"Pure, Passionate, and truly forever!" Reviewers love Most Beautiful Words plus #Giveaway! #MMromance

I've received three truly incredible 5* reviews for Most Beautiful Words in the last week or so that I'd like to share.

Prism Book Alliance says:

I was unprepared for the beauty and power of Most Beautiful Words. I was swept away by the desperate pain and fiercely loving relationships depicted within this story. Autumn and her Grand-Pop love each other mightily, and it’s a love so all-encompassing for young Autumn that she cannot imagine living without Grand-Pop physically with her. Tommy’s love of Roy is pure, passionate, and truly forever, as is Roy’s love of Tommy that does not fade with the passing of life or time.

To read the entire review go here

Rainbow Book Reviews says:

If you like bittersweet stories that contain a large dose of reality, yet manage to end well, if you don’t mind reality and fantasy intermingling for the purpose of a great story that just needs too be told, and if you’re looking for an imaginative, very sweet, and touching story about family and love, then you will probably like this novel. I was pulled in from the beginning, and think it is absolutely brilliant.

To read the entire review go here

Inked Rainbow Reads says:

This is not merely a book about two men who fell in love at a time when they had to keep everything secret. It’s also not merely a book about a dying man and his relationship with his beloved great-granddaughter. It’s about how all relationships are complex and multi-faceted and how love doesn’t just have one size or shape.

To read the entire review go here

Remember, you can get your copy of Most Beautiful Words at Dreamspinner Press (ebook) | Dreamspinner Press (paperback) | All Romance eBooks | Amazon | Barnes & Noble

ALSO! Don't forget, it's STILL *~*~GIVEAWAY TIME!!~*~*

Follow the official Most Beautiful Words blog tour around to snag all your chances to enter the rafflecopter for a $25 Amazon gift card

Tour Dates/Stops:

October 10: Angel Martinez | My Fiction Nook | Up All Night, Read All Day | Fallen Angel Reviews

October 13: Amanda C. Stone | Decadent Delights

October 14: Jade Crystal

October 15: LeAnn’s Book Reviews | Velvet Panic

October 16: Full Moon Dreaming | Dawn’s Reading Nook

October 17: Wake Up Your Wild Side | Scattered Thoughts & Rogue Words

October 20: Parker Williams | Inked Rainbow Reads

October 21: Cate Ashwood | Love Bytes | Book Reviews, Rants, and Raves

October 22: Regular Guys, Hot Romance | Emotion in Motion

October 23: EE Montgomery | MM Good Book Reviews

October 24: Iyana Jenna | Prism Book Alliance

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20 Year in the Making! + 3 #Giveaways! #MostBeautifulWords #MMRomance

So...............................................a dream of mine just came true. Written that way underplays it a bit, I think. Let me rephrase: A VERY IMPORTANT *~*TWENTY YEARS IN THE MAKING*~* DREAM OF MINE came true today!

Today, I am a published novelist.

I dreamed and I worked and I fretted and I worked and I wanted to quit but I didn't quit and I dreamed some more and I fretted some more and I worked and I worked and I worked and here it is: the product of all of that.

I think my eighth grade self, writing in her notebooks and dreaming, would be very proud. I know last year's Raine O'Tierney is proud!

Okay, enough of the self-pats on the back. Let's get down to business. What's this novel I'm yammering about? And where are the GIVEAWAYS we were promised?!

Twelve-year-old Autumn's world is shattered when her beloved Great-Pop, Tommy Johnson, suffers a stroke that leaves him comatose. With everyone around her resigning themselves to the inevitable, Autumn is the only one not willing to give up. She and Great-Pop have more secret stories to share with each other, after all. More stories about Roy McMillan—the great love of Tommy's life whom he lost fifty years ago.  


Autumn struggles to keep Great-Pop on this side of death's door. But how can she compete with the beautiful and mysterious Valley—a place of surreal magic where the sun never fully sets? Especially when there's someone familiar in the Valley who will do everything he can to keep Great-Pop from returning to her.

Available from Dreamspinner Press (ebook) | Dreamspinner Press (paperback) | Amazon | Barnes and Noble | All Romance eBooks

Exclusive excerpt:

 “No,” he said. “You wanted a story I never told anyone. Well, this is it. It’s a story about friendship.”

“I thought he was your love?”

“All good loves start out as friendships, princess,” Great-Pop said, his hands warm and firm on her back. “Do you want to hear?”

Oh how she wanted to hear. More than anything she’d ever wanted before. Autumn nodded quickly.

“I noticed him at church first.”

Autumn looked around the yard. The sun was burning out of the sky, leaving a swath of sunset colors in its wake, and near the edges of the yard where the juniper bushes grew, tiny bursts of green illuminated the growing darkness as the fireflies came out to dance.

“He kept his hair long, which wasn’t the style at the time.”

She thought again about Joey Sullivan on That Rocks! It was the best show on television, and all the girls in her grade thought Joey was the cutest. Of course he was her favorite too. He had a really great smile with a dimple and really long hair, almost as long as hers. He tied it back in a ponytail.

“And he dressed really casual for Sunday service. My step-momma—your great-great-grandmother—used to say that his family was poor trash and that the bank ought to do us all a favor and take those acres of dust they called a farm and drive them out of town. Step-Momma was a snob, and we were poor too. But we weren’t poor like the McMillans, and that made her think she was better than them.”

It was the first time she’d ever heard him say anything about his stepmother. She decided anyone that had anything bad to say about the young man her Great-Pop loved wasn’t a good person, and she immediately disliked the great-great-grandmother she’d never known.

“What did he look like, Great-Pop?”

“Handsome. Mischievous.”

“What color was his hair?”

“Brown.”

“And long,” she repeated for herself. Joey Sullivan had blond hair, so she had to adjust for that.

“With bright blue eyes.”

She fixed that too.

“So you talked to him at church?” she spurred him anxiously. She wanted more!

Great-Pop moved quietly over to the rust-stained iron chair next to the bushes. “I met him at the little library. The librarian there was an old maid named Miss Palmer, and she was mean….”

*~*~GIVEAWAY(S) TIME!!~*~*

Check out my interview over at The Hat Party and comment for your chance to win an e-copy of Most Beautiful Words.

There's a second chance to win an e-copy of Most Beautiful Words if you follow along with my Dreamspinner Press Blog Release Day Party posts from 9 a.m. CDT to 12:30 p.m. CDT today!

And finally, follow the official Most Beautiful Words blog tour around to snag all your chances to enter the rafflecopter for a $25 Amazon gift card

Tour Dates/Stops:

October 10: Angel Martinez | My Fiction Nook | Up All Night, Read All Day | Fallen Angel Reviews

October 13: Amanda C. Stone | Decadent Delights

October 14: Jade Crystal

October 15: LeAnn’s Book Reviews | Velvet Panic

October 16: Full Moon Dreaming | Dawn’s Reading Nook

October 17: Wake Up Your Wild Side | Scattered Thoughts & Rogue Words

October 20: Parker Williams | Inked Rainbow Reads

October 21: Cate Ashwood | Love Bytes | Book Reviews, Rants, and Raves

October 22: Regular Guys, Hot Romance | Emotion in Motion

October 23: EE Montgomery | MM Good Book Reviews

October 24: Iyana Jenna | Prism Book Alliance

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Positivity for Writers #3: Don't Let Others Dictate Your Pace

I can't believe it's already week three of the positivity posts! I hope you've found them helpful. I'd love your feedback. :)

--Raine

With the current culture of ebooks, indie-publishing, and small-press publishers, the pace at which it seems authors want to (or more often, need to) write has really changed. Growing up, I had a favorite Harlequin author, Jessica Steele, and on the very best of years, when her releases fell just right, she put out two books in a calendar year. That was fast. That was insanely fast.

Now, it's almost as if two books a year is standard, if not a little on the slow side. I know authors that release every two months. I know authors that seem to release every month. I know authors who do this *and* have full-time jobs. Is your head spinning yet?

I admit it, I lost myself to the pace for a while. People cheered me on. You can do it! Write more! Write faster! And so I did, and I felt good. Faster, faster, faster... Until my fastest wasn't fast enough. And then I didn't feel good at all.

Between April and December 2014, I will have put out six works. But those works were percolating for YEARS and many were in various stages of drafting and editing before 2014! They just happened to get clumped together and published in a relatively short span of time. So what happens in 2015...?

A very dear friend gave me a piece of advice that I wrote down in journals, on my hand, on scraps of paper, anywhere I might stumble upon it. It's, well, pretty much everywhere. I have to keep it nearby because if I don't, it slips right out of my brain.

Simply put, she said:

Your Creator didn't give you a lifetime's worth of stories, so that you could write them all today.

Write at the pace that works best for you. If a release a month WORKS for you and you are happy--keep doing that! But don't feel like you have to. We want you to take the time you need to craft the story in your heart with love and care. (Except in November: November is NaNoWriMo. Mwahaha!)

Remember: this is not a race, my friends. It's an art. :)

Until next time!
Raine O'Tierney

Ta-Da! Most Beautiful Words! #MMromance #Coverreveal

A very special thank you to Brooke Albrecht who put together my lovely cover and to Will Parkinson who set up the cover reveal. :) And to YOU for stopping by to check it out. Isn't it pretty? <3

Book Name: Most Beautiful Words

Author Name: Raine O’Tierney

Cover Artist: Brooke Albrecht

Publisher: Dreamspinner Press

Blurb(s):

Twelve-year-old Autumn's world is shattered when her beloved Great-Pop, Tommy Johnson, suffers a stroke that leaves him comatose. With everyone around her resigning themselves to the inevitable, Autumn is the only one not willing to give up. She and Great-Pop have more secret stories to share with each other, after all. More stories about Roy McMillan—the great love of Tommy's life whom he lost fifty years ago.

Autumn struggles to keep Great-Pop on this side of death's door. But how can she compete with the beautiful and mysterious Valley—a place of surreal magic where the sun never fully sets? Especially when there's someone familiar in the Valley who will do everything he can to keep Great-Pop from returning to her.

Excerpt:

“So what’s my prize?”

“I’m gonna let you kiss me,” Roy said with a big, devious smile.

“Yeah?” Tommy asked, thinking he was being put on. “All right, I guess I’ll take the consolation prize then.”

“That leaves me with the grand prize by default.”

And he leaned in, and as sweet as anything Tommy had experienced in his whole life, Roy kissed his slightly parted lips. Even when Tommy stiffened, Roy did not pull back. Instead, slowly and deliberately, he gathered Tommy to him with a hold that was loose enough for him to escape from, but tight enough to be a real, romantic embrace. He kissed Tommy until he had to draw breath, and even then he did not let him go all the way.

“You… really wanted to?” Tommy asked, his head spinning. In that moment he had a single, solitary regret. It wasn’t coming out here to shoot arrows, and it wasn’t that he hadn’t pulled out of Roy’s embrace or even that he’d been kissed. It was that he hadn’t kissed Roy first. Because Tommy liked the kissing. A lot. And he wanted to do it more.

Available from Dreamspinner Press (ebook) | Dreamspinner Press (paperback)

About the Author: Called "Queen of the Sweetness" (well, two or three people said it anyway!) Raine O'Tierney loves writing sweet stories about first loves, first times, fidelity, forever-endings and...friskiness?

Raine O'Tierney lives outside of Kansas City with her husband, fellow Dreamspinner Press author, Siôn O'Tierney. When she's not writing, she's either asleep, or fighting the good fight for intellectual freedom at her library day job. Raine believes the best thing we can do in life is be kind to one another, and she enjoys encouraging fellow writers. Writing for 20+ years (with the last 10 spent on M/M) Raine changes sub-genres to suit her mood and believes all good stories end sweetly. Contact her if you're interested in talking about point-and-click adventure games or about which dachshunds are the best kinds of dachshunds!

Raineotierney.com | Dreamspinner Press Author Page | The Hat Party (LGBT Author Interviews!) | Facebook Fan Page | Twitter

Tour Dates: 9/10/14
Tour Stops: Parker Williams, Prism Book Alliance, Cate Ashwood, Velvet Panic, Fallen Angel Reviews, Regular Guys, Hot Romance, Wake Up Your Wild Side, Iyana Jenna, Elisa - My Reviews and Ramblings, Love Bytes, Amanda C. Stone, LeAnn’s Book Reviews, Scattered Thoughts & Rogue Words, Up All Night, Read All Day, Rainbow Gold Reviews, Nephylim, EE Montgomery, Inked Rainbow Reads, Andrew Q. Gordon, Emotion in Motion

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