Free Read from Marta Acosta

If you are on Marta's Mailing List or read Vampire Wire you've probably already heard the news but if not- here it is.

Marta Acosta is offering a completely free download of her YA vampire novel, Shadow Girl of Birch Grove.

Here's a brief description:

Jane Williams sees no way out of her miserable foster home when she receives an invitation to attend elite Birchwood Academy with a full scholarship. They'll give her tuition, spending money, clothes, and she gets to live in the old groundskeeper's cottage in the middle of a birch grove.

It sounds too good to be true. She expected snobbiness, but the students are almost too nice and welcoming. Her elegant and pale headmistress even offers Jane the chance to earn extra money by tutoring her gorgeous son, Lucky.

An unknown enemy begins threatening Jane, but she's not easily scared...even though she suspects that something happened to a former scholarship girl and that the headmistress and her staff are hiding some very dark secrets.

You can read it here for free.

For more about Marta visit http://www.martaacosta.com/ or

http://www.vampirewire.blogspot.com/

Kicking Off the 25 Paranormal Days of Christmas with Zombies & Yolanda Sfetsos

Christmas in Australia just isn’t what it used to be. Ever since the Earth cracked open, spewing forth demons, it’s become the loneliest holiday.

What do you give your zombie neighbors for a gift anyway? Certainly not your brains.

Some of us have survived. Hey Santa. Can I have a new baseball bat this year? My old one is broken and bloody now. I’ve been good...at killing zombies.

---

Firstly, I just wanted to thank Roxanne for having me here today, and Kim for setting it up. It's great to be here. :)

With the festive season approaching most people are thinking about presents, trees, decorations, and dinner with the family. I mean, who’d think of zombies now, right?

Well, actually, I did. You see, I live in Sydney, Australia. Here, the Christmas season falls in the middle of summer, which is usually accompanied with scary bushfires. And that's how I got my idea for CHRISTMAS DAY OF THE DEAD. Zombies, Christmas and bushfires just clicked into place.

CHRISTMAS DAY OF THE DEAD is a zombie novella I wrote a few Christmases ago. Since the first draft, it’s been rewritten and edited a few times, but the idea hasn't changed. It's a story that starts on Christmas Eve and takes Jess to a local shopping center so that she can do some last-minute shopping. But what she finds, changes everything.

I love to toy with the what if? notion a lot. So when I got the idea to mix an otherwise lovely time of the year, with the zombie apocalypse, I started writing and went with it. I have to admit that I feel sorry for my characters–a small group of strangers who get thrown together inside a cinema because the shopping center is filled with the corpses of holiday shoppers who are rising as zombies. But it made for an interesting, gory zombie tale that ended up being a lot of fun.

I have to admit that I’m a huge zombie fan. I’ve actually got two zombie tales available from Damnation Books this month, because nothing says "Merry Christmas" like the end of the world, as a result of a zombie outbreak.

So, if you're wondering what happens when Sydney is overrun by zombies and the survivors have nowhere left to go, you might be interested in checking it out. Oh, and did I mention that it’s available for FREE download? That's right. All you have to do is go HERE, and type this promo code at checkout: 61DODholiday.

Go on, check it out. I hope you get into the zombie holiday spirit... and see why Christmas and zombies really do go well together. Actually, I think I might spend a lot of this month watching, reading, and maybe even writing some more zombie fun.

Merry Christmas!

---

Yolanda Sfetsos
http://www.yolandasfetsos.com/

Yolanda Sfetsos lives in Sydney, Australia with her husband, daughter, and cat. She loves to spend most of her days writing stories. Her muse doesn't like genre restrictions and is always happy to toe the dark edge of storytelling. When she’s not writing she spends as much time as possible with her small family. She also enjoys watching movies, TV shows and reading.