Monday, April 4, 2016

Little Flame Series Box Set by Melissa Lummis


Thank you to Fang-tastic Books for having me today! My name is Melissa Lummis and I write Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy. My latest project is the Little Flame Series about a magical healer who has teamed up with an EDM DJ to look for a former vampire lover who can help her fix some problems.

I want to share some of the playlists I’ve put together for the Little Flame series, but first I want you to know that I didn’t just slap these playlists together. There’s serious method to my melodious madness. If a song is in one of my playlists, it’s because I felt it belonged there.

Music and story have always been intertwined for me. From AC/DC’s killer rock anthem Who Made Who as the theme song to Stephen King’s Maximum Overdrive to the haunting rendition of White Rabbit in Sucker Punch, I’ve felt song has been as much a part of story telling as the characters or plot.

Music always played in our house, that is when we weren’t watching movies. I was immersed in rock and roll fantasies since birth: from the Beatles to the Doors to David Bowie. As I grew up, I soaked up the 80s one-hit wonders, more of the ever-changing but ever-timeless David Bowie, Toto, Tina Turner, and the Talking Heads.

The 90s brought techno and grunge: Lords of Acid and Nirvana. The 2000s burst on the scene with new fusions of rock and rap, electronica and classics, and in the current decade I find myself fascinated with EDM (electronic dance music) and Dub Step.

But throughout my musical education I was also filling my head with paranormal and fantasy novels. As I came of age, Hansel and Gretel morphed into Lord of the Rings and Piers Anthony’s Xanth series. Anne Rice and Stephen King eventually led to Laurell K. Hamilton, Angela Knight, and Charlaine Harris.

Then one day my love of paranormal romance and musical story telling collided in an eye-opening way during the HBO series, True Blood. If you’ve watched the show, you know the ending song of every episode was the source of that episode’s title. I jumped online to find out the entire song line up for each episode. I studied the lyrics while listening to the soundtrack, floored by the synergy of story and song.

I was so fascinated with how the song choices lined up with the episode’s story arc, themes, and the characters, that I had to know who was in charge of finding these absolutely perfect songs for each episode. The music supervisor was Gary Calamar. You may not have heard of him, but you definitely felt his genius if you watched True Blood.

From book #1, Nine30 to the one I’m currently writing, Head #10, I’ve put together a meaningful playlist for each book. While I don’t possess Gary Calamar’s uncanny ability to match songs to story, I aspire to achieve his greatness.

So here are the first three playlists. What do you think? How well do you think they match up to the stories and the characters?

 

#3 StarLand Playlist on Spotify

If you’d like to listen to the other playlists, you can find them by following me on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/user/1224653337




Little Flame Series Box Set
Books 1 - 5
Melissa Lummis

Genre: Urban Fantasy

Publisher: Peacepipe Productions

Date of Publication: September 30, 2014

ASIN: B00MY7IY00

Number of pages:  495
Word Count: 155K

Cover Artist: Stephanie Nelson

Book Description:

Fiamette Jurato is on a mission: to fix her broken past. She’s teamed up with the world famous DJ, Maximillian, to search for the ex lover who can help her put all the pieces back together. There’s only one problem: he’s been dead for over two hundred years.

As a healer to the supernatural, she’s no stranger to navigating the impossible maze of magical complications. But getting lost in the magic isn’t the problem; finding her way back home is.



Book Trailers:

         


Excerpt:

The club lights blinked out, and in the humming dark an amplified voice yelled, “Give it up for Maximillian!”
Laser lights flashed around the smoky stage, revealing human-shaped shadows and a DJ setup.
 “Make some noise,” the DJ yelled.
A spotlight strobed across the scene, then snapped back to the DJ. I stopped adjusting my white go-go boots and squinted, trying to get a good look at him. The crowd roared as he leaned over to a beanie-wearing guy on his right, a cigarette dangling from his lips. Beanie-guy cupped the end of the cig and flicked a lighter. Smoke obscured the DJ’s face and I sighed. I wanted to see him, dang it. I’d been running late tonight and missed the usual meet-and-greet. Story of my life.
 “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” the DJ mumbled into the mic as he twisted knobs and pushed buttons, puffing smoke and music into the air.
Even with the spotlights, the details of his face were buried under swirling smoke and pulsing laser beams looping the hazy club. The first high notes picked like an electric guitar sample, and words I couldn’t make out repeated in jittery bursts over a subdued bass. Black lights flipped on, turning teeth and all things white into glow-in-the-dark neon. The fog machines bellowed clouds of dry ice that burned my nose. Damn, shouldn’t I be immune to it after so many shows?
Rising up from my kneeling squat, boots finally tied, I dropped my hula hoops onto the platform, then set one thigh-high boot at a time inside the circles. Jutting a white-sequined hip, I waited for the music to build to that explosion of bass and high-pitched alarms that had been driving me deaf the past two months. Yet, I couldn’t say I hated the job. I’d tried different settings, but this was definitely the best fishing spot. The catch I was after liked the nightlife and large crowds.
And this club was packed to the gills. Good. Better pickins. I bent with deliberate flare, popping my ass into the air and giving it a shake as I scooped up one of the glowing hoops and spun it around my hips. I gyrated and dipped, swinging the hoop higher around my exposed midsection, my arms swaying to the music.  I didn’t have to think about my next move. It poured out of me like the music from the DJ’s hands. I turned in lazy circles, taking in the jumping crowd as one living, breathing beast. Individual faces surfaced in rare glimpses.
When I completed a 360-degree turn, the bright eyes of the DJ arrested me. I sucked in a breath. He was the hottest thing in L.A. at the moment, exploding all over the music scene. His lips twisted in a sideways Popeye grin, and holding my gaze with penetrating eyes, he flipped black hair over his shoulder and winked. Damn! Heat flushed through me in a prickly flood, followed by a startling surge of disappointment when he returned his attention to the MIDI boards.
He bobbed up and down, one hand constantly flickering as it tweaked the boards in front of him. Everything about him moved to the music, even the occasional finger jabbing his black-rimmed glasses back.
The music decelerated as he pulled the cigarette from his mouth and raised it to the sky, granting the crowd a huge smile that said something mind-blowing was about to happen. The mass of bodies bayed in anticipation. He tucked his smoke back between his lips, and his shoulders rocked as he worked at bringing the music. He raised his palms to the crowd, encouraging them to take it up a notch, and they obliged with glee.
Suddenly, he lifted his euphoric face to the sky, swaying back and forth in focused ecstasy. One arm shot up, an index finger pointing the way to heaven, as he squeezed his eyes shut.
A synthesized female voice cried out, “OOOH MY GOD – god – god – god - god!”
Music burst in a sizzling shower over the DJ and crowd as they leaped together to its driving beat. It got to me. He got to me. I licked the heavy gloss I’d applied preshow before I realized what I was doing, and pressed my lips together trying to fix it. Things lower clenched. Too bad he’s so young. I sighed. And not a vampire.
A tingling on the back of my legs dragged my attention back to my goal for the evening. Peeking over my shoulder, I drove the hoop around my hips, the LEDs smearing white and seven-colored orbits over my mostly bare body. Turning toward a pair of crimson eyes, I dropped my Day-Glo-painted eyelids to half-mast as his burning gaze slid over my boy-shorted backside.
My white halter top glowed in the black light as the strobes made the sequins flash like Christmas lights. The music paused unexpectedly and the DJ mumbled into the mic, “I just finished this song half an hour ago on the tour bus.”
The horde screamed its ridiculous approval. When he turned the music back on, I kicked the second hoop into play. It was all improvised, of course. I had no idea what the DJ was going to do during the show, and he apparently hadn’t known either, considering I never got a playlist. So, to prepare, I’d practiced to all his music all week.  This song sounded familiar, but if he’d just created it, I guess it had to do with absorbing his style.
The blipping sample of a laser blast penetrated my sternum, my heart tripping with it. As a quiet drum calmed the moment, I returned the hot stare of my quarry. I couldn’t make out the details of his features, but when I blurred my gaze and tapped into what most healers referred to as their “third eye”, I could see the subtle energy pulse of his aura: definitely vampire. Anticipation bubbled up my spine.



About the Author:

Melissa Lummis writes new age suspense in a fantasy setting, but her stories are also straight up, steamy adult romance. The Love and Light Series is currently available at Amazon exclusively, as well as the Little Flame Series, a spin off focusing on the character Fiamette from the Love and Light world.

Melissa considers herself a truth seeker and a peaceful warrior, in addition to a paranormal and fantasy author. With too many interests for her own good, she has rarely been content with one vocation. Her first professional life was as a high school English teacher, which led to another incarnation as a wife and an instructional designer /technical writer. After starting a family, she found herself reincarnated yet again as a mother, yoga instructor, and personal trainer.

While all her past lives have contributed to who she is today, yoga has become a part of how she gives back, maintaining her Registered Yoga Teacher status with Yoga Alliance so she can help people one-on-one to overcome physical limitations and heal themselves. But she has always been and always will be a writer. She’s authored dozens of wellness articles for various publications, as well as maintains a blog focusing on wellness, healing, and living a life on purpose.

A Yankee by birth and a Penn State graduate, she lives in rural Virginia with her husband, two children, an Alaskan Malamute, and a myriad of forest creatures. Melissa believes the universe conspires to help an adventurer, and if we live our lives as if it is a daring escapade (and it is!), then everything we need will find its way to us.















1 comment:

Melissa Lummis said...

Thank you for having me on your blog! :-)

 
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