Showing posts with label guest. Show all posts
Showing posts with label guest. Show all posts

Monday, January 19, 2015

Deceived by L.A. Starkey - Guest Post and Giveaway

Today, I'm happy to be part of the tour for Deceived by L.A. Starkey. Please enjoy Laurie's post and enter the giveaway!


Book & Author details:

Deceived by L.A. Starkey
(Soul Keeper Series #1)
Publication date: August 28th 2014
Genres: Paranormal, Young Adult

Synopsis:
They say a soul is the immaterial essence, the animating principle, the actuating cause of an individual life.

But what if you had to share yours with the one person you hated the most?

The soul mate principle states that for every one soul there is another that will recognize its match, hence creating the perfect union.

But what if you had two soul mates, which would you choose?

What if your choices had eternal ramification?

Deceived, the debut novel in the Soul Keeper Series, is a modern day love story about the implications of having more than one soul mate, and having to choose between the two of them. The decisions of the gods has left the next generation, their heirs, torn between fate and reality, and the balance of the future hangs in anticipation of what’s to come.

Purchase

Today, Laurie talks about the difference in writing YA vs. Middle Grade books. Enjoy and don't forget to enter the giveaway at the end of the post!


Writing for Young Adults vs. Writing for Middle Grade

Let me start by giving encouragement to anyone who writes and then I’ll jump into my thoughts on MG vs YA seeing that I write for both groups. If you love to read a certain genre or enjoy jumping from MG to YA to YA to NA or Adult, then as a writer, don’t feel held back to choose which you’ll stick to. I know for promotions and things of that nature it’s a lot easier to gather a crowd around you if you only write one thing, but if your crowd or readers are anything like me? They like to read just about anything. There will always be room to expand into new audiences and groups, so write what you love with passion, because that passion will bleed through and everyone will feel it and see it in your work.

Okay! For me as a writer, that opening paragraph says it all. I’ve actually added New Adult (which is under my pen name Kate Thomas) to my listing too, my first book coming out this spring. I started as a YA writer, my Soul Keeper Series my first trilogy to write simply because I didn’t want to write sex scenes. I could write them and I’m thinking they would be good enough to make your grandmother blush if not you too, but I just wanted to stick to early romance… that first look and love, as well as having minimal cursing. I read a lot of YA for those reasons myself and I just feel like there is so much more focus on the plot and characterization overall.

I had two middle grade girls at the time I wrote Soul Keeper and realized that I wanted to write something fun for them, so I wrote my debut MG novel, Howl at the Moon. The funny thing is that I couldn’t get my male main character Ben’s voice out of my head when I wrote it, so I used him as the POV knowing that it might be fun for my girls and me to get into the head of a junior high boy. They are soooo comical as it is I figured being a tomboy myself and hella immature most days that I could pull it off. It was FUN and turned out great, though I might be a little bias.

I think the main difference between them is that MG is even more focused on the plot or adventure, the humor and common place settings that make sense to that age. There is a little first love type romance, but nothing more than hand holding and a kiss perhaps, but probably not in my opinion. YA is focused on the same things, but there is more weight on the relationship parts of the story, the adventure can be more complex and the diction can be increased to have more metaphors and a depth of emotion.

Let me know if you have any questions about either and I’m happy to give my opinion/experience.

Laurie


AUTHOR BIO:

Laurie Starkey is the author of the upcoming Soul Keeper Series, a supernatural young adult series, and The Liarus Detective Series, a supernatural middle grade series. She lives in Houston, Texas with her husband, Jacob and three beautiful kiddos.
She is a CPA by trade, a church planter and entrepreneur at heart; however, writing and reading are passions she just can’t help but indulge in. With more ideas than one person should be allowed, she is blessed to have a muse that doesn’t seem to take a vacation and more energy that one might consider healthy.

Connect with Laurie:


a Rafflecopter giveaway

For more info on the tour, please click the banner below:

(http://xpressobooktours.com/2014/11/03/tour-sign-up-deceived-by-l-a-starkey/
 

Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Author Interview - Brenda Corey Dunne, author of Dependent - and Giveaway

I'm so happy to have my writer friend Brenda Corey Dunne stop by today on her Blog Tour for the release of her new novel, Dependent.



When 45-year-old Ellen Michaels loses her husband to a tragic military
accident, she is left in a world of gray. For 25 years her life has been
dictated by the ubiquitous “They”—the military establishment that has
included her like chattel with John’s worldly goods—his dependents,
furniture, and effects. They—who have stolen her hopes, her dreams
and her innocence, and now in mere months will take away the roof
over her head. Ellen is left with nothing to hold on to but memories and
guilt, and an awful secret that has held her in its grip since she was 19.
John’s untimely death takes away her anchor, and now, without the
military, there is no one to tell her where to go, what to do—no one to
dictate who she is. Dependent deals with issues ever-present in today’s
service families—early marriage, frequent long absences, the culture of
rank, and post-traumatic stress, as well as harassment and abuse of
power by higher-ranking officials. It presents a raw and realistic view of
life for the lives of the invisible support behind the uniform!





Inspiration and Stumbling Blocks for DEPENDENT
By Brenda Corey Dunne

About ten years ago, I was an unemployed, stay-at-home mom and military spouse. I was happy, my kids were bright, my husband had a great job, and we were building a custom home in a lovely community just off of the base. 

I’m not sure what it was that made me step back and think about it, maybe it was a speech I did for our local health authority, maybe it was something I heard on the news, or maybe it was just a bad dream, but somehow around that time I realized that I had let everything that made me unique slide. I was no longer a physiotherapist, I no longer wore an Air Force uniform, my kids were growing and soon would be off to their own adventures, and where would that leave me?

At home supporting my husband and his career.

Don’t get me wrong, I am incredibly supportive of my husband’s Air Force career. I’m so proud of everything he does and would do anything to help him toward success. The same goes for my kids. But that day ten years ago I realized that the girl who graduated at the top of her high school class—that girl who had dreams and goals and so much potential—had somehow hidden herself behind the other things.  Behind the uniform. And happy as I was to be there at the time, I knew that it was a temporary emotion. Sooner or later my kids would move on. What if something happened to my husband?

It terrified me. It’s not something military spouses—or any spouse for that matter—want to think about. And that fear inspired me, for some crazy reason, to write down forty pages of a similar story, with no expectations of what it would become. It was like an exercise, a catharsis for me. Realizing that I needed to work to not only support the ones I love, but I needed to support myself.

The story I wrote was difficult, sad, disturbing. And I put it down many, many times because I simply couldn’t allow myself to go there, especially when I saw other friends and neighbours going through similar experiences after I had written them down. There were times when I’d sit and re-read the manuscript and burst into tears. But I kept picking away at it until 2012, when I forced myself—at the encouragement of a writing and military friend and with the help of NaNoWriMo—to finish writing it.

And now the little story that started out as a way to work through my own,  deeply personal fear will be my first traditionally published book. I hope other women read it and it inspires them to take their own steps toward supporting their own dreams.

Brenda

Dependent releases on July 29th. Find it here:


BRENDA COREY DUNNE, trained as a physiotherapist, worked several
years as a Physiotherapy Officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force before
meeting the love of her life, RCAF Colonel Tom Dunne, and becoming a
military dependent herself. Brenda currently resides on a small hobby
farm in Eastern Ontario, Canada, with her husband and three children.

Connect with Brenda online:
Twitter
Blog

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