killer. 

But I didn't want to just do serial killer books, and I wanted to switch up the protagonists in each book. Also, I wanted to take this concept of psychics, which I called memory surgeons, and take it another step further. My goal is to widen and widen the paranormal aspects with each succeeding book, with memory magic and the location of Chicago as the thread tying them all together, so they can be read as standalones or in any order. 

To do the expansion, I worked with Clark Rowenson, who does amazing work with magic systems (he's the author of The Magic System Blueprint), and we brainstormed on ways that the magic could grow that makes sense and isn't me randomly thinking up cool things. So, we hit on the concept of memory magic: all the expanding powers are based on actual memory functions.

 In The Color of Trauma, the first book in the series, the memory surgeon community is known in the world (it's just like our world but with this one tweak), and are held in suspicion. What is believed about them is that they can access what I term the root memory (the first experience of what happened), and experience the memory as the person did the first time, then there are also what I termed echoes, times when the person recalled the traumatic event or thought about what had happened. Real memory doesn't work that way, there isn't a master copy of memory, but I liked the idea of these people being able to access the true happening as well as how memory evolves, like a game of telephone. 

For the second book, The Color of Betrayal, I still have that aspect of memory reading/surgery, but I added the ability to access not just long-term memory but short-term memory. Short term memory is what we experience before it is encoded in our long-term memory (or not, like when someone introduces themselves and two seconds later, you can't recall their name). This manifests itself as mind reading, what the other character is thinking about in real time. 

I wanted to add another type of memory magic, too, for my other protagonist. His ability reads on the page like precognition, the ability to know what's true or what will happen. This is based on an implicit (unconscious) type of memory called priming.

Priming is instinct informed by experience. In the novel, this isn't a known thing, so the character invented a word for it that he calls knowings. He knows how someone will respond or what will happen seemingly by magic. (It is magic, because I've taken what we as humans naturally can do and just expanded it, but it is based on genuine memory abilities.)

As we grow, we learn how to interpret body language without thinking about it, even beyond smiling/frowning. Think of people you know really well. We can often predict when a partner or family member is going to get upset based on the set of their jaw or their hands on their hips, etc. Imagine if you had the ability to recognize so easily the same thing in strangers. Although I never explain this in the book, because the characters don't know, this is what is happening. He isn't getting divine knowledge, but his brain is able to take in a person and situation and know what will happen. It's also why it doesn't always work. He can't call upon the ability at will.

Scientists know very little for certain about memory. Several parts of the brain are involved: the hippocampus, neocortex, amygdala, basal ganglia, cerebellum, and the prefrontal cortex, some of them working together and some used for only specific kinds of memories. One of the really fun parts of being a fiction writer is the ability to not just invent things out of thin air but to craft something new out of what already exists. 

About the Author: 

Hollie Smurthwaite is a paranormal romantic suspense author of The Color of Trauma and The Color of Betrayal. The Color of Trauma was the winner of the 2020 Soon to Be Famous Illinois Author Project in adult fiction. She lives in Chicago with her husband, son, and too few pets. In past lives, she's been a checkout clerk, massage therapist, office manager, recruiter, magazine staff writer, pepper spray hawker, and belly dancer.

Website: https://holliesmurthwaite.com

LinkTree https://linktr.ee/hollie_smurthwaite

Twitter: https://twitter.com/H_Smurthwaite

Bookbub: https://www.bookbub.com/profile/2336027206

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hsmurthwaite/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HollieSmurthwaiteAuthor/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hollie-smurthwaite-03376516b/

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/author/hollie_smurthwaite

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/75834809-hollie-smurthwaite

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Artist Leah Jeffrey (aka Bruised Reed Studio) Transforms Discarded Scrap Metal Into Exquisite Animal Sculptures

 

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Written by Kids

10. HOW DO YOU DECIDE WHO TO MARRY?
You got to find somebody who likes the same stuff. Like, if you like sports, she should like it that you like sports, and she should keep the chips and dip coming. -- Alan, age 10

9. No person really decides before they grow up who they're going to marry. God decides it all the way before, and you get to find out later who you're stuck with. -- Kristen, age 10

8. WHAT IS THE RIGHT AGE TO GET MARRIED?
Twenty-three is the best age because you know the person FOREVER by then. -- Camille, age 10

7. HOW CAN A STRANGER TELL IF TWO PEOPLE ARE MARRIED?
You might have to guess based on whether they seem to be yelling at the same kids. -- Derrick, age 8

6. WHAT DO YOU THINK YOUR MOM AND DAD HAVE IN COMMON?
Both don't want any more kids. -- Lori, age 8

5. WHAT DO MOST PEOPLE DO ON A DATE?
Dates are for having fun, and people should use them to get to know each other. Even boys have something to say if you listen long enough. -- Lynnette, age 8 (isn't she a treasure?)

- On the first date, they just tell each other lies and that usually gets them interested enough to go for a second date. -- Martin, age 10

4. WHEN IS IT OKAY TO KISS SOMEONE?
-When they're rich. -- Pam, age 7 (Love her)

-The law says you have to be eighteen, so I wouldn't want to mess with that. -- Curt, age 7

-The rule goes like this: If you kiss someone, then you should marry them and have kids with them. It's the right thing to do. Howard, age 8

3. IS IT BETTER TO BE SINGLE OR MARRIED
It's better for girls to be single but not for boys. Boys need someone to clean up after them. -- Anita, age 9 

2. HOW WOULD THE WORLD BE DIFFERENT IF PEOPLE DIDN'T GET MARRIED?
There sure would be a lot of kids to explain, wouldn't there? -- Kelvin, age 8

And the #1 Favorite is.......
1. HOW WOULD YOU MAKE A MARRIAGE WORK?
Tell your wife that she looks pretty, even if she looks like a dump truck. -- Ricky, age 9

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