Guest Post - C L Raven on Disenchanted #newrelease

I'm so excited to have these two authors here and this great guest post. C L Raven is a pair of sisters who write together. C L Raven are two of the nicest  women you'll meet. It was a year ago I joined twitter and they were one of my first friends. They are awesome and super supportive. Pop by twitter and see them @clraven.

Thank you Lacey for inviting us back on here! Ever since we released Gunning Down Romance on Valentine’s Day, we’ve been enjoying life as Indie authors. But one release wasn’t enough. We wanted more and we discovered releasing ebooks is a great way to keep us out of mischief (at least until we go out filming our next ghost hunting episode). So we wanted another project. As this year is the 200 year anniversary of the Brothers Grimm rewriting the fairytales, we thought we’d do the same. Unfortunately Twisted Sisters was too popular to use as a name, much to our annoyance. Then we discovered everyone else was also doing fairytales and the brightness of our rage convinced NASA there was a new solar system.

         

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   After seeing what Disney did to fairytales (actually we’ve never watched Disney stuff. We grew up watching Blood Beach and Snow Beast), we decided it was time fairytales were taken back to their original, gory forms. Gone are the helpless girls who sit around waiting for their prince to save them. When our Red Riding Hood encounters her worst nightmare – Prince Charming, she doesn’t steal his heart, she takes his head.  And yes, the originals are very gory, quite horrific and after learning about them, we hope our lives are never a ‘fairytale.’

                The  opening story, Long Live the Queen is told from Snow White’s step mother’ s bitter point of view and is the funniest. It includes our favourite line, “a prince just happened to be walking through the woods? Why couldn’t it have been a bear?” We decided to do 10 stories instead of matching Grimm’s 80. 10 was bad enough! They’re a mixture of horror and comedy, sometimes both at once with a nice amount of sexiness to keep the heart rate racing. Once Upon a Nightmare is the darkest story. The woods that surround Red’s cottage are filled with nightmares, but it’s not the wolf the villagers have to fear.

                We asked our friend Lizzie Rose to do Disenchanted’s cover for us. She painted it using her grandfather’s watercolours, which she hasn’t used since he died. We were honoured she deemed our cover worthy enough to use them on. We were stunned with the results. We knew it would be good, having seen her artwork before but when we opened the email, we sat there gasping like asthmatics. Then we realised an ebook didn’t do it justice. We’re now bringing Disenchanted out in print so we can sit there stroking the cover like a Bond baddie.

                We asked our mate Ryan Ashcroft to do a book trailer for it, having made Gunning Down Romance’s ourselves in Movie Maker. It very nearly drove him insane. In fact, we logged each step of his meltdown live on Twitter for everyone to enjoy. But his loss of sanity was worth it and he produced a trailer that makes us proud. It’s amazing. We can’t stop watching it. We’re now worried Disenchanted doesn’t live up to the brilliance of the trailer and the cover!

                And then we decided to play with Fate and launch Disenchanted on Friday 13th. We couldn’t resist it. And naturally, something went wrong. We’d filmed a launch video where we did a reading of Disenchanted at Cardiff’s fairytale castle, Castell Coch. The night before the launch, our slow internet connection told us it would take at least 8 hours to upload. So at midnight we were down Ryan’s house (half hour away) uploading it. Only to wake up on Friday 13th to find it had failed to upload. Ryan had to re-do it for us. Luckily that was the only disaster and the Facebook launch was a lot of fun. We even bought vegan wine to celebrate. We’d never tried wine before as we became vegan at 14. We joked about looking sophisticated before spitting it back into our plastic Halloween goblets. While we didn’t spit it out, we did pull some interesting faces. Think we’ll stick to Red Bull.

                But Disenchanted is out now! These are ten broken fairytales that are definitely NOT for children’s bedtime. 

Disenchanted

Once upon a time, in lands far, far away, everyone lived happily ever after. Until now. If you thought you knew the fairytales well, think again. In a modern world without morals, where beauty does not always equal goodness and evil sometimes wins, the heroes of the legends learn the hard way that survival will take more than just a pretty face, and a handsome prince does not mean salvation. Ten broken fairytales that are definitely not for children's bedtime. 

Amazon / Smashwords