What's Happening? A LOT!

First off, the long-awaited print version of Barefoot Girls will be available within the next few weeks! For those of you who prefer the heft of a book in your hand, you'll finally be able to get it in the format you prefer.

Personally, I'm still a paper-book girl. Even though my husband has been sucked over to the alternate universe of ebooks, I'm hard to sway. Let's face it, I'm a late adopter, not an early adopter. You probably won't be able to drag me away from my paper books until they stop printing them!

The other piece of news is.....
(drum roll, please)
My short story collection, Earth and Air, is on sale now in ebook stores! Woo hoo!

This collection contains one of my favorite short stories ever, the title piece, and I really think readers will love it, particularly if you love darker spookier fiction (well, there's a comic story at the end that leaves you laughing, or at least I hope it will).

The cover is at the top of this post and the description is as follows:

A handsome singing gypsy who has the power to make girls sleep, sometimes forever, decides to rest from his journeys in an old Victorian house in suburbia with two mesmerized sisters. A broken jukebox leads a girl into uncharted territory, a wilderness in the back of a bar where the colorful neon lights of a working jukebox beckon and where she learns terrible things from a dragon-like woman breathing fire in the dark. A thirty-something career woman trying to rediscover her purpose on an island retreat is attacked in the still of the night by a neighbor whose greatest wish is for her to leave.

Tara McTiernan's stories resemble twisted modern fairy tales, full of real-life magic and Grimm-like darkness. Containing three unforgettable short works, Earth and Air, like her novel Barefoot Girls, illuminates and explores the lives of women with rare eloquence, keen insight, and a sharp wit.

By the way, the last part of that description was a combination of all the wonderful reviews I've received so far for Barefoot Girls, so, no, I couldn't write something like that about myself.

Very exciting times!

Book Cover for Barefoot Girls!

My wonderful and incredibly talented cover designer, Mimi Bark, has completed the ebook cover design for Barefoot Girls and I am madly in love with it! Isn’t it bee-you-tee-ful??? Mimi, you are amazing!

It achieves exactly what I wanted the cover to do – to spark memories of carefree summer days as well as communicate the feeling of Captain’s Island, the setting of the majority of the book. Captain’s is a fictional composite of several islands out on Long Island, New York, but the island that inspired it most was Oak Island, the island where I spent the summers of my youth.

The way the cover captures Captain’s is with the inclusion of the dock where the little girl is sitting. Captain’s Island is in the Great South Bay and, like most islands there, the dominant places to play and entertain are the docks and the long boardwalk (also made of wood) that connects the houses - there are no roads. The docks that stretch out in front of each house have well-used diving boards and ladders, flagpoles with stars and stripes snapping away at the top, the occasional lawn-chair for sunbathers, bobbing moored boats, and plenty of activity all day long.

Or sometimes, you just sit, like the girl on the cover, feet dangling in the water and watching the boats go by, giving the water a kick occasionally to watch the droplets make expanding circles on the surface. When I first heard Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” as a little girl, I thought