Five months or so ago, in the midst of the very stressful and time-consuming task of forcibly downsizing my parents’ living situation, a wonderful thing started to happen. An opportunity for a full-time job sort of evolved in an industry I left in 2003 and never thought I would re-enter. All I can say is this path felt more clear, sensible, and stimulating than the idea of continuing to write when I can’t seem to earn the support of more than a few people who buy books. So, I’m starting this week on a new/old professional journey.

Local readers often ask if I’m working on the next book. I have a few in my head, in both my existing series and one totally different story, but writing them is another thing. The inclination exists, the love for the written word and my characters is still there. I just can’t imagine I’ll have time. If I choose to continue, it will begin again as a hobby, which is how I started, after all.

Thank you for visiting my blog and website, and for being one of the fans who enjoys my writing. I’m sure I’ll be distracted by this new chapter for awhile. Hopefully, one day, some characters will become so loud in my head that I’ll start to let them out again. And when that happens, I’ll definitely be talking about it here!

Can I just say the success of this series supports my love of the good guy, especially the complex, tortured good guy? (Please refer back to my obsession last year with North and South. Richard Armitage. O.M.G. I even have fan fiction on Wattpad for that one.) I know that bad boys are somewhat the rage right now with their tats and their pasts completely devoid of love and understanding. But I like me a sexy nice guy.

I’m releasing one to you almost as we speak. In one week, Rhyolite Drifts: Yellowblown™ Book Two will be released with the continuing story of Violet and her slice of heaven, Boone, all on preorder for 99 cents. So grab yourself a handful of Hotness.

Sitting in the truck on the prairie, the night sky blocked by ash, was like sitting in a closed refrigerator, minus the threat of suffocation. Boone reclined in the passenger seat, gingerly exploring the cut and bruise over his eye. At least the lid wasn’t swollen shut anymore. Sneaking over the train trestle bridge with fifty-percent vision hadn’t been the wisest journey he’d ever made. Violet wouldn’t call him Dudley Do Right when she heard about that.

If.

Distance was supposed to break the bond. That’s what had happened with his high school girlfriend, and with Twyla. He’d gone on to the next phase of his life and they’d receded. He wasn’t so cold that he hadn’t worried about their hurt feelings, but he hadn’t been broken. He hadn’t shuddered with guilt in the daylight and woken at night filled with longing.

He’d been alone—solidly alone, without even a friendly conversation at a gas station—for a little more than two weeks and learned he wasn’t very good at it. Especially now, when time and distance weren’t working in his favor.

Leaving Violet hadn’t been a real choice. He’d had to go. He had to find his parents.

A girl he’d only been with a couple of months couldn’t tag along, even if she asked fervently enough to squeeze his heart. This wasn’t a trip to the county fair, after all.

But the damned bond wasn’t breaking the way it should. It wasn’t even weakening.

Rhyolite Drifts on Amazon

If you need to start at the beginning, Eruption is also on sale. You can find the purchase links here.

Make sure to visit other people on the hop by using the Click Here link below.

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Click here to find the other authors on the Book Hooks hop.

As services are disrupted, Violet Perch uses her bike to deliver mail to her rural neighbors and steal some alone-time for her sanity. She sees the flag up on the mailbox at a house she’s never stopped at before, and is pretty sure the note in the box requesting she come to the slightly creepy house to get a message is just a ploy to lure her into the clutches of serial killer.

I left my bike by the road as a signal that Violet had been here. That way if the cell towers were down and my phone’s GPS failed, the homicide detectives might know where to find the blood spatter with their black lights. Were forensic scientists still employed? I wondered this as I shuffled through the dead leaves in the driveway. It would actually be a great way to evaluate careers. How would such a proficiency test question be worded? “Is it important to you your career remain viable through an apocalyptic event?” Perhaps if I survived the next quarter hour, or the next year, I would take a serious look at who still had jobs and then go get training for whatever they were doing.

As I mentioned above, books one and two are both on sale for 99 cents, so it’s a great time to get started with the Yellowblown™ series. Eruption: Yellowblown™ Book One is highly recommended to be read first, and was a BTS eMag Red Carpet finalist in 2014.

You can find Eruption: Yellowblown™ Book One here:

Amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MRHAIRO

Barnes and Noble http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/eruption-j-hughey/1120343037?ean=9781500866051

Kobo https://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/eruption-3

iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/eruption/id977183578?mt=11&uo=4

Rhyolite Drifts: Yellowblown™ Book Two is available for preorder at Amazon and will be on other vendors on or around May 5, 2015.

Here’s a blurb:

Abandoned by Hotness.

Held hostage by the Yellowstone eruption, I’m stuck at home instead of loving life at college.

Sanity is restored when my college roommate arrives, but I’m still trapped in my hometown with a bunch of people just trying to survive. Some of them are surprisingly interesting, like the HAM radio opera singer lady. Or the pop star who crushes on me while waiting for an air filter for his tour bus.

Unfortunately there’s also my roommate’s gangster little brother who pushes Grandma to her conservative edge, and the local entrepreneurs determined to capitalize on hard times. They tick me off.

Despite all this I’m determined to find a path to the fabled land of Adulthood even if my heart is broken and all the roads are ash covered.

And where the heck did that Nebraskan cattle rancher go, anyway?

Everything is changing but my heart and my hopes don’t want to change with it.

Admit it, you’re hooked. Give the first book a try for 99 cents.

Also, visit the other authors on todays Book Hooks blog tour by using the Click here link below.

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Click here to find the blog list.

“I’m here to be with you and I intend to keep it that way. I’m not stepping aside for anybody or any reason, unless you tell me to.”

I nodded again, abrading my forehead on denim.

“And even then, I’m gonna put up a helluva fight for you.”

If Amazon did their job, Rhyolite Drifts should be available to preorder for 99 cents at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00VGOQ9VS. To be ready for it, you need to get to know Hotness in Eruption: Yellowblown™ Book One.

Make sure to visit the other Hot For Friday bloggers today. You can find them by clicking the little blue frog.

Here’s the snippet where Boone makes Violet weak in the knees…again:

I kissed the center of his chest. “You don’t want a helpless girl to go limp in your arms?”

“As long as it’s you, I’ll take it. You can go limp, grab me, lie down, stand up, do whatever you want as long as I’m the man you’re doing it with. Tell me how you want it and I’ll do it. Fast, slow, noisy, quiet, dirty, polite, outside, inside….”

He continued his list while I cracked up. “So, now you’re my sex slave?”

“Yes,” he answered without thought. “Absolutely yes. Or maybe we can take turns.”

As I said, this is from Rhylite Drifts: Yellowblown™ Book Two, which is in the editing phase now, and will soon be released, but get yourself some Hotness by reading Eruption!

For more swoon-worthy lines, click the froggy to find the other authors in this weeks hop. Thanks for visiting!

A few weeks ago I posted some concise talking points about Yellowstone so you could sound smart at your holiday gatherings, and I promised a continuing path to geekdom. Join the journey today, as I expand on point number one. Yellowstone is hot like a romance hero. Well, duh, everybody knows that. It’s gorgeous, steamy, and explosive.

But why is it hot? Deep underneath Yellowstone—from eight to sixteen kilometers depth, according the the United States Geological Survey (USGS)—lies a chamber of magma forty to eight kilometers wide. (Magma and lava are molten rock. Magma is lava that hasn’t erupted yet. If you can see it above the ground, it’s lava. If it’s still hiding underground, it’s magma.)

Not all of the chamber is full of melted rock. Some areas are probably solid or semi-solid. The point is there’s a minimum of something like 12,800 cubic kilometers (8,000 cubic miles) of freakin’ hot rock sitting down there. It heats everything above it, including creating super-heated water, hence the geysers, bubbly mud pools, and hot springs. Occasionally this gentle release of heat isn’t enough and it erupts, usually in a small way and other times like a Roman candle. As in one-thousand times the Mt. St. Helens eruption.

That epically large potential is why Yellowstone is known as a super volcano. (Call it a super caldera if you want to be really geeky and correct, which you do.) We’ll get into the “super” part more next time, but a caldera is an area of volcanic activity that sinks to fill the void left when a volume of magma exits. While we picture most volcanos as cones sticking up, a caldera is a saucer dipping down. If they were belly buttons, calderas would be innies. They make beautiful lakes, such as the aptly named Crater Lake.

If you have any questions about what I’ve written so far, ask away. I’ll do my best to answer or let you know if there is a future post that will address it.

Next step on the path to geekdom? The geographical size and eruption history of the Yellowstone caldera.

Another case of good timing: on Thursday Amazon announced the ability for indie authors like me to set new books up for preorder. This is awesome on several levels, not the least of which is the creation of a link for the book. With a link one can reward early purchasers with a fantastic early bird price (99 cents), start to set up advertising and have a real place for interested readers to land. Did I say this is awesome?

So, here is a link for the Amazon preorder page for Eruption and my funky new blurb.

BLURB – by Violet Perch

I’m in the middle of the perfect college semester, hundreds of miles from Mom, with an awesome roomie and my freshman crush finally becoming a sophomore reality—Hotness! I’m figuring out calculus, I’ve got both hands on the handlebars and the wind of freedom in my hair. What on earth could slow my roll?

How about if the Yellowstone volcano erupts for the first time in 630,000 years, spewing a continuous load of ash (crap) all over North America? Think that’ll put a kink in my bicycle chain?

Make that kinks, plural, because here’s a scientific fact I’ll bet you didn’t know. Nothing ruins the perfect semester like a super caldera. Now that I’ve made you smarter today, maybe you can tell me how to keep my life cruising in the right direction—no to Mom, yes to roomie, double yes to Hotness!—during a global disaster?

In the interest of full disclosure, I’m not hanging from the side of a cinder cone on the last page of this trauma, but there’s definitely more to come. Unless, of course, humans become extinct and then there’s not. Duh.

END OF BLURB – Thank you, Violet.

Hey, don’t forget to sign up for my newsletter. I’m not super-chatty but I will share bonus material and sometimes I give stuff away. Just click on Contact in the header!

A fun fact about J.J.:  I was married at Graceland — in the private chapel on the Elvis Presley estate.

I have to admit that is the first time anyone has had that fun fact.  LOL

So, on to the first meeting!

EXCERPT