Hi, All.
Just a quick post to let everyone know that the new mailing list seems to be ticking along more or less as planned, but there are some people who have only completed the first step of the signup process.
My list is a double-opt in list, so if you haven’t received a confirmation e-mail asking you to click a link that points back here to my site, or if you haven’t received your e-mail with the coupon codes for Torn and Thawed Fortunes on it, then you aren’t actually signed up yet.
Manually adding people is a little work on my end, but I’d much rather do that than have someone miss out on their copies of Torn or Thawed Fortunes. Just e-mail me (dean (at) deanwrites <dot> com), let me know what e-mail address you were trying to get signed up with and I’ll do my best to get you squared away.
Thanks,
Dean
Hi
I just wanted to say that the confirmation link to your website is having problems and I can’t sign up. I tried several times but no deal. Could you please send it again.
Thank you
Maria
Hi, Maria.
I’ve just gone in and added you-did you get the e-mail with the coupon codes in it okay?
Thanks,
Dean
Please sign me up for your mailing list! 🙂
Hi, Tammi.
It looks to me like you’re already signed up-are you experiencing problems, or have you not received your copy of Torn and Thawed Fortunes?
Dean
I have not received any free book(s)
Hi,
I just checked the mailing list and didn’t see a signup under the email address you used to leave this comment. I’ve gone ahead and added your email address and, so you should have the welcome email with the coupon codes now.
Just to make sure, I’ve also gone in and manually sent you an email with the files in question attached.
Thanks,
Dean
I did not get an email comfirming that I was signed up on your mailing list. I am on a fixed income and would appreciate any coupons as it said at the end of the book broken. thank you I rally eenjoyed youe book.
Hi, Judi.
I’m sending you an email now.
Dean
sorry about the typo’s
Hi I’ve just read all your books, totally hooked! At the end of A Darkness Mirror , it says continued in Disillusioned. I cannot find this book on kindle and am desperate to continue the story. Please help !! Don’t leave me in limbo …..I need to know if they ever meet again….will Imastious change her…….help….thank you I look forward to hearing from you Dee x
Hi, Dee.
I ended up having to change the title of ‘Disillusioned’ to ‘Bound’. Sorry about the confusion there-I’m slowly getting the various books changed over to have the right title in the front matter, but there have been some other projects that have been taking priority.
Please make sure that you read the blurb on Bound before you buy it. It’s an alternate timeline, so I’ve had some people try to fight the events in Bound in before the events of Torn. This is how things could have gone for Alec if his father hadn’t been killed by Agony.
I think you’ll really like it–it’s one of the best books I’ve written so far.
Dean
Brilliant so far I’ve brought and read:
Broken x
Torn x
Splintered x
Intrusion
Trapped
Forsaken
Riven
Scent of Tears
The Greater Darkness (Eldon Murphy)
A Darkness Mirrored (Eldon Murphy)
Should I have read Bound first? And what happens to Geoffery and Lucy ?
Thanks
Dee
Hi, Dee.
You’re reading them in the exact order I would recommend.
Broken
Torn
Splintered
Intrusion
Trapped
Forsaken
Riven
Scent of Tears
The Greater Darkness
A Darkness Mirrored
Bound
Hunted (Coming in March)
Jasmin’s book (Coming in May)
Dark Reflections 3 (Coming in August)
Isaac’s book (Coming in October)
You could start with Bound since it is an alternate timeline (I expect that I’ll see people start there in the future). At some point I’ll put together a recommended reading order for those who start with the Dark Reflections series (probably it will be to read the first 4 Dark Reflections books and then jump into Broken and Torn). As far as Geoffrey and Lucy, I’ll pick up some of their story threads in Jasmin’s book, and then I’ve got another book planned for the two of them.
I’d love for you to stop back by and let me know what you think of Bound once you’ve finished it.
Thanks,
Dean
In reading the other books it appeared that Alec and his father, Kaleb, had a good relationship in the past, and that Alec’s mother and father were in love. In this book it does not portray the same.
There is no mention of the intensity of fighting that took place prior to the other books, it seemed more to portray Alec as a young schoolboy shapeshifter as opposed to a long term fighter.
Rachel seems to have a good relationship with her mum which again goes against the other books where it appears different.
Mallory appears as a lot younger with a harder different personality, Donovan appears to be older and more frail.
Kaleb does not appear to have much affection for Alec and puts him in harms way a lot with a risk of getting killed, he appears the same with rachel
Brandon also seems to be stronger and around as a main leader with strength long before his time
No talk of school or education for any of them
Rachel enjoys designing clothes no mention in other books
Not sure how Brandon, Vincent etc all link up to the next book
As a female reader I enjoyed the love story side of the books, if I had to read this book first, I don’t think I would continue to read all of your other books. This could have been a stand alone Book with no connections to all the others.
I did enjoy reading it towards the end, but am left unsure whether to purchase any more books, I’ve spent a lot if money as I’ve paid for all the books in this series and am left wondering about what happened to Alec and Adri and also Geoffrey and Lucy. There is no continuation of the story but more of a swerve in the series onto a completely different storyline !
This is just my personal feedback, sorry if it sounds too critical !!
Hi, Dee.
I’m really glad that you stopped by to let me know about you concerns! This is actually something that I’ve been discussing quite a bit recently with some of my advance readers. I’m eventually going to do a blog post about all of this, but I haven’t quite decided how to frame what I’m trying to say yet. Apologies in advance, this is probably going to be a lengthy response–I hope that you’ll stick with me, even though it may not feel like I’m addressing your concern at the start. This gets to the heart of who I am, so it’s difficult for me to boil it down to just one or two sentences.
Ever since even before I started writing Broken, I’ve always tried to write the kind of books that I enjoy reading. If you had asked me what that meant a year ago, I would have said it meant books that were fantastical (vampires, shape shifters and the like) that were a mix of romance and action, with characters that you fall in love with.
Over the last year or so, I’ve once again realized that I love books that have an epic kind of scope. I’ve read books where the plot is more or less girl meets boy, boy and girl marry, girl and boy live happily ever after. Those books tend to deal with life in the some kind of world that you and I live in. They have characters that are worried about office politics and family drama rather than rogue vampires and saving the world.
There isn’t anything wrong with that kind of story, and I’ve enjoyed many of them, but I tend to gravitate towards reading stories where the stakes are higher than that. It’s only recently though that I really sat down and thought about what that means when it comes to my writing, and it’s because of the input of fans like you that I undertook that self-reflection.
I’ve come to realize that some of the signs were there in the series all along. The way that I ended Splintered was not the kind of ending that you would ever see in a traditionally published romance. It was risky, but in the end I think it made Adri and Alec’s relationship much more believable and made them much stronger as a couple.
Then I wrote Intrusion and Trapped, neither of which were directly about Alec and Adri. My advance readers were torn. Some of them thought I was a genius, and some of them thought that I’d lost my mind, but they all seemed to love the stories, so I just kept on.
Forsaken was a pretty straight-forward book, but it was when I was writing Riven that I really should have realized what was going on. I ended Riven in a way that demanded that I go off and write seperate stories for Isaac, Jess, Jasmin, and most of the rest of the individual pack members.
Again, that’s not the kind of thing that you typically see in a standard romance novel, but it just felt like the right thing to do given that it was what I wanted to see happen next in the story.
It turns out that I don’t write romance or paranormal romance, I write what I call Epic Paranormal Romance. It’s just how I’m wired. I want to write a story that goes way beyond girl meets boy.
The story I’m ultimately trying and tell is bigger than just Alec and Adri, it’s bigger than just Kristin and Ash or Dom and James. It’s a story that is so big that it can’t even be contained in just one timeline. I spend more time with my characters than I do with some of my neighbors. I’m attached to all of the main characters in the series so far, but it’s more than that. I’m attached to characters that all of you haven’t even met yet, characters who will have a profound influence on Adri and Alec, characters who have powerful stories of their own to tell.
I want to tell a story of redemption and what might have been. I want to tell a love story of two people who are the pivot around which their entire world turns. I want to tell a story of vengeance and peril that has been building for thousands of years. I want to paint a verbal picture of the people who are going to save Adri’s world and I want to show you why they are saving it.
At the end of the day, Alec doesn’t do what he does just because it’s right. He and the rest of his pack are going to pay incredible prices to overcome the trials headed their way, and they’ll do it in no small part because of the people they love.
For most of us it’s our relationships that drive us. Friends, family, lovers. It’s a combination of ideals and the people we care about that turn our individual worlds, and most of my characters, be they shape shifters, vampires, humans, or something else are no different.
That probably felt like a lot of description that didn’t address your core concerns, but I think it sets up why I wrote Bound.
From your comments I’m pretty sure that you didn’t understand going into Bound that it was an alternate timeline book. In Broken and Torn, everything is exactly as you described. Alec’s father was killed when Alec was very young, and the surviving members of the Sanctuary pack splintered into two packs.
In Bound, the fight between Alec’s dad (Kaleb) and Agony never happened. The pack never splintered, and Kaleb ended up joining up with the Coun’hij. Kaleb’s ambitions resulted in the Sanctuary pack being pulled into a war with the jaguars.
There are a host of other differences as well, many of which you’ve identified, but they all stem from that fact that this is a different timeline with a very different backstory.
All of that begs the question as to why I wrote Bound, why I felt like it was necessary to write the Dark Reflections books (the alternate timeline) rather than sticking with the Reflections books. It’s a good question, a fair question, but it’s a difficult one for me to put down in words, which is why I haven’t clarified things before now.
Part of the answer is contained in the things that I explained earlier on in this response. For me, Reflections is about more than just Alec and Adri. I have a much bigger story that I want to tell, one that can’t be told if I have to limit myself to just Alec and Adri’s point of view. I need to be able to write from Ash’s point of view, and Kristin’s, and Dominic’s and from the point of view of people that haven’t even been introduced into the series yet.
That means that I’m going to have to break some of the conventions of regular paranormal romance novels and move into Epic paranormal romance. It means that sometimes the books will lean more towards the action side of things and less towards the romance side of things, but the relationships will always be a core component of my stories.
Even in Bound, which was much closer to urban fantasy than it was to paranormal romance, it was the relationships that I thought moved the story forward. It was the loyalty of a group of friends who were willing to risk everything to help each other, and the bonds between siblings who’d been betrayed that made for the ultimate crescendo of the story.
Even so, all of that is only a partial answer still to the question of why I wrote Bound. The other part of the answer is that I wrote Bound (and Hunted which will go live later this month) because I love some of these characters too much to only show you one side of them.
Dark Reflections gives us a chance to see Mallory at the height of her power, not crippled, not beaten down by life. She’s got a harder edge to her now, but there are reasons for that. She’s been faced with an impossible choice and she’s chosen the best she could, but even so, that choice has taken a toll on her.
Dark Reflections gives us a chance to see Alec’s mom as a strong, determined woman, one who is faced with her own set of difficult choices. She may not be making the choices that you and I would make, but the very fact that Donovan is still standing by her side tells me that there is probably more going on there than probably meets the eye.
We get to see what Brandon would have been if he hadn’t spent nearly as much time worrying about the Coun’hij as he spent trying to absorb Alec’s pack. It turns out that he was much more deadly than any of us realized in Broken and Torn. As incredibly as it sounds, Brandon was keeping a low profile and hiding the true extent of his gift because he didn’t want to scare the Coun’hij into trying to eliminate him. He was biding his time, playing the game that everyone was expecting him to play, while he looked for a chance to work his way onto the Coun’hij and eventually set himself up as king.
Some people will say that’s a small thing, but to me it’s important because it means that Alec’s victory over Brandon is even more incredible than we realized.
Bound, and the rest of the Dark Reflections books will do even more than that though. Bound showed us that even in this messed up, tragic timeline where Alec’s father had gone over to the dark side, Alec and Adri still belong together.
They’ve never met, they don’t know each other, but something out there knows that they belong together, that the future of the world depends on them meeting each other. That is why Alec is having recurring dreams of a mystery blonde.
Again, it’s a small thing, but I think big things are all ultimately made up of small things, and I think that the Dark Reflections books will ultimately help take the Reflections books, take Alec and Adri’s story to the next level.
There is a lot that I wish I could tell you, but I don’t want to ruin what is coming next. Suffice it to say that there is an event coming soon in Reflections that will make every Reflections reader want to cheer. The Dark Reflections readers will want to cheer too, but they’ll be wiping tears of sorrow out of the corner of their eyes while cheering. There are scenes coming up that I could never manage without the extra emotional depth that the Dark Reflections books will bring to the table, and I very much want to make sure that I give you all an oppertunity to exprience those higher highs and those lower lows.
To a large extent, people will be able to read Reflections and Dark Reflections as standalone series if that’s what they want to do, but in the end I’m trying to create the best overall story I can, so reading them together will result in an even more incredible experience.
You seemed to indicate that you enjoyed Bound by the end, which probably means that you liked the underlying story, you just couldn’t plug it into the rest of what you knew about the Reflections timeline.
I’ve tried very hard to explain by way of the product description that Bound wasn’t part of the main Reflections timeline, but at the end of the day if I’ve got readers who don’t understand how Bound and the rest of the Dark Reflections books fit together with the Reflections books, then that’s on me.
I’ll be going back to the drawing board in the next few weeks to try and figure out a better way to try and explain what I’m trying to accomplish, but in the meantime I’d be open to any suggestions you might have when it comes to how I can better alert people as to what the Dark Reflections books represent.
Dean
What I love most about your books is that they are Epic Paranormal Romance books. That is what attracted me to the stories and has held me since, captivated me in fact and I am really caught up in the whole story and characters, in fact I look around me on a day to day level wondering if the people around me are Shapeshifters, jaguars, wolves etc and I wonder what one I would like to be if I had a choice.
I also love reading the stories from all the characters points of view , but my mind works in a more practical way and I got confused with the different story line and it all got a bit blurred, I personally would have loved Bound more, if the storyline tied up with the storyline in all the other books, knowing that in the next book, Alec may meet up with Adri, and bring the story back together again would have excited me more.
I also see books as films and wonder what they would look like on the big screen, when I first started reading your books, I thought brilliant, one day I might see these as a film, and there could be loads of them that I could watch over and over again, but Bound just wouldn’t tie up with the others, I still wish I had never read it as I so wanted to read a book with Adri and Alec’s storyline being on the same track.
And I still personally think that Bound, could have been a standalone book with the characters having different names and being completely separate from the other books.
So what storyline will your next book follow? Will it be the original storyline? The storyline from Bound? Will you continue with the Geoffrey and Lucy story? Or will this also have a different story line?
I think I would need to read some boring old plain books for a while to clear my head.
I’m a therapist and work with children so I love using my imagination and love watching children create characters that are true to them. I can really empathise with them and get down to their level more so after reading books like you write.
I will always wonder what happened to Adri, Alex, Geoffrey and Lucy and hope the memory of them will one day fade from my mind as I feel I will never see the true ending of their stories.
Hi, Dee.
I will definitely be continuing the main timeline that you are already so invested in. May will see the release of a regular Reflections book that features Jasmin, Ben, and Geoffrey. October will see the release of the next chapter in the Reflections books, which will be from Isaac’s point of view.
I hope that eases some of your concerns–I would never purposefully leave my fans hanging with regards to a series that they are invested in, so as long as I’m able to continue writing full-time, you can expect to see additional Reflections books added to the series on a fairly regular basis.
Does knowing that you’ll be able to continue to read the main timeline Reflections books over the coming months and years so that you can get resolution on that storyline resolve most of your concerns?
With regards to Dark Reflections, the release at the end of March is Hunted, which is an Adri Dark Reflections story. Hunted is when we get to see Adri and Alec start to connect a little, but I like the book most of all because it shows us what life would have been like for her and her family if her Dad and sister hadn’t been killed in a car wreck–she’s a much stronger individual when she’s not trying to deal with such a severe loss.
This isn’t an offer that I would extend to just anyone, and I know that you said that you wanted to go back to reading some less convoluted books for a while, but if you would like, I will send you a free advance reader copy of Hunted–for you to read fully understanding that it’s a Dark Reflections book and therefor kind of a ‘what-if’ version of Alec and Adri’s story. Once you’ve finished Hunted and you and I have had a chance to discuss what you thought of Hunted (probably just via email so that we don’t ruin the plot for everyone else) then I’ll give you a free advance reader copy of Jasmin’s story which most everyone else won’t get to read until May.
Obviously I’m hoping that reading Hunted will hook you on the Dark Reflections books and change your opinion of Bound, but I’ll give you the copy of Jasmin’s story regardless of whether you like Hunted or not. The only requirements would be that you read Hunted, give me a chance to talk the book over with you, and that you keep both books confidential until after they go live for everyone else to get ahold of.
What do you think?
As always, thank you for your thoughts and the politness with which you’ve expressed them. It has been very helpful to me.
Dean
Can you send me your email address please so I can reply directly mine is [redacted]. Thank you