Here’s me signing books at Ottawa’s Prose in the Park last week. I met some super interesting fellow authors and thoroughly enjoyed chatting to readers about the Embodied trilogy. Thanks to all those who came out!
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Awesome review!
Authors never read reviews of their books. No way, Jose. Not in a million years. But if ever they totally by accident stumble upon one, they sure hope the review looks like this one, that appeared today on the Silver Dagger Scriptorium website.
My first book tour!
Rather like one of my favourite literary characters, Don Quixote, I shall put on my suit of armour tomorrow morning and embark on a chivalrous quest, riding my trusty steed.
Okay, fine, just like the man from La Mancha, I’m letting my imagination get the better of me. But tomorrow morning I will drive my daughter to camp in my trusty Subaru and THEN… I shall be visiting the first of many stops on a month-long virtual tour of fantasy and science fiction book blogs.
Blog tours are a great way for a Young Adult author like me to get in touch with new readers and share some information about my books, my life and my writing. A tour is the online equivalent of travelling to a bunch of book stores across North America doing interviews and signing sessions.
During the tour, I’ll be promoting the new Embodied trilogy special edition ebook collection, which is out tomorrow. As the name suggests, it’s a 3-in-1 version of the entire series. But that’s not all! The reason it’s a special edition is that it also includes deleted scenes (basically an alternate ending) from Diamond Splinters, as well as a brand new foreword with author insights and a fun quiz/treasure hunt. As a bonus deal, for the duration of the tour, the trilogy ebook’s retail price is 20% off ($7.99 instead of $9.99).
Here’s the full tour schedule with details of what you can expect at each stop along the way. Thank you to the awesome Roxanne Rhoads at Bewitching Book Tours for organizing the whole thing. More dates may be added along the way. Now to grab my sword and shield…
July 11 Spotlight Share My Destiny http://sharemydestiny.blogspot.com July 12 Interview Deal Sharing Aunt http://dealsharingaunt.blogspot.com/ July 13 Interview Roxanne’s Realm http://www.roxannerhoads.com/ July 14 Interview and review Happy Tails and Tales Blog http://happytailsandtales.blogspot.com July 15 Spotlight 3 Partners in Shopping, Nana, Mommy, and Sissy, Too! http://3partnersinshopping.blogspot.com/ July 18 Interview Fang-tastic Books http://fang-tasticbooks.blogspot.com/ July 19 Spotlight Lisa’s World of Books http://www.lisasworldofbooks.net/ July 20 Spotlight Zenny's Awesome Book Reviews https://zennysawesomebookreviews.wordpress.com/ July 22 Interview Urban Fantasy Investigations http://urbanfantasyinvestigations.blogspot.com/ July 25 Guest Blog/Top Ten List The Creatively Green Write at Home Mom http://creativelygreen.blogspot.com/ July 27 Interview Sharon Buchibinder http://sharonbuchbinder.blogspot.com/ July 28 Spotlight JeanzBookReadNReview http://jeanzbookreadnreview.blogspot.co.uk/ July 29 Review Romance Authors That Rock https://pratr.wordpress.com/ August 1 Spotlight and review The Silver Dagger Scriptorium http://silver-dagger-scriptorium.weebly.com/ August 2 Interview The Violent Vixen theviolentvixen.blogspot.com August 3Interview Diane’s Book Blog http://dianes-book.blogspot.com August 4 Interview House of Books http://www.house-of-books.com August 5 Spotlight Ramblings of a book nerd www.booknerdramblings.com August 8 Spotlight T's Stuff http://teresanoel.blogspot.com/
I said it would be out next month. I lied.
It’s what fiction writers do, see? We lie. And the paperback version of Diamond Splinters is already available from Amazon right here even though I promised it would be out next month.
Next up, a single-volume collection of the entire trilogy. Promise…
The Embodied trilogy is complete!
If you’ve been waiting to find out what happens to Kari Marriner and the people she loves, wait no more! Diamond Splinters, book 3 of the Embodied trilogy, is out today. Available in paperback next month, you can buy the ebook right now for Kindle here, for Apple iOS devices here, for the Barnes & Noble Nook ereader here, and for Kobo here.
Please take a couple of minutes to leave a short review (I really want to hear readers’ thoughts!) on whichever site you purchased Diamond Splinters. Thanks!
A title. A cover. A compliment.
The publication date of the final installment in the Embodied trilogy has been set for May 5, and today I’m revealing both the cover and the title. Drum roll, please…
In Diamond Splinters, prep school senior Kari Marriner has a heart-wrenching choice to make: rescue her mother or prevent aliens destroying the Earth. The cover by designer extraordinaire Alex Nereuta shows the two men in Kari’s life who are inextricably wrapped up in her adventure: her boyfriend and fellow student Cruz, and the other-worldly Noon, leader of the Temple of Truth.
In my last post I put out a public call for input on which title to choose from the following options: The Diamond Sphere, Diamond Splinters, and Diamond Scars. In the end it was a close call between the latter two but Splinters won out. You’ll have to read the book to discover what the spheres, scars, and splinters are all about!
An early reader of Diamond Splinters has already given me a huge compliment by saying, “Kari is a total feminist badass. Diamond Splinters is YA for a fun, independent brainy chick into saving the universe.”
If you’re into smart urban fantasy/science fiction, then Diamond Splinters is for you, whether you’re a young adult, man or woman. Or alien.
Punctuation rules!
This is pretty awesome. Also awesomely pretty. Now you can see what books look like with all the words removed and only the punctuation marks remaining. The author of this article compares different works by famous authors, with some astonishing results.
Science fiction becomes science fact
Just a short post because I’ve been terribly busy editing my upcoming book. Today’s momentous news about the detection of gravitational waves originally predicted by Einstein is a huge milestone in the history of science. I read a couple of articles on it, one of them in Canada’s Globe and Mail. The article quotes MIT astrophysicist Nergis Mavalvala saying, “We have turned on a new sense. We have been able to see and now we will be able to hear as well.”
What almost made me fall off my chair was his first sentence. Why? Because he said a new sense and one of my novels is called The New Sense. No biggie, you might think, quelle coincidence… But the title refers to a sense that one of the main characters claims to have, and that sense is… the ability to detect gravity!
Mind therefore officially blown. Maybe my superpower is predicting scientific discoveries, who knows?
A single-minded bookstore
According to this article in The Guardian just before Christmas, there’s a bookshop in Japan that only stocks one book at a time – some classics, some contemporary works.
Owner Yoshiyuki Morioka explains how he came up with the concept: “Before opening this bookstore in Ginza, I had been running another one in Kayabacho for 10 years. There, I had around 200 books as stock, and used to organise several book launches per year. During such events, a lot of people visited the store for the sake of a single book. As I experienced this for some time, I started to believe that perhaps with only one book, a bookstore could be managed.”
This is pretty much as close to being the anti-Amazon as it gets!
Neil Gaiman demystifies writer’s block
Who hasn’t been there? The blank page. The blinking cursor. The author’s horrifically empty torture chamber: writer’s block.
Neil Gaiman in a snuggly sweater
Well, according to Neil Gaiman, best-selling author of the Sandman comic book series, Coraline and many more super-imaginative works of fiction, writer’s block is just as much a fiction as anything else that pours out of an author’s mind. In this fascinating interview on the Goodreads website, he talks about how his ambition as a writer has evolved over the years and offers these pearls of wisdom about the dreaded you-know-what (shhhh… don’t say it out loud or it might come true!):
Writer’s block is this thing that is sent from the gods—you’ve offended them. You’ve trod on a crack on the pavement, and you’re through. The gods have decided. It’s not true. What is really true is you can have a bad day. You can have a bad week. You can get stuck. But what I learned when I was under deadline is that if you write on the bad days, even if you’re sure everything you’ve written is terrible, when you come to it tomorrow and you reread it, most of it’s fixable. It may not be the greatest thing you’ve ever written, but you fix it, and actually it’s a lot better than you remember it being. And the weird thing is a year later when you’re copyediting and reading the galleys through for the first time in months, you can remember that some of it was written on bad days. And you can remember that some of it was written on terrific days. But it all reads like you. Fantastic stuff doesn’t necessarily read better than the stuff written on the bad days. Writers have to be like sharks. We keep moving forward, or we die.
So on that note, here’s a toast to all the other authors out there: have lots of fun over the holiday season and then sit at your desk and work. Cheers!
Photo credit: Lvovsky via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND
