Tantra Bensko's Blog
November 23, 2018
Returning to Goodreads
There's only so many places a gal can blog. . . But here I come, to save the day!
When my earlier books and stories in anthologies were listed here, they tended to be Literary and Interstitial fiction. I had extremely wide publication, but over the years, I've stopped writing the genres I used to do.
Psychological Suspense, Psychological Thrillers, Romantic Suspense, Gothic, Seductive Psychological Suspense -- these are my predominant genres in recent years. I won awards like the Reader's Favorite gold medal in a major international contest.
Book 1 in The Agents of the Nevermind series is Glossolalia -- What if your subconscious determined the fate of nations?
Book 2 is Remember to Recycle - What if the homeless man going through your recycling bins knows more about your life than you do? Like who is going to die.
Book 3 is Encore -- Hypnotized to believe she's his wife, and abducted to a castle. Can Colin save her, even though she is told he's a crazed murderer?
Give Encore a try! Like the other novels, it's received high praise, such as Literary Titan giving it a Gold Book Award. It's compared to Rebecca, Wuthering Heights and Gaslight. The friends to lovers romance is intense, desperate, feral and mystical. And it delves into the historical juxtaposition of espionage and the occult.
The next book due out is not in the series, but it does combine Romantic Suspense with a twist of Gothic and Psychological Suspense. Floating on Secrets. The woman floating in the sensory deprivation tank is not alone. Not at all.
When my earlier books and stories in anthologies were listed here, they tended to be Literary and Interstitial fiction. I had extremely wide publication, but over the years, I've stopped writing the genres I used to do.
Psychological Suspense, Psychological Thrillers, Romantic Suspense, Gothic, Seductive Psychological Suspense -- these are my predominant genres in recent years. I won awards like the Reader's Favorite gold medal in a major international contest.
Book 1 in The Agents of the Nevermind series is Glossolalia -- What if your subconscious determined the fate of nations?
Book 2 is Remember to Recycle - What if the homeless man going through your recycling bins knows more about your life than you do? Like who is going to die.
Book 3 is Encore -- Hypnotized to believe she's his wife, and abducted to a castle. Can Colin save her, even though she is told he's a crazed murderer?
Give Encore a try! Like the other novels, it's received high praise, such as Literary Titan giving it a Gold Book Award. It's compared to Rebecca, Wuthering Heights and Gaslight. The friends to lovers romance is intense, desperate, feral and mystical. And it delves into the historical juxtaposition of espionage and the occult.
The next book due out is not in the series, but it does combine Romantic Suspense with a twist of Gothic and Psychological Suspense. Floating on Secrets. The woman floating in the sensory deprivation tank is not alone. Not at all.
May 22, 2017
Everything has changed
Time isn't what it used to be. I've been away from Goodreads for three years. Goodness!
Publishers kept putting out my stories and books, a combination of Literary and a variety of genres.
A publisher accepted a novel and then dropped the ball. Another publisher was interested in putting out a series. I wrote a series. Called the Agents of the Nevermind, Psychological Suspense Thrillers. They dropped the ball too. The books are about our current world. Time was of the wastin'.
I stopped sending manuscripts out and started Insubordinate Books, a new imprint of the publishing company with which I'd put out people's Literary chapbooks. I took matters into my own hands.
Glossolalia, the first book in the Psychological Suspense series, The Agents of the Nevermind, has garnered forty six reviews at this point, in spite of how Amazon has taken down surely twenty others at this point, for no reason I know of. It was published July 10 2016.
March 30, 2017, the second book came out -- Remember to Recycle. It also is received well, with a 4.8 average of twenty reviews on Amazon, a Recommended status (which happens around ten percent of the time with The US Review of Books) and a five star review from Publishers Daily Reviews. Both books could also be labeled Conspiracy Thrillers, Political Thrillers, and Suspense Thrillers.
I appreciate all the people who continue to publish my work, even though I haven't made public the last several stories published like I should have. After so many, I guess I finally got burned out. I drafted a book called How to Get Hundreds of Short Stories in Magazines and Anthologies. But though I teach short story writing regularly with UCLA Extension, Writing.com and elsewhere, and love reading my students' work, it was time to focus on the series for the time being, and come back to that later.
Probably before that one, I'll put out How to Write a Gothic Novel, a very thorough manual I'm finishing up now. It will accompany the next novel in the series. Every book has other categories as well it could go in besides Psychological Suspense.
Encore is Gothic. I'm revising it now. I extensively revise each book in the several book series before releasing it. Some of my published stories are Gothic, as is the novella, though it's very mentally challenging, convoluted metaphysical innovation.
The next one is more SF.
So, that's catching up anyone who happens to be interested in my progress from primarily experimental fiction gal to more traditionally plotted genre fiction. I made the required change of personality consciously, and was surprised how possible it was to do. Who knew?
Publishers kept putting out my stories and books, a combination of Literary and a variety of genres.
A publisher accepted a novel and then dropped the ball. Another publisher was interested in putting out a series. I wrote a series. Called the Agents of the Nevermind, Psychological Suspense Thrillers. They dropped the ball too. The books are about our current world. Time was of the wastin'.
I stopped sending manuscripts out and started Insubordinate Books, a new imprint of the publishing company with which I'd put out people's Literary chapbooks. I took matters into my own hands.
Glossolalia, the first book in the Psychological Suspense series, The Agents of the Nevermind, has garnered forty six reviews at this point, in spite of how Amazon has taken down surely twenty others at this point, for no reason I know of. It was published July 10 2016.
March 30, 2017, the second book came out -- Remember to Recycle. It also is received well, with a 4.8 average of twenty reviews on Amazon, a Recommended status (which happens around ten percent of the time with The US Review of Books) and a five star review from Publishers Daily Reviews. Both books could also be labeled Conspiracy Thrillers, Political Thrillers, and Suspense Thrillers.
I appreciate all the people who continue to publish my work, even though I haven't made public the last several stories published like I should have. After so many, I guess I finally got burned out. I drafted a book called How to Get Hundreds of Short Stories in Magazines and Anthologies. But though I teach short story writing regularly with UCLA Extension, Writing.com and elsewhere, and love reading my students' work, it was time to focus on the series for the time being, and come back to that later.
Probably before that one, I'll put out How to Write a Gothic Novel, a very thorough manual I'm finishing up now. It will accompany the next novel in the series. Every book has other categories as well it could go in besides Psychological Suspense.
Encore is Gothic. I'm revising it now. I extensively revise each book in the several book series before releasing it. Some of my published stories are Gothic, as is the novella, though it's very mentally challenging, convoluted metaphysical innovation.
The next one is more SF.
So, that's catching up anyone who happens to be interested in my progress from primarily experimental fiction gal to more traditionally plotted genre fiction. I made the required change of personality consciously, and was surprised how possible it was to do. Who knew?
