The Year of the Dragon!

I wish I could say I was clever enough to have arranged for my Goodread's Greatshadow giveaway to have purposefully ended yesterday so that I could announce the winners today at the beginning of the Chinese Year of the Dragon. On the other hand, I'll take the serendipity of the development as a good omen.

I'm going to be doing my best to be making this my own personal Year of the Dragon. I'm still tapping out chapters on my first draft of Witchbreaker and am already daydreaming heavily of books that follow it. I pretty much wake up thinking about dragons and go to sleep thinking about them. Perhaps I even dream of them, but I seldom remember my dreams. Perhaps my slumbering thoughts are devoured by nocturnal dragons. Imagination would be an appropriate diet for a primal dragon of nightmares. Hmm. I could totally turn that into a book.

Back to Greatshadow: One week from tomorrow, the book hits shelves. I'm weirdly nervous about it. I mean, this is my fifth novel to see print, and at any given time there's at least one or two anthologies in bookstores that contain a story by me. I've reached a point where it's entirely possible for me to go in and out of a bookstore without looking to see if my books are in stock. But, there's something different about Greatshadow. I've taken some real gambles with the book in terms of style and subject matter. I feel like I should take some gambles with selling the book. I just want to go stand in the isles of bookstores and shove copies into the hands of anyone who makes eye contact and say, "Here! Read this book!"

Which, actually, is kind of what I'll be doing on February 10 at 7:30 at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh. I'm having a book launch for Greatshadow. I'll read a little from the opening, take some questions, then sign books. Also, I'll be bribing the audience with dragon cookies. (Did you know you can buy dragon-shaped cookie cutters? I didn't until quite recently. Is this a great country or what?)

Anyway, back to the giveaway: I launched the giveaway hoping I might interest a few hundred readers. Some of the other epic fantasy novels that had drawings going on had 400-500 entries. I told myself I'd be completely satisfied if I got 300 entries.

I wound up with 807 entries. Yowza. I'll give thanks to both Gerard Miley's cover art and, of course, the positive energy that flowed throughout the universe as the Year of the Dragon approached.

The winners are:

Cristen Ferguson
Heather Fourman
Brandi O'Bannon
Randy Smith
Ambereen Khan
Norma Navarrete
Melissa Alles
Margaret Scheiner
Ashley Keith
Donna Montgomery

Congrats, all! I'll have these in the mail to you tomorrow!