MASTERED BY MY GUARDIAN is up on Kobo no

MASTERED BY MY GUARDIAN is up on Kobo now. Nook and iBooks et cetera are taking a little longer.
~~~
Chelsea spent the past ten years rebelling against Zane’s control. When their parents died, he became her guardian, controlling her trust fund and the company they shared. But hating the control he exerted on her did nothing to stop her from wanting him.
When she refuses to obey his summons for a weekend meeting, he cuts off her money, leaving her in a strange city with no way to pay her hotel bill. Forced to accept his help and join him at his country house, she soon discovers his intention is not strictly business. When she experiences his potent masculine domination she finds the reality of being with Zane far exceeds her fantasies… leaving her wanting more.
But can she surrender to this forbidden love and be mastered by her guardian?
Kobo: http://bit.ly/1OPtSJp
Kindle: http://amzn.to/1NSUkT1 http://ow.ly/i/dd3hW

InkHeart Authors Presents Sexy and Sweet Summer Reads

Hi everyone, I’m excited to tell you that TWO new box sets were just released, STEAMY & SIZZLING, and its sister SEXY & SWEET. Tons of reading and the two sets are just $2.99 each!
Of course you know my story, THE MALE STRIPPER, is in STEAMY & SIZZLING. Even if you’ve already read it, you’ll be getting some great stories from wonderful authors like Carly Phillips, Jayne Rylon, Lexi Blake and many others.

Damselfly – Accessorize Speckled Polish

Hi.  I’ve had so much to do in my writing with my serial novel, His to Command, released in January, my novel Illicit and the Northern Heat anthology in February, and finally His to Command the book (combination of all the serial parts) two weeks ago, I’ve had no time to blog about nails.  I have been having fun with polish in real life, though!

My oldest son, Matt, has been accepted to a masters program at the University of Sussex in Brighton England.  (Yes, I will get to how this relates to today’s post about nail polish.)  Matt’s dream has been to be accepted to Sussex and go live in England, but a university here in Ottawa (we live in Canada) offered him a scholarship.  This made for a difficult decision.  It’s such an important decision that we suggested he go to Brighton and check out the university

and the town.  So he did.

Well, that meant I had to check out the nail polishes in England.  (You knew I’d get there, right?)  I reviewed UK nail polish blogs and that led me to the Super Drug store on-line and I found some great polishes.  I fell in love with a collection of speckled polishes from a line of polishes called Accessorize.  So I sent Matt with a list of polishes to pick up for me.  Unfortunately, he couldn’t get the feather effects ones I saw by InVogue polish, because they’d just come out in the on-line store but not yet in the physical store.  I have a niece in London who is coming to Canada in July, though, so… score!  She’s going to bring them over for me.  In the meantime, I found that the Nails Inc. feather effects were the inspiration for these polishes and they are available here, and for far less than in the UK.  That seems so unfair to the UK polish lovers, because they seem to range from £11-£14 there, but I bought them for $11.50!  Even though Nails Inc. polishes originate in the UK!

I talked Matt into bringing me 12 polishes in all (he was only traveling with a backpack and staying in hostels) and I haven’t tried them all yet, but one of my favourites is Damselfly.

It’s a lovely turquoise colour with royal blue specks and gold glitter.  So pretty.

The name is on the back of the bottle, but a little hard to see.  Not too bad in the picture below, but the actual bottle is a heck of a lot smaller!

Speckle polishes seem to be all the rage.  I was recently in the U.S. and was able to pick up some of the Hard Candy speckles, too.  I’m currently wearing Sugar Rush, a milky white polish with black speckles and a little silver glitter mixed in for good measure.  Very fresh and spring-like.  I’ll try to pop up some pictures soon.

Now before I get back to writing, I’ll pass on that I just found out my book His to Command will be mentioned on TV!

by Opal Carew
April 16, 2013

It will be during the April 29th segment of Buy the Book on Good Morning Texas on “Thrills, Chills and a bit of Suspense” between 9am and 10am Central Time. Good Morning Texas is produced by the ABC affiliate in Dallas Fort Worth (WFAA channel 8, fifth largest US television market) and follows Good Morning America at 9am Central Time.

The four minute segment is live during the hour-long broadcast and  the program producer will put up for the segment shortly after it airs (Monday, April 29th, 2013) on http://www.wfaa.com/good-morning-texas.  (I hope I’ll be able to see it here in Canada, because sometimes the U.S. websites don’t allow viewers from other countries.)

I hope I’ll be blogging again soon.  In the meantime, please let me know what you think of Damselfly!

Spring Romance

I’ve been a little sidetracked with my writing so haven’t had a chance to post anything on this blog.  My new serial novel, His to Command, came out in January and Northern Heat, an anthology of short stories from Canadian authors will be released on Valentine’s Day.  On Februrary 16th, my next novel, Illicit, will be released.  It’s been a busy time.

With Valentine’s Day fast approaching, I wanted to do some Valentine’s Day manicures.  Today, I’m showing you Spring Romance by Nicole over a black base.  I picked this bottle up in October when I was at a conference in New Jersey.  I had been anxiously anticipating my trip for many reasons, but one was to visit the store Five Below.  I’m from Canada and we don’t have those stores here, but I had seen some beautiful polishes from a brand called Funky Fingers.  I picked up a few of those while in NJ, but there also had some Nicole polishes.  I don’t usually go for the ones with hearts and stars, but I thought why not give it a try?  They had a few Nicole’s with shaped glitter.

Recently, I saw a couple of reviews of Spring Romance and the reviewers weren’t impressed.  They said it was difficult to pick up the hearts on the brush and the polish was gloppy.  Maybe because I went in aware of the potential problems, I didn’t find it too bad.  It’s true that not many hearts came out on the brush, so I brushed on the polish, then dipped a toothpick into the bottle to pick up the hearts then applied them where I wanted them.  It worked really well.  Also, I found the lovely turquoise background glitter and the hearts really popped on the black background.  In the reviews I saw, they applied them on light pink polish.

In the picture, above you can really see how the hearts catch the light.

The black base was Black on Black by Sinful Colors.

I found that it was a good idea to put a topcoat on the black before applying Spring Romance, because I found that pushing the hearts around to position them,  started to remove the nail polish below, leaving bare patches.  I put my Seche Vite topcoat on the other nails and this prevented the problem.

Here’s one more picture.  I take a lot of my pictures in front of my orchid plant and to my surprise (because I’m not great with plants), it started to bloom about a month ago.  It’s so pretty!

I’m way behind on haul posts.  I was already behind before Christmas, then I got a lot of nail polish for Christmas, and I bought some since, too, so I think I’ll give up for now and just update my stash number and move on.   (Not today.  I still have to update my stash spreadsheet.)  I can’t believe how many polishes I have now!  I will probably share some of the more exotic ones with you, though, like the ones I got from Korea and Brazil.  Also, I bought two  Ciaté caviar sets to celebrate how well my serial novel is doing.  I hope to post some pictures of my caviar nails after I try them.  (They haven’t arrived yet.)

Thanks for stopping by!

Odds and Ends

Hi.  I hope you’re having a nice New Year’s Eve.  Today I’m posting some odds and ends of holiday polishes I bought this season.

The first batch is from head2toebeauty.com.

These are two holiday mini sets from China Glaze.

Above includes Angel’s Wings and Glistening Snow from the Holiday Joy collection.

Above includes Pure Joy and Champagne Kisses  from the Holiday Joy collection.

In a previous haul, I bought three of the Color Club Halo Hues: Cherubic, Blue Heaven, and Halo-graphic.  I loved them so much, I bought the other three of the set.  They are so gorgeous!  How could I resist?

Next are four polishes from the Color Club Winter Affair collection: Winter Affair, Ho-Ho-Holly, and Gift of Sparkle.  I’ve already used Ho-Ho-Holly in a previous post.

Below I have China Glaze Winter Holly (Holiday Joy collection) and Color Club Snow Flakes (Winter Affair collection).

I’ve already shown Winter Holly being used in a couple of my blog posts.  Here and here.

This season, I’ve bought several of the polishes from the China Glaze Holiday Joy collection, including the mini sets above.  I showed Pizzaz and Glitter All the Way in this post.

 

You might remember back around Halloween I had some nail polishes in round bottles with Jack’o’lantern faces.  These are put out by Blue Cross Beauty.  Well, they also have cute little snowmen bottles.

They are so adorable!  And so far the ones I’ve tried are really nice.

I bought these ones directly from their website, but you have to buy a whole display.  (I did that because I want to use the extras as gifts.)

I also got a set of nail polish pens from them.  They act as both a striping brush and a pen.  I bought the holiday set, which should have been red, green, gold, silver, black and white.  Unfortunately, instead of green they sent hot pink!  I asked them to send me green to replace the missing ones and when I received them, they were neon green.  Not too Christmasy!

Here are the ones that should have been a nice glittery Christmas green!

The green one doesn’t even have the printing on the bottle!

Now I can update my stash count.  I only update it when I update a haul and I’m way behind!

My current count is

Holiday Nails – Two Final Christmas Manis

Hi.  I hope you all had a very merry Christmas!  I have two final Christmas manis to show you.

In this first one I used Zoya Aurora for the base to look like the evening sky with stars.  I used China Glaze Winter Holly for the Christmas tree, and China Glaze Pizzaz painted over the tree for the ornatments.  Finally, I used a star from Hollywood Walk of Fame from the Wet’n’Wild Fergie collection.

The second one was straight Christmas glitz that I wore for Christmas day.  I used China Glaze Poinsettia as the base with a coat of fine red glitter from the Blue Cross snowmen colours.  (These polishes don’t have colour names.)  Next, I taped off the tip at an anlge and applied glitter: first some China Glaze Twinkle Lights, which is a fine gold, green and red glitter, then coated that with another of the Blue Cross snowmen colours, this time in a coarse red and green glitter.  Finally, I used a green foil striping tape between the red and glitter, and topped the whole thing off with my usual clear top coat, Seche Vite.

The snowmen nail plish bottles are so cute!

This second one is fun and glitzy, but I was disappointed with how the striping tape lost some of it’s colour (mostly noticable on the middle finger) when I applied the clear topcoat.

I received loads of new polishes for Christmas, so I’ll be posting those soon.  I hope you are all having a wonderful holiday season!

Holiday Nails – A Bit of Holly

Hi.  I know I already posted today, but I had time to do one more!  Again, a very simple mani–just Zoya Blaze with China Glaze Winter Holly on the tips.

I think it looks a little bit like glittery watermelon, but I like it!

I wanted to post pictures of the haul that included Winter Holly, and Snow Flakes from the earlier post, but I haven’t had time to take them yet.  Maybe in a few days.

I’ll definitely need to update my stash counter! (Of course,  I have the feeling I’ll have several more to add after Christmas!)

Holiday Nails – Shiny and Bright

Hi.  Time is flying by and I’ve been busy getting gifts wrapped and doing last minute holiday shopping.  I hope your preparations for the holidays are coming along well.

I needed a quick mani, but wanted to stay with the Christmas theme, so I decided to put on a quick coat of gold, then top it with some glitter.  I used my Zoya Ziv, then added a coat of Kleancolor Holiday Jingle.  I got my first bottles of Kleancolor on a trip to Toronto in the summer and have been looking forward to Christmas to use this lovely green glitter, and their red, too.

The Holiday Jingle is green glitter in a transluctent green base, so it gave the gold a lovely green glow!  I also added a coat of Color Club Snow Flakes, which is a red flakey, but it is so sublte  you can barely see it.  (I look forward to trying it over a different colour to see the effect.)

Here’s the result.

The next day, I decided I’d like to enhance it, so I pulled out Kleancolor Red Sparkle.  When I painted it over Ziv on my thumb, I found it was a stronger base than the green, so rather than a hint of red, it went bright red, but oh, so lovely because over the gold it has a foil look!  As pretty as that was, though, I wanted something more glitzy, so I added the Kleancolor Holiday Jingle and I decided to add some gold glitter, too, so I used Glamorous from the Wet’n’Wild Fergie collection.

Next, I decided that the current colour on my other nails would look fabulous peeking out from the red, so I grabbed my striping take and here’s what I came up with.  (The green glitter is showing through the coat of red.)

And I left the thumb as is.

I was very happy with the result and wound up wearing this for almost two weeks.  I was amazed at how well it  held up!

Here’s a closeup of all that lovely glitter on my thumbnail.

I took some photos in the late afternoon with my poinsettias and the lighting was a bit dark, but I liked the result so I thought I’d share them.

I still have a couple of Christmas manis to share, so I’ll try to get them up before Christmas.  (We’ll see if that works out!  lol)

Holiday Nails – A Bit of Glitter

Hi.  This is a really quick post because I should be wrapping gifts!  This is another simple holiday mani.

I used Color Club Ho-Ho-Holly, which is a lovely foil-like green with a gold shimmer.  Next, I used China Glaze Glitter All the Way lightly scattered on the tips.  This glitter is a lovely combination of purple, green, red, blue, and gold.

It was a beautiful combination with a lot of sparkle.  Here’s a slightly out of focus shot to show it off better.

Holiday Nails – A Bit of Sparkle

Hi.  The holidays are fast approaching and I have a few Christmas manicures to share.  This first one doesn’t even use any of my new holiday polishes.

I wanted to do something quick and simple, so I pulled out China Glaze Ruby Pumps.  I love the glitter in this.  I then used China Glace Snow Globe overtop to give a bit of sparkle.

Here are some more pictures.  You can only see a bit of the sparkle of Ruby Slippers.  It’s so much prettier in real life!

More to come over the next couple of days!