CALLING HOME (A Destiny's Child Book): What it's all about!

Hey beautiful people

My name is Zee Monodee, and I've been a Noble Romance author for some 8-9 months now (my first release, Walking The Edge - Corpus Brides: Book One, allowed me to score a Hot New Talent slot with Noble, for which I'll be eternally grateful!) ...

... and today, my second book with Noble came out, titled Calling Home (A Destiny's Child Book), and it's a sweet romance novel about an uptight forensic pathologist, a young and handsome village doctor, and the tween girl who brings them together.

There's so much I can tell you about this story, but let me ask you a question:

Have you ever desired something, more than your own life?

Now what if you got that something, loved it, cherished it, built your life around it ... to then have it snatched out of your grasp?

Your world is dark, bleak, without meaning ... so you shatter inside, but keep a strong front going on, because you need the world to believe you are bucking up and holding on...

And then, through a twist of Fate, when your life never looked bleaker, when you have convinced everyone, including yourself, that your strong front is unbreachable...

You get that something back...!

Wouldn't that spin you on your axis, take the world you've carefully crafted and crash it to shards? What becomes of you in this whole maelstrom? How do you cope?

All these questions, my heroine, Margo Nolan, faces them. All Margo ever wanted was to care for Emma, the baby she was bringing up like her own. But Fate snatched the child away, and Margo made do. She built her life, threw herself into her job, became a force to be reckoned with in her field. Aligning herself upon her job protocol helped - as a forensic pathologist, she knows that "...emotion is something foreign; cold, rational facts and proof guide everything. Brain over heart, always ..."

And then emotion slams home, the day Margo lands custody of the daughter of heart, the one she had to give up!

But hasn't she moved to an irreversible point now, squelching her heart so much that she doesn't know the meaning of 'feeling' any longer?

What about the woman in her, the one she also never allowed to the fore? What if she decides to make a play for existence... when Margo meets the handsome, sexy - and much younger! - village doctor, Jamie Gillespie?

Thankfully for Margo, Jamie steps into her and Emma's lives, and starts them on the path to a true, 'feeling' mother and daughter relationship. And it appears the cute doctor is also smitten with Margo...

Will she give in... trust in her heart... finally be calling home?

Catch the answer to all these questions in a copy of the book, available here on the Noble Romance website!

Here's a snippet from Chapter 1:

Chapter One

Emotion is something foreign; cold, rational facts and proof drive everything. Brain over heart, always.

Every forensic pathologist knew his or her work boiled down to that line of conduct, and Margo Nolan lived her life by the principles of her job. Emotion used to be an unfamiliar concept most of the time, except for the rare occasions when the pain would tear through her, when she was unable to tamp the suffering into submission. Pain, the sharp, visceral, abject torture that gripped her every time she thought of Emma, during all those years she was away from the daughter of her heart. Lately, pain sliced through her every time her gaze landed on the pretty girl, fast blossoming into a beautiful young woman.

How many years we've lost . . . . If only I'd sought her out . . . .

But she couldn't—shouldn't—think of that then. No—there were more pressing matters at hand.

Margo's feet slowed in the lobby that also served as Dr. Gillespie's waiting room. He was the only doctor in the little village, Camberry, just outside London in the county of Surrey, where Emma, and lately Margo, too, lived. Like most country doctors, he operated his practice from his house. Emma had been sick at school that day, and had been sent to see him.

Under Margo's stilettos, the wood planks of the big Victorian manor didn't even creak or groan—strange, as old houses always had a telltale creak or two in the parquet. Or maybe her step remained light enough not to evoke any sound from the dark surface, worn smooth from years of foot traffic in that very lobby. No place echoed the click-clack of high heels louder than a morgue. Margo had learned how to keep her tread soft under any circumstance. Despite the high-gleam polish on the wood, her feet didn't skid on the glossy surface as she glided, more than walked, across the boards. Whiffs of beeswax and lemon wood polish tickled her nostrils—a completely different scent from the usual sterile tang and formaldehyde-permeated atmosphere at the morgue.

Margo stopped at the doorway that led into the anteroom to the doctor's office. Her gaze lingered on Emma, asleep on a high-backed, plush sofa. In slumber, the girl's dainty features still showed the sweetness of childhood. So very much the likeness of the chubby-cheeked cherub with corkscrew, auburn curls Margo had had to leave seven years ago—
Don't!

Today she was back with Emma, trying her damndest to bridge the gap between ages four and eleven, the time she hadn't been there for the girl. Not by choice—

Stop!

Margo straightened when a dark, looming shadow crept up on the tween. All her senses shot on high alert; she bristled, and her hands closed into fists.

The man, tall and imposing in the semi-darkness, bent and placed a hand on Emma's forehead.

Who on Earth is he? And why is he touching her?

"What do you think you're doing?" Margo crossed the distance to stand between her daughter and the stranger. She shouldered him aside, before folding her body protectively over the top of the armchair.

Her gaze raked over him, taking in the faded, threadbare-at-the-knees jeans, the hint of a dark T-shirt under the baggy, slate-grey jumper with a hoodie that obscured his face.

Who is this hooligan? What's he doing here?


*** End of excerpt ***


Catch the rest of Chapter 1, and your very own copy of the book, on the Noble website!

Thanks for having allowed me to share my big day with you today!

From Mauritius with love,

Zee

It's October aka Breast Cancer Awareness Month!

by Zee Monodee

Hello beautiful people!

I hope you're all doing good and life is shining bright. It's October, and there's something I wanted to share with you.

Most of you here are women - after all, who read and who write romance mostly? Women, right? I know there are some blokes on board too (amazing fellas, btw!), and these guys have women in their lives - wives, girlfriends, sisters, daughters, female friends.

So it's October, and as you probably know, this is the month for Breast Cancer Awareness. I am a two-time survivor of breast cancer, and there's nothing I want more than to help other women and prevent them from having to go through what I went through. I'm not asking for sympathy, but when you're prepared to face a situation, you're much better off than someone who is clueless - as I was before the disease struck me, first time in a total back-stabbing move; second time as a slap in the face that I managed to block because I as armed with the information.

Let's start with some common stuff most women (usually over 30) know about breast cancer:

• It happens after you turn 40.
• It happens after menopause.
• If there is a history of breast cancer in your family, get yourself checked.
• If you're on the pill, the risk for breast cancer increases.
• Have a mammogram every 3 years after 30, yearly after 40.
• To have breast cancer, there needs to have a family history of it.
• The more excess weight you carry, the higher your risk of getting breast cancer (especially after 40 and/or menopause) 

All of this is true, to a certain extent, but this is just the tip of the iceberg where breast cancer is really concerned!

I knew all about these aspects of breast cancer - especially the "after 40" aspect. Hadn't "heard" about them as there didn't seem to be any awareness campaign 10-15 years ago, but read about them online (thanks to newsletters of women-oriented sites like iVillage.com and sofeminine.co.uk). I'm also one of those anal 'patients' who reads all the literature about any drug I take, thus I knew there was a risk when taking the pill because I read that small sheet with the kill-your-eyes small font. I knew there was a family history on my mother's side, but I always glossed over any aspect after hearing/seeing "after 40" in the literature.

I thought I knew. I thought I was covered. I thought I had time (I was in my early twenties).

How wrong I was! It took me finding a solid, golf-ball sized lump in my left breast to drive it all home. I had celebrated my 22nd birthday a week earlier. That's when I fell on any information about breast cancer I could find, and helped along by my terrific oncologist answering my every nit-picky question, I found a picture that is most of the time hidden.

Let's take some of those common knowledge stuff listed above.

It happens after 40.
Not necessarily. It depends what type of cancer - estrogen-receptor positive or estrogen-receptor negative (more on that in a minute). Most women are more at risk of the estrogen-linked cancer than the rest.

It happens after menopause.
Again, largely due to the estrogen receptor. A big catalyst of the 'after menopause' debate is the use of Hormone-Replacement Therapy.

If there's a history of breast cancer in your family, get yourself checked.
Only too true! Breast cancer in the family is the genetic type of cancer, the one that gets passed on through genes. A mutation in specific genes, BRCA-1 and BRCA-2, is responsible for the cancer trigger. And these don't heed age - they won't wait until you're over 40 to strike! (as it was the case with me).

If you're on the pill, the risk for breast cancer increases.
True - but again this is the estrogen-receptor positive type of breast cancer that comes into play.

Have a mammogram every 3 years after 30, yearly after 40.
True - prevention is better than cure. But a mammogram is not prevention enough, not even yearly, at any age! I'll tell you why shortly.

To have breast cancer, there needs to be a family history of it.
Yes, and no. Furthermore, do you know your whole family history?

The more excess weight you carry, the higher your risk of getting breast cancer (especially after 40 and/or menopause)
That's because estrogen is stored inside body fat cells, so the more fat you carry, that's like sitting on a keg of gunpowder with a lit fuse in hand, waiting for it to blow into your face.

Let me explain some more.

So there is a difference between breast cancer brought on by hormonal changes (estrogen. No need for me to tell you estrogen and progesterone are the main female hormones. Pills and hormone-replacement therapy work on altering the level of these hormones in the body to get the desired outcome, ex prevent pregnancy in the former's case), and breast cancer brought on by genetic mutation.

A cancer is basically cells growing too quickly especially where they shouldn't. The difference between breast cancer brought on by estrogen (thus which has estrogen-receptors positive) and one brought on by genes (estrogen-receptor negative) is the development and proliferation rate of the abnormal cells. A genetic-type cancer is many times more rapid and more aggressive than one brought on by hormones.

So then we know that hormone-type cancer's risk increases the minute you go over 40 (your body preparing to go into menopause, even if that if still a decade away). Genes do not wait for you to turn 40.
Which is why having a mammogram every 3 years after 30 and yearly after 40 is not prevention enough if it happens that a genetic-type cancer hits you. With a gene-mutation cancer, a lump can develop overnight, and double or even treble in size over 1-2 weeks (it was the case for me. Between the day the lump was noticed and the 5 days after which it was removed, it had nearly doubled in size!). You can thus have your mammogram in January, the cancer declares itself in February, and in March it has already hit your lymph nodes and spread.

Then what do you do, if mammograms are not prevention enough? Simple - you take matters into your own hand, literally! No one knows your body as well as you do.
Breast self-exam is your biggest pro-active shield towards recognizing breast cancer!
Ideally, this exam should be done 10 days or so into your cycle. But it has become painfully aware, to me, that a lump will not wait for Day 10 of the cycle to happen. Carry out the exam more often than just once a month, if you can.

Now you can tell me I'm blowing hot air over genetic-type breast cancer and there is no history of breast cancer in your family. Fine - but do you know your full family history? Maybe someone had it but didn't advertise it. Maybe one of your ancestors had breast cancer in the 1800s or in the 1900s - the gene might be there, silent for generations, and then bingo, it decides you're the lucky winner for it to become activated!

The final line - better be safe than sorry! Be aware of your own health, and take your well-being into your own hands, whatever your age! Where I live, on the island of Mauritius, I was considered an anomaly 6.5 years ago when I was diagnosed the first time, at 22. Fast-forward to today, and girls as young as 13 are having lumpectomies, and at 15, malignant breast cancer that requires a radical mastectomy (where the whole breast and underarm lymph nodes are removed!), followed by aggressive chemotherapy and radiation therapy.

A breast self-exam takes 15 minutes tops, and the more you do it, the more attuned you become to your body. 15 minutes now and then, regularly, is not a heavy price to pay compared to cancer, the hours of worry, the agony of surgery and recovery, the hell of chemotherapy treatment, the torture of radiation therapy, and if you had estrogen-receptor-positive breast cancer, the plight of hormonal therapy that puts you into a simulated menopause no matter your age!

Do your self-exam. Get a mammogram yearly. Get regular check-ups with your gynecologist. Breast cancer caught early has an almost 100% survival rate.

To the women reading this, I ask you to please heed my words. To the men reading this, please forward this post/information to the women in your lives (and note that less than 1% of men are at risk of developing breast cancer!)

1 in 9 women will develop breast cancer.
Nearly a third of all new cancers in women over the past decade are breast cancers.
It is estimated that 1.38 million women worldwide are/have been diagnosed with breast cancer.

Please share this information (FB this post, Tweet/RT this link, post a link on your blog, print it and distribute to your loved ones).

And since this is the Noble Authors' Blog, I've been told I can also take the opp to shamelessly promote my Hot New Talent NRP release, the romantic suspense title Walking The Edge (Corpus Brides: Book One), available at the total steal-deal price of $1.99 at the NRP site. :)

Share this post, and let me know. Anyone who leaves a comment is eligible to win a copy of Walking The Edge through a random draw I'll carry out on Saturday.

Don't let me down - I beg you to please spread the word about breast cancer. You don't know whose life you could end up saving.

From Mauritius with love,

Zee

Walking The Edge: Of secrets and suspense...

Hello everyone

My name is Zee and I write suspense-- Stop right there! I do? You'd be stumped to know I'm the first one surprised! I generally write romance, at least, I set out to write romance. How this turns out is sometimes out of my hands. Like what happened with Walking The Edge (Corpus Brides: Book One) , my debut release with Noble Romance that came out on June 30.

So what happened where that story is concerned is that I had a heroine with amnesia. To me, that spelt out "Secrets hiding in her closet". And there's nothing that looks more like bait to my curious mind than secrets!

I just have to think about this - some of my favourite movies are driven by the secrets that the heart of the plot. In Unknown, Liam Neeson's character ends up with amnesia after an accident in Berlin, and suddenly the woman he recalls as his wife claims she doesn't know who he is. What secret is she hiding? What's lurking inside his mind?
Same goes for Jason Bourne's character (played by Matt Damon) in the Bourne trilogy - what secrets lurk inside his blank mind, after he is pulled out of the water by fishermen off the coast of France?
In Salt, Evelyn Salt (played by Angelina Jolie) is told by a Russian dissident that she is in fact a double agent. Salt does not remember that - it's a secret. How, and why?

Is it a surprise all those movies are suspense? And when you combine this to the fact that I write romance, I ended up with... romantic suspense, of course!

Secrets have spurred me on the journey to writing this book. Secrets, that I uncovered along with my heroine throughout the story, have fuelled the pace and tone of this book. I know of no greater catalyst and spru-into-action springboard than secrets, and these are rife in a memory that has been wiped clean.

Come find out what secrets lie inside my heroine, Amelia's, past. See what she'll discover about herself. The novel is on sale at the bargain price of $1.99, and that's a steal, if you'll allow me to say so. :)

And here's the blurb:

Walking the edge: The next step might be the last...

A woman without a past
Left amnesiac after an accident, Amelia Jamison struggles as her instincts slowly rise from the depths of oblivion, leading her to question her life as the wife of a cold, manipulating and distant man. Wisps of a dream show her another man she may have known intimately, but is he a memory, or a figment of her imagination?

A man with too much information
After many aliases, today Gerard Besson is simply a police commissaire in Marseille. When a mysterious woman starts to follow him, he is suspicious - and intrigued. But things aren't what they seem, and as he reluctantly gets closer to her, dregs of his painful, buried past emerge and make him question her identity.

Each seems to have led several different lives
But neither is prepared for what awaits them when they cross the fine line between knowing your true self and that of your alter ego.

Danger is the name of the game, and as it catches up with them in the French Provence, both know they better be ready for the inevitable fall.

You can find the book here.

From Mauritius with love,

Zee

What cold medication, SpongeBob, & Angelina Jolie have in common...

Hello everyone!

My name is Zee Monodee, and I recently joined the amazing Noble Romance Publishing house as part of the Hot New Talent program (feels all funky to see my name listed up there *grins*). I'm 28, married, mum to a tween hellion, addicted to Supernatural-- and I'll go back to the real purpose of this post before I bore you to death.

So, intrigued by the title question up there? Some might say they all put you to sleep, but then too, there's good to be ascribed to sleep. Especially when it generates new stories.

All three of the above have played a part in my story coming together. My romantic suspense-slash-mystery-slash-thriller, Walking The Edge (Corpus Brides: Book One), will be coming out with Noble Romance on June 27, under the Foreign Affairs imprint.

Now what on earth do cold medication, SpongeBob, and Angelina Jolie have in common with a romantic suspense-slash-mystery-slash-thriller? Let me explain, and for this, I need to tell you a bit more about the book.

I've always loved a good amnesia storyline. What does this past that the character cannot remember hold? What secrets hide in those darkened depths? I knew this was the starting point of my story - an amnesic heroine, who wakes up from a coma and knows -just knows - that something is off with the world her 'husband' wants her to live in.

What lurks in her forgotten memories? I'll admit that I hit a brick wall here. What was the husband's deal? Why the secrecy? How not to make this into a soap opera? By now I was halfway through a draft, and I shelved the story because it wasn't going any further.

Fast forward to few months later - it's now August, and where I live, the heart of winter (southern hemisphere, tropical island by the name of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean. Yes, we do have winter in the tropics *grin*). My town is very much like England - always cold, always rainy, so winter months are spent inside. Not really helpful for your sanity when your kids go on winter break, and you're stuck with them 24/7 inside four walls. Add to this that you catch the cold of the century, and you're stuck in bed with fever, endless sniffles, kinks and pain in your body - you get the picture. Sleep is very welcome then - except that you cannot sleep, because there's a kid at home that you have to watch.

Enter the cold medication. Real good stuff - knocks your cold off in 3 days tops. Not to mention that it also knocks your socks and brain off too in the process. I would be out cold within half an hour of a dose, and then I would dream. When I'd wake up, everything would be hazy... and on a few occasions, my husband had to ask me what I was talking about because, you see, my dreams had felt so real I was experiencing deja vu when I was awake.

Eureka moment! I suddenly knew what it was like to lose all your bearings, to question your reality, to second guess yourself and doubt your husband's words when he goes, "honey, nothing like what you mention has ever happened."
And guess what? This is exactly what Amelia, the heroine from Walking The Edge, feels like when she wakes up with amnesia and goes to live with her husband in their posh Hampstead Heath home in London.

I got the trigger point of dreams - highly lucid visualisations that make Amelia question her reality. What if the dreams were real, as in, fragments of her shattered memory? And what happens when they don't equate at all the 'reality' her husband wants her to believe in?

Enter SpongeBob. A SpongeBob GameBoy cartridge, actually. I'm an imperfect and perfectly-flawed mother, and my idea of school break babysitter is a new game cartridge. Anyhow, my kid is the kind who can conjure chaos in 10 seconds flat - I always need to have him close to me. Which is how I find myself drifting between reality and la-la-land (courtesy of the cold meds), to the background score of the SpongeBob Volcano Island video game.

Anyone familiar with the yellow sponge here? You'll know he is extremely annoying. The music on his video game is none less brain-bashing. One tune in particular, on a level my son was stuck on for days, kept playing over and over here. So much so that after a while, I could hear that tune in my head even when it was switched off. It did have a rapid, catchy pace to it, that escalated to a mind-numbing climax. Thanks to my cold meds, guess what sound became the background score of my dreams and daydreams about the story? You guessed it - SpongeBob.

So now I had my starting point. I had my pace, and I knew it all escalates to a climax. The big question was - why? Why is the husband so intent on having her drugged? What does he want to hide? What doesn't he want her to remember?

And what if the clue to her past lies in Amelia's dreams of the past, in the guise of this gorgeous Frenchman she sees in bed with her when she closes her eyes?

Back to my own reality, on the day I manage to tear myself from my bed to plop down on the couch, it so happens that my husband is watching this movie, Wanted, starring Angelina Jolie. Not my cup of tea usually, such movies, but hey, anything is better than listening to SpongeBob. So I sit down and watch this story about a total nobody (played by James McAvoy) who is told that he must avenge his father's murder, and the person who will train him is this kick-ass, no-nonsense, gun-wielding chick played by Angelina Jolie (that was long before her Salt days!).

And Eureka again! Amelia in Walking The Edge should be a kick-ass, no-nonsense, edgy chick a la Angelina-in-Wanted too.

From here on, I slid into Amelia's psyche, walked in her shoes, saw the world through her eyes and the limited frame of reference she had to process everything because of her amnesia. When she wondered that the Frenchman from the dreams could have the key to her memory, I cut and run along with her to Marseille, the old city on the Mediterranean coast. I met this man, Gerard Besson as he is called, at the same time Amelia comes across him in the flesh, finally.

Together, Amelia and Gerard took me on a journey through Marseille to find out who she really is. Start to finish, I had this story's first draft down in exactly 13 days. I wrote for every minute I was awake - I became Amelia. Along the way, with her, my heart broke, sang, took a few hits, found a safe harbour... and found the truth.

What was the truth, you ask? Ah, this I cannot say. Not yet. Why don't you catch Amelia directly, on June 27, to find out what her story is when Walking The Edge (Corpus Brides: Book One) comes out?

I hope I have managed to give you a glimpse of what an incredible ride it has been to put this story together.

From Mauritius with love,

Zee

Catch me on the Web at the following places:
Blog - http://zeemonodee.blogspot.com/
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