Tag Archives: spies

News, Short Stories

New release: Wilderness

SASL Wilderness_2000In 2013, I visited a beautiful lodge in the Canadian wilderness, where I spent several days grizzly-bear-watching, observing hummingbirds and enjoying the Great Bear Lodge. I blogged about the experience (and the importance of Not Surprising Bears).

I’m not especially outdoorsy (pause to allow the people who know me to stop howling with laughter at the understatement) but I did enjoy the Lodge. The Lodge itself was comfortable, with nice cosy beds, an excellent chef. I even saw some bears.

Some of my fondest hours over the three days were spent on the deck of the floating platform of the lodge (designed to ensure bears and other large wildlife didn’t get too up close and personal). I watched the haze over the river, the splash of the occasional seal, the curious buzz of the pretty hummingbirds hovering like wee helicopters and chasing each other from the feeders. Time slowed down (except I suppose for the hummingbirds) and I soaked up all the fresh, green, untamed atmosphere beyond the very elegantly tamed portion of the lodge itself.

Naturally, almost my second thought was “How can I take this tranquil setting and introduce mayhem into it?”

Marge, one of the people who runs the lodge and Great Bear Nature Tours, said that it was oay for me to use the lodge as a location in the story, provided I didn’t make the bears look bad.

So. Grizzly bears do not get a bad rap in the latest story of my Secret Agents, Secret Lives series – but bears, bear wallows and the wilderness in general all play their part in the story.

Wilderness brings us back to the lives of agent Martine Dubois – a former cop caught up in disgrace when betrayed by her partner – and spymaster Philip Marsden.

Martine Dubois is on a mission to extradite Thomas Reilly, a dangerous criminal, which ends in treachery and a crash landing in the Canadian wilderness. Grizzly bears are the least of Martine’s problems as she and Reilly hunt each other through British Columbia’s Great Bear Forest. Whatever the outcome, Martine is determined to survive and return to Phillip Marsden: top spy, the Grey Ghost, her boss who is also her lover.

This new story comes out along with a re-release of Double Edged and Expendable with their new covers.

SASL covers

If you’re after a bit of action and spy adventure with your sexy romance, the Secret Agents, Secret Lives series delivers quick reads that pack a punch.

News

Expendable and Showtime: e-available!

Kitty banner smallGood morrow, good readers! It’s mid July and things that I write continue to wriggle out into the world at every opportunity.

Kitty and Cadaver: Not the Zombie Apocalypse continues to appear, one part at a time, every Monday. The second part of Chapter Three went up on 15 July. If you haven’t checked it out, you can start at Chapter One here.

ExpendableIn the meantime, the second of my erotic spy stories has been published. The Secret Agents, Secret Lives series began with Double Edged, and the story of Spymaster Philip Marsden and his lover, Agent Martine Dubois, continues in Expendable. As the blurb says:

Secret Agent Martine and her spymaster lover, Philip Marsden, are back in action and on the trail of international bad guy Bartos Rigo. Will they have to compromise their love or their honour to get the job done?

You can get both books in digital format from Clan Destine Press for only $1.80 each. Double Edged is also available on Kobo. 

Expendable will follow its footsteps there soon.

In the meantime, you can also get both stories for Kindle on Amazon.com:

Showtime_smlFinally, my Twelfth Planet Press contribution to the Twelve Planets series, Showtime, is now available for Kobo along with a stack of other Twelve Planets titles. These include collections by Tansy Rayner Roberts, Margo Lanagan and Kaaron Warren, who has just won the Shirley Jackson novella award for Sky, which appears in her Twelve Planets collection Through Splintered Walls.

If any of you feel so moved, it would be great if you wrote reviews for any of the Twelfth Planet Press or Encounters books on GoodReads, Amazon or Kobo (or all three!)

 

Cool Projects, Short Stories

Don't Fence Me In (or, Narrelle's adventures in new genres)

Secret Agents, Secret Lives vsmlI sometimes sort-of-joke in job interviews that I haven’t had a career path. I’ve had a career meander. I’ve pottered about, taking jobs on the basis of my skills and interests at the time. Sometimes my interests were basically ‘I need to pay the rent’. I have been a bank teller, a customer service person, a kitchen hand and, for one awful and soul-withering afternoon, an outbound telemarketer.

But then I found the courage to break out of all those jobs that I did not love to write for a living, at least in the corporate sphere. I took my rather patchy background and wove a narrative through it of me as a writer: of letters to clients, of training materials, of articles for social clubs. Thank goodness for those three years I spent teaching English as a Foreign Language in Egypt in Poland, which got me through the door.

But even my corporate writing career has been eclectic. I’ve written abstracts for a news-gathering service; educational materials and advocacy texts for an aid agency;  brochures, newsletters, taglines and marketing texts for an advertising company. For a year I was a journalist who wrote about supermarkets and convenience stores and related products (and I’m still unreasonably excited that I got to interview Stephen Twining of Twinings Tea). These days I’m a quality assurance editor, being paid to be pernickety about other people’s grammar.

Cold BloodFrankly, if I’m all over the place when it comes to my day-job career, it can hardly be  a surprise to anyone that I’m just as eclectic in my vocational writing. So far in my non-office writing career I have produced crime, fantasy and horror fiction.  I’ve written a true crime essay  (part of the recently re-released Cold Blood) and two non-fiction smartphone apps. I’ve written a play. I’m currently writing songs with my talented niece, Jess Harris, for a new book project.

And my latest unexpected foray into new genres?

I’ve become a writer of erotic fiction!

I haven’t always been a fan of the genre. I read a lot of romance novels that made me want to stab one or both protagonists, but I don’t believe in dissing a genre I haven’t actually read. As much as most of the books I read left me cold, though, I would sometimes find books that were fun, with great characters and rollicking plots. I also kept meeting smart, funny, confident women who enjoyed the field. I must be missing something, I thought. So I asked the Twittersphere for advice and it delivered Anne Gracie to me. Oh. So that’s what all the fuss was about. That was what a good, fun, saucy romance story could be!

When Lindy Cameron, my publisher at Clan Destine Press, approached me about writing for the press’s new Encounters line, I thought: why not? I haven’t written in that genre before, but it’s an element of some of my previous books. And it’ll be a challenge. It’s good to be challenged. It’s obviously very hard to write romance and erotica well, and I want to find out if I can do it. I want to find out if I can write a believable romance as the central point of a story, and if I can write an explicit sex scene that isn’t utterly risible.

Let’s face it, most of my books contain an intense relationship of some kind – often a romantic one, though not always. Exploring human relationships is a significant part of my plots.

Thus – ta da! – I have added a new genre to my literary ensemble. Double Edged is the first short story in the Secret Agents, Secret Lives series. Other stories are being prepared for that and another series in Clan Destine’s Encounters erotica stories, written mainly by writers better known from other genres – including Kerry Greenwood, of Phryne Fisher fame.

To delineate this genre from my other work, I’ve opted to publish the stories under a simplified variant of my own name – NM Harris – rather than my stripper name (Heidi Hillside, if you’re interested). After all, I don’t have children to protect from my own reputation, and I’m actually pretty proud of my efforts in the genre.

But you know me – I love a bit of adventure! Double Edged is full of action, sacrifice, explosions,  spy shenanigans, swordplay and sass. And that’s before we even get to the saucy scenes.

I’d love it if you’d come on this surprise foray into love and adventure with me. (And I hope you like it if you do. It’s only $1.80, so it’s worth a try!)

And let’s all wait with bated breath to see what genre I’ll be writing in next!

Double Edged by NM Harris

Martine Dubois is a disgraced cop whose main sin was to trust a partner she should not have trusted.

When spymaster Philip Marsden, who has a painful past of his own, recruits Martine as an agent, it’s her chance to find redemption, and a chance for both of them to find love – unless duty kills them first.