Trapped in a Song by Nicole Pouchet

Happy Book Birthday to Nicole Pouchet! Today is release day for her hot new romance, Trapped in a Song published by Decadent Publishing. Here are all the details about this great paranormal read:

If Detective Jori Anzoli has to do one more telepathic reading for the Las Vegas Police Department, her para-capabilities may fry out. That doesn’t matter when she’s called in to help find eight men who mysteriously went missing. The case escalates quickly. Clairvoyants in the department are scared to touch it, her brother becomes the ninth missing man, and the Paranormal Investigative Agency (PIA) sends a distractingly handsome agent who hassles her every step of the way.

Agent Del Moore is on a mission to find the PIA’s missing biomedical weapons engineer. A retro-cognizant, Del is used to avoiding human contact unless the job demands it. The less intrusive knowledge he has about others, the better. But a brush with the aloof Detective Jori may change his mind. He can’t ignore her warm essence, especially when she impossibly summons him into her dream.

As mounting clues lead Jori and Del to go deep undercover into a Nevada brothel, an ancient succubus preys on every living soul within, placing Jori and Del on separate hallucinogenic paths of destruction. Will they learn the truth behind the brothel and their mission before succumbing to an ulterior plan neither of them wishes to see?

About the Author

Nicole Pouchet is a memoirist and a paranormal romance novelist. Books from her Elemental Myths paranormal romance series have enjoyed spots on Amazon’s Bestseller lists. Layla’s Gale, A Paranormal Romance won second prize in the 2013 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest.

Still amazed to be an adult, Nicole has managed to center her life around raising her two small sons and being true to her family (including husband and friends). She resides in Leesburg, Virginia where she owns a marketing agency. Happiest near the water, Nicole spends her free hours plotting her next escape, writing, and staring at the ceiling.

Website

www.NicolePouchet.com

Social Media

Twitter: @NPouchet

Facebook: www.Facebook.com/NicolePouchet

Excerpt

She applauded her dream version of Agent Del. If she had to have lucid dreams, this was a great one to have. She met his gaze, and he ogled her body as openly as she did his.

“This is a welcome surprise.” His voice sounded even sexier in the dream. “Y’know, Jori, you’d better be careful with this dream manipulation,” he teased before stepping into her space. “People will think you’re a lucid.”

“Who’ll tell? You’re just my fantasy.”

“And you’re my every desire come to life. I wonder….” He leaned down and pressed his mouth against hers, pulling her closer as they both ceased speech.

Standing on her toes, she let her hands roam the contours of his back. He pulled her in tightly, lifting her higher until she wrapped her legs around his waist. His hard length pressed against her center.

He tasted her mouth, delving with the kind of abandon only found in fantasy, and pushed them both onto a bed that materialized as soon as she wished for it.

“Del….” she moaned when her head hit the pillows.

He reached under her and palmed her bottom then pulled her closer while grinding down into her. “You’re wearing too many clothes. I want to touch all of you.” He reached up and then pulled her T-shirt off over her head.

With a laugh, she let her head bounce back to the pillow. His chest loomed above her, the tattoo of an eagle over his right nipple.

The giggle died on her lips. She didn’t know he had a tattoo and wouldn’t have placed it there in her dream. He was real. She was about to have sex with the real Agent Del Moore. Dream or not, that was not bright.

Her lucidity was wreaking havoc again. This time, she’d pulled a PIA agent into her dream. Her brother and the rest of the Para Resistance believed the PIA performed illicit experiments on paras, especially lucids. The PIA did force paras—those not in law enforcement—to medically suppress their special abilities. And no matter what, they distrusted and medically suppressed lucids, who could manipulate anyone’s dreams.

Czech It Out

It's Tuesday again, which means I'm letting my geek flag wave proudly. This week in my class we are studying morphology. Our exercise this week comes in the form of picking out a foreign language and attempting to complete the linguistic puzzle for it. There was a long list, but Czech caught my eye immediately - probably because Prague is on my bucket list and because my great-grandparents were both born in Czechoslovakia. Disclaimer - I know not a word of Czech. I know a few words like beer, house, bottom, and red-headed devil in Slavic, but I didn't imagine that would help me with the time of day in Czech.

If you'd like to try your hand at this puzzle, click here.
If you'd like to take yourself to task with some other languages, click here.

Here's how I came up with my answers(spoiler alert - don't look if you want to take the test yourself):


For this assignment, I selected the Czech linguistic puzzle, which requires the participant to try their hand at two sentences in Czech regarding time. The user is given several examples of how time should be written in Czech.

My rational in solving the puzzle was to look first for words that look similar to English words. From this I opted to presume that minut in Czech is equivalent to the noun minute or minutes in English. It also seemed to me that čtvrt could possibly translate to quarter. The rest of the words needed to translate the two sentences I was given, I guessed at based on the information provided in the mini telling time lesson above the problems. The following are what I guessed the words to be:

·         Osm – Eight

·         Půl – Half, as in half past.

·         Devate – Nine

·         Šeste – Six

·         Sedm – Seven

·         Deset - Ten

·         Na – To

·         Za – It’s

 The two phrases in English I had to translate into Czech were:

·         23 minutes after five

·         10 minutes after nine

To solve these, I relied on phrases from the mini lesson that were similar in nature and changed out the numbers to the appropriate ones. It seemed from the two examples with after in the time phrase that the convention was to explain the difference from the quarter to the next hour or half to the next hour. So 23 minutes after five would translate into Its seven minutes from half to six and 10 minutes after nine would be Its five minutes from quarter to ten.

 

 

Dictionaries are Adorkable

I am entering into the second week of my first Master's class in English and Creative Writing and thought it might be fun to share some of the discussions in class. This week we are talking about the value dictionaries hold, and how specialized dictionaries provide us with unique perspectives on our ever-evolving language. An online dictionary that offer not only traditional words, but also words in popular culture is the perfect choice for this geek girl. Here's my offering on the discussion:

I chose to explore Wordnik (https://www.wordnik.com/), which operates in both a conventional and unconventional manner when providing information about words. Wordnik offers definitions from multiple sources, so you can see as many different takes on a word's meaning as possible. It showcases a word’s etymology if available as well, so the user can get a sense of the word’s evolution. Wordnik presents examples of how the word is used including examples from major news media and from books.

This online dictionary also presents information about word relationships. It presents synonyms, but in this dictionary you will also find hypernyms (words that are more generic or abstract than the given word) and hyponyms (words that are more specific). Wordnik also functions as a community. Registered users can create lists of words, discuss words with others, and leave comments on word definitions. Users can also find audio files of pronunciations, visual representations of word meanings, and for fun how many points the word is worth in Scrabble.

This dictionary can be an invaluable tool for me as I write some of my new-adult or young adult contemporary romances in a variety of ways.  It offers me alternative words for the word I am thinking of using, but that doesn’t quite fit the situation. For example, if I am writing a sentence where I want to use the word “kerfuffle” but it doesn’t sound like something my character would say, I can use the Wordnik to find similar words like “racket”, which might fit better in the context of the sentence I am using and the character who is speaking.

Another way this tool can be beneficial is to find words that aren’t necessarily in the more establish dictionaries, but are used frequently in communicating both in person and in situations like social media conversations. A great example of this is the use of the term “adorkable”. Wordnik defines it as “adorable in a socially awkward manner” (Wordnik). Adorkable might not be found in a traditional dictionary, or be a valid Scrabble word, but it is being more often. The examples Wordnik offers of its usage illustrate that as well as the fact that the word is on numerous user lists, and has been looked up 2,468 times.

The English language is ever-changing and growing. I believe Wordnik is a dictionary that mirrors that fluidity by combining conventional elements of word meanings with interactive, community-driven ones.

 

"Adorkable." Wordnik..com. N.p., n.d. Web. 09 Sept. 2014.<https://www.wordnik.com/words/adorkable>.

 

Thoughtful Tuesday - My Life is A Book

There are two people you'll meet in your life.

One will run a finger down the index of who you are and jump straight to the parts of you that peak their interest.

The other will take his or her time reading through every one of your chapters and maybe fold corners of you that inspired them most.

You will meet these two people; it is a given.

It is the third that you'll never see coming. That one person who not only finishes your sentences, but keeps the book.