Guest Post The Fortune Tellers Daughter by Jordan Bell

Title: The Fortune Tellers Daughter
Author: Jordan Bell
Genre: Supernatural Romance/BBW/Light BDSM/Steamy Romance
Publisher: Self Published

Serafine Moreau grew up on the shiftless, grimy edges of cities that were never home, raised at the capricious whims of her bohemian mother. She learned young how to move unseen through crowds, acquire things that didn't belong to her, and disappear at the first sign of trouble. Together they made a curious life beneath street market tents, plying tourists with fortunes and new age voodoo. It wasn't perfect, but it was theirs - until a stranger appeared one unremarkable autumn morning to steal the fortune teller’s life and leave Sera with nothing but questions.

Now alone, Sera wanders lost between days, strangled by the past and unable to pursue her future. Even the cards reveal nothing. So when an invitation addressed to her mother’s stage name Corazon arrives from an old carnival outfit looking to recruit the late fortune teller, Sera answers instead.

Beneath the labyrinthine tents she discovers enchantments that defy explanation and wonders that feel like magic. Bewitched by the carnival’s handsome illusionist and the dark whimsy of the Carnival Imaginaire's sideshows, Sera finally feels like she’s home until the mystery of her mother’s death unravels with the secrets of the carnival’s past. At the center of the brewing storm hides Sera’s heart that can’t hope to survive another loss.

What does 2013 hold for you has an author?

This is how 2013 started for me.

First, it snowed. I woke up late, but my husband already had coffee waiting. We spent the morning watching episodes of Elementary even though I thought it would be awful until Johnny Lee Miller started speaking, all tatted up and deliciously broken. 

(With dialogue writers like that you don’t even need a plot.)  

Then, coming out of our British crime fighting induced trance, I logged onto my laptop and discovered my new novella, The Curvy Sister, had hit the top 10 on Amazon’s Top 100 Hot New Release list, the Amazon Bestseller list for Erotica, and my novella, Her Secret Pleasure, was featured on the front page of All Romance E-Books.

This was how my year started. 

The extent of my plans for the day had been to nurse any lingering hangover and drink an obscene amount of coffee.  

Instead I was simultaneously on the phone and on my laptop and on my iPod Touch scrambling to contact all the right people to help keep the momentum going strong and reach out to my fans and scream from the rooftops that despite the seemingly insurmountable odds stacked against me, I’d just become a bestselling author. 

It’s not every day you see your career hop into a rocket ship and take off for the stratosphere. 

And not to discredit the truly professional, great minds of my peers who I’m sure possess more grace and dignity than I, but when the news broke, I ran around my house in nothing but my jammies and socks screaming like a lunatic, scaring my cats, and dragging my husband into impromptu dance parties in the hallway.

I’m not different from most serious writers. I have a day job that I go to Monday thru Friday, 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week. I have a husband and four cats. I like to read as much as I like to write and I feed a healthy obsession for sci-fi television shows and video games. I write when I’m not doing the job that pays the mortgage. I write when I get home from work, after I make dinner, until midnight most nights. 

On any given week, between my day job and my writing career, I log almost 80 hours of work time. I don’t take weekends off – are you kidding? Those are prime writing days. I can camp at my local coffee shop for ten hours straight on a Saturday, mainlining skinny turtle lattes and gorging myself on coffee cake. It’s just part of the job. 

Some of my closest friends are writers who keep a similar schedule to mine, although more than one is successful enough to do it professionally and doesn’t have to wake up at ohmygod o’clock in the morning to go to work. We talk by email and text messaging because we’re writers and by nature we avoid communication we can’t edit first. You can tell when things have gone south with our plotlines when we can no longer bother to spell check our messages and autocorrect mangles our text into amusing inferences of sexual gratification instead of “don’t bother coming w/o my vanilla latte.”  

My plans for 2013 were actually shaped by what happened following hitting the bestseller list. I suddenly started receiving a half dozen emails a day from readers who told me these honest, heartbreaking stories of love and self-acceptance, of cheating and rejection. I heard about women who’d struggled with body issues their whole lives and those who wanted to believe that they could be touched by someone who’d love them the way it happened for Cassidy in The Curvy Sister. 

What I learned from these messages and the conversations that occurred afterward was that I had the writing down. I could tell a good yarn and I knew my characters and I knew what made them cry, what made them moan, and what made them step up to be a hero. The part I’d been missing all this time was not the writing, it was the people I was touching. It wasn’t my stories that needed to be given validation, it was the stories of the people who were messaging me to say Thank you. 

For 2013 I decided to write three novels. The first one came out on March 5th called The Fortune Teller’s Daughter. It’s got a little supernatural something going on, but it’s mostly a story about a girl and her complicated relationship with her mother and about falling in love with a man who, until meeting her, didn’t believe he was worthy of it. While Sera’s fairy tale of running off with the traveling carnival and falling into the arms of the mysterious illusionist was not my first novel, it felt like the sweetest. By the end I just wanted to scrap the plot and write nothing but love scenes. 

I decided that this year I’d spend less time on numbers and more time with connections. Connections to readers and connections to other writers. Planning and pulling together the Insatiable Reads Book Tour became a central force in that undertaking, shoving me out of my comfort zone to embrace these wonderful people, all of whom have different strengths and weaknesses. Some of us make covers I’d like to print off and hang on my wall, while others could do print book formatting blindfolded with their mouse hand tied behind their backs. 

What I’m learning from them and from my readers and from The Fortune Teller’s Daughter is this: you don’t really know how big the world is until you step out into it.

Places to find Jordan

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