Wednesday, September 30, 2015

#Review: THE KING'S SISTERS by Sarah Kennedy



  3 of 5 stars


In The King's Sisters author Sarah Kennedy once again brings us back to Tudor England and the fate that has befallen Catherine Havens Overton. Catherine is a wealthy widow serving at Richmond Palace in the house of Beloved Sister Anne of Cleves. It's 1542 and Henry's young queen Catherine Howard has been beheaded for treason. Suspicion and danger hang on every word and in every corner, but Catherine is in more peril than most as she hides a secret. She has attracted the attention of the power hungry Martin David Martins and she must use her wit to stay one step ahead of the foul man.

I have read The Altarpiece, the book that introduced us to Catherine Havens and thoroughly enjoyed it. This third book, however, dragged considerably at the beginning. I understand that the mood of the house and that of England had to be conveyed, but nothing really happened until 40% into the book. Snippets of what had happened to Catherine since the first book were revealed and I think if I had read City of Ladies, I would have been more invested in Catherine's character. When the action finally started, my interest in Catherine's fate was piqued. Without going into any spoilers about the fate of the characters, I was not pleased that this book ended on another cliff hanger. 

Ms. Kennedy clearly has researched Tudor England well and while I appreciated that, I was not very interested in the day-to-day drudgery of the kitchen maids which took up too much of the beginning of the story. I would recommend reading both of the previous books before reading this one as it will allow the reader to fully immerse oneself into Tudor England.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Amazon buy link:
TBA

The Altarpiece
Amazon buy link:
http://www.amazon.com/Altarpiece-Cross-Crown-Sarah-Kennedy-ebook/dp/B00BPTY0PG/ref=twoen-20 

City of Ladies
Amazon buy link:
http://www.amazon.com/City-Ladies-Cross-Crown-Book-ebook/dp/B00PHG1RTU/ref=twoen-20 


#Excerpt: DOS ANGELES by Michael O'Hara


Excerpt:
Shining her light through the opening she saw what appeared to be a fully equipped home office. It had a desk with a computer, a printer, a multi-line phone system and custom-built shelving holding an array of accordion files and cardboard storage boxes. On entering she found an illuminated light switch she quickly turned on.

With the room now brightly lit by a series of overhead spots, the first thing she noticed was one of the storage boxes had fallen off a shelf and it was lying face down on the carpeted floor. Alongside it was a banded stack of dollar bills. Turning over the box Maria was shocked to see it was filled with more wrapped bundles of cash. But the bills weren’t ones—they were all hundred dollar Benjamins.

Almost tripping in her haste to see what was in the other boxes, she took another down, placed it on the floor and quickly removed its fitted lid. It, too, was filled with packets of hundred dollar bills. Like a pirate sifting through a chest of precious Spanish doubloons, she quickly determined there was close to a hundred thousand dollars in just that one box.

It had to be a sign, she told herself. She had suffered and endured so much over the last two months. There had been days when she didn’t know if she even had the inner strength to carry on. Now—with this amazing stroke of good fortune—she finally had some hope again.

But first she would have to get all of the money out of the house.

And once she did… where in the world would she go?



BLURB:
Dos Angeles, the first in a franchise of mysteries featuring Paco Moran, puts the multicultural thirty-something ex-LAPD homicide detective turned reluctant private eye on the trail of a beautiful young Latina on the run with ten million dollars in cash. Half Anglo and half Mexican, Moran is a transitional character equally at home working in Beverly Hills or blue collar Boyle Heights, the tough East Los Angeles neighborhood where he was raised by a single mom.

In his debut case Paco quickly learns he will be the fall guy if he doesn't track down the young immigrant who allegedly stole a small fortune from a sleazy Hollywood producer secretly laundering money for a notorious drug cartel. Paco's frantic search takes him on a roller-coaster ride through a shadowy place he calls Dos Angeles a city within the city and a virtual country unto itself.

AUTHOR Bio and Links:
Emmy nominee Michael O’Hara-- who has written and produced some of the highest-rated television movies and miniseries in recent memory – is adding author to his resume with the August, 2015 the publication of his first novel,  Dos Angeles.

The book, featuring a bilingual and bicultural private eye named Paco Moran, centers around Moran’s desperate search for a beautiful young Latina immigrant who stole ten million dollars from the mob. In a pre-publication review American Book Award winner Peter Quinn said: Paco Moran’s debut in Michael O'Hara's Dos Angeles is fast-paced, finely crafted, and full of surprises. It's noir fiction for the 21st century, a helluva ride from the first page to last. Here's hoping O'Hara brings Paco back very soon. I can't wait!

A former award-winning journalist and NBC Vice President of Media Relations, O’Hara made an auspicious debut as a writer/producer with “Those She Left Behind,” a critically acclaimed family drama that continues to be the highest-rated TV movie (25.1/38 share) on any network in over twenty years. It starred Gary Cole and Colleen Dewhurst (who won an Emmy Award for her performance). That success was followed by the widely praised NBC movie “She Said No” which won an American Women in Radio & Television Award for Best Television Dramatic Special.

O’Hara next wrote and executive produced “Switched at Birth,” the blockbuster NBC miniseries that earned an Emmy nomination as Best Dramatic Special and remains the highest rated (22 rating/33 share) miniseries on network television since its initial telecast over two decades ago. He was also the writer and executive producer of “Murder in the Heartland,” a celebrated ABC miniseries which garnered a Casting Society of America Award and two Emmy nominations. Right after that he created and executive produced the first of 22 “Moment of Truth” movies for NBC, establishing one of the most successful film franchises in TV history.

O’Hara also wrote “She Woke Up Pregnant,” the pilot for ABC’s ‘Crimes of Passion’ franchise. It scored an impressive 13.4 rating and 21 share, making it the highest-rated ABC movie of the year. He went on to write “One Hot Summer Night,” another ‘Crimes of Passion’ thriller that was ABC’s highest-rated Thursday night movie of the season. Other producing credits include two CBS projects: “Twilight Zone – Rod Serling’s Lost Classics” and “A Child’s Wish,” which was filmed in the Oval Office and featured a cameo appearance by then President Bill Clinton. In addition he wrote and executive produced NBC’s “In His Life: The John Lennon Story” and “1st to Die,” a two-part NBC miniseries based on the best-selling novel by James Patterson.

Overall O’Hara has produced four miniseries and 33 Movies of the Week. Besides his Emmy nomination, other honors include: a Christopher Award (“A Child’s Wish”); a Prism Award (“The Accident”); a Humanitas Award nomination (“Heart of a Child”); a National Easter Seal Society Award (“To Walk Again”); an International Health & Medical Film Award (“Heart of a Child”); and the Media Award from The National Council on Problem Gambling (“Playing to Win.”)


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Tuesday, September 29, 2015

#Review: THE TAMING OF MALCOLM GRANT by Paula Quinn



   5 of 5 stars

This is the first book I've read by Paula Quinn so I was not familiar with Malcolm Grant. Luckily, that made no difference in this book. His reputation was teased out in the book and it became clear from the beginning that he was a sexy rake who enjoyed women and could leave them in a heartbeat. That is, until he meets blind Emma Grey. Her quiet presence and her never quit attitude begins to thaw the rugged Highlander's heart.

I absolutely adored Emma. She was fierce and intelligent and not the least bit meek despite being blind. Though she couldn't see with her eyes, the world around her opened their secrets to her skilled hands. Ms. Quinn does a fantastic job of giving us a heroine who is inspiring, brave and romantic. Her interactions with Malcolm are priceless and she can leave the handsome rake flustered with just a hint of a smile. There were a couple of good twists and turns along the way that only added to the enjoyment of this book. I plan of reading more of Ms. Quinn's Highlander stories. Highly recommended.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchanged for a fair and honest review.


Amazon buy link:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00RTY0BPE/ref=twoen-20

Monday, September 28, 2015

#Excerpt: HOOKAH by Cameron Jace


Excerpt:
"Have you ever jumped out of a plane in a parachute, down to meet up with people who’d take selfies of your blood on their faces for breakfast?
I am doing it right now. And guess what, it’s nighttime, so not only am I free-falling, but I am also doing it in the dark. That’s what I call a bonus.
Throwing away the Pillar’s goggles, I hear the plane explode in midair above me.
Oh my god, this is for real!
“I’ve always wanted to blow up my employees,” the Pillar shouts all the way down. I am not sure how I can hear him. “But you’ll be fine. Just pull the red lever when I tell you to.”
In spite of all the madness, I feel unexpectedly fine up here in the air. Fine is an understatement. I feel euphoric. I want to feel like this every day. It’s ridiculous how much I am enjoying this, although I may get face-palmed by the earth in a few seconds.
Mary Ann, also known as Alice Wonder, 19 years old, dead and gone. I imagine the scripture on my grave says. But who cares? She was mad anyways.
Suddenly I realize that the madness hasn’t started yet. Not at all.
Down below, I can see something glittering. The vast land where we’re landing is nothing but an endless field of ridiculously over-sized mushrooms.
Big mushrooms growing everywhere, whitening up the black of the night.


Book & Author Details:
Hookah by Cameron Jace
(Insanity #4)
Publication date: September 28th 2015
Genres: Fairy Tales, Fantasy, Young Adult

Synopsis:
A Plague Scarier than Death
Alice and the Pillar have to stop a Wonderland Monster who’d lashed out an incurable disease onto the world. Their biggest challenge is that the world loves this monster so much.
A Cure Larger than Life
The only way to save the world is to travel to the other side of the globe, and peek into one of Lewis Carroll and the Pillar’s darker pasts.
A Truth Madder Than Fiction
This time, the price of saving the world is too high. Alice will have to live with the consequences of the maddest logic of the world surrounding her.
Will Alice find who the Pillar really is? What he wants? Is she brave enough to handle the one Wonderland Monster she’d thought was a good friends? And even so, is the world ready the truth?


Purchase:

Get book 1 (FREE): 

Insanity 4 is available for pre-order http://www.amazon.com/dp/B013JAUABG

AUTHOR BIO:
 Cameron Jace is the bestselling author of the Grimm Diaries and Insanity series. A graduate of the college of Architecture, collector of out-of-print books, he is obsessed with the origins of folk tales and the mysterious storytellers who spread them. Three of his books made Amazon's Top 100 Customer Favorites in Kindle 2013 & Amazon's Top 100 kindle list. Cameron lives in California with his girlfriend. When he isn't writing or collecting books, he is playing music.

Sign up for his mailing list here: http://bit.ly/1sxp3p1

Author links:

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Interview with A.G. Henley, THE FIRE SISTERS

Why don’t we start off with you telling us a little about yourself.
Thanks for having me! I SO appreciate bloggers for the good work you do to help authors get the word out about their books, and you’ve been especially kind to me. Thank you!

So, I’m a YA author with a now complete (hooray!) series of dystopian/post-apocalyptic books. The Brilliant Darkness series begins with The Scourge, a 2015 Next Generation Indie Book Award Finalist, and includes The Defiance and the just-released The Fire Sisters. There are also two novellas in the series. The series features a blind girl who believes she’s mysteriously protected from flesh-eating creatures called the Scourge, but she hasn’t been tested—until now.

I’m also a psychologist, which makes my workweek an interesting mix of fantasy and heart-wrenching reality.

What is your favorite comment from a fan that really lifted your spirits?
I LOVE my readers, and I have such nice ones. They are incredibly supportive. One comment that has always stuck in my brain came very early after I first published The Scourge in January 2012. I was not planning to self-publish, but at the time I couldn’t interest an agent in my writing. I thought no one would buy or read my book.

A woman, an early reader, said she was so engrossed in The Scourge that she read while trying to do her housework, and while changing her baby’s diaper. I was thrilled that the initial response was that the book was hard to put down. I see that as a primary goal for an author: to make you lose sleep, because you can’t stop reading : ) Consider that fair warning! You can see her actual comment here, third one down on the left:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Scourge-ebook/dp/B0073O59OI

How did you come up with such a great idea for a story?
I initially came up with the idea of people trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world full of swamps. I figured they’d move up into the trees. But, what if half the people moved up and wouldn’t share with the other half? That’s how the two main groups in The Scourge, the Lofties and Groundlings, were born. (The swamp idea kind of fell away, although water is very important to the story.)

Then, I thought, what if the main character, a Groundling, was blind? And THEN, I thought, and what if there were zombie-like creatures that only she was protected from, due to her blindness??? And that was it. Fennel and the Scourge were born.

Your characters have a ways of getting themselves into so many bad situations and some causes problems for those around them. Which character(s) gave you the most problems when trying to write their story?
Hmm, I’m not sure any of them gave me problems. I LOVE creating characters. They usually just jump into my head fully formed!

Who was your favorite character to write?
I’m attached to my two mains, Fennel and Peree. It was so fun to build their relationship from scratch. But the most fun to write was Moray. He’s a bad guy, really, but he has heroic, good guy moments. I really tried hard to write him so that you couldn’t classify him, so he wouldn’t be black and white. I hope I succeeded right through The Fire Sisters.

Do you feel there will be a spin-off or prequel in the future?
Hmm, this is it for NOW. Funny you should mention a spin-off, though. I did try to leave the ending somewhat open for a few characters, and there are many more questions about the world of the Scourge…

What are you working on now? Has a new story started to bring itself to life?
Thanks for asking! I’m writing a YA time travel short story right now for an indie anthology that will release in March. I met a group of women writers here in Denver who all write YA and are mostly indies. We have done a few writing retreats together, and at the last one someone said, “Why don’t we publish a short story anthology?” So, Tick Tock: Seven Tales of Time came to be! It’s so much fun to write a new character in a new world. I could totally see this leading to its own series down the road…

I’m also revising a novel I wrote last year that is YA speculative fiction. It will be a duology, if all goes as planned.

  
Book & Author Details:
The Fire Sisters by A.G. Henley
(Brilliant Darkness #3)
Publication date: September 25th 2015
Genres: Fantasy, Young Adult

Synopsis:
Fennel and Peree are finally where they’ve worked ceaselessly to be: together and safe from the Scourge in the protected village of Koolkuna. But on the day of their partnering ceremony the children of the village are stolen away—Fenn’s loyal companion, Kora, among them.

Fenn wants to bring the children home, especially as the villagers seem to blame Peree and her for the tragedy. Only since the death of her own family, she’s terrified that a wrong move on her part will lead to the loss of others she loves.

Despite her apprehension, Fenn and Peree join a small search party led by rival Kaiya, the one person who stands a chance of finding the children thanks to her mysterious past. As they travel away from the safe waters of Koolkuna and into the Scourge-infested wilds, Fenn endures Kai’s scorn, her subtle designs on Peree, and the squabbling of the group. But nothing in her life so far has prepared her for the fierce warrior women who will steal others’ children to preserve their own existence—the Fire Sisters.

If Fenn is to survive the threat of the Scourge, rescue the children from the Sisters, and have a hope of making a life with Peree in Koolkuna, she must face her fear of failure and loss and become the leader she’s destined to be.

Read THE FIRE SISTERS, the thrilling conclusion to the bestselling young adult fantasy Brilliant Darkness series! There are three novels and two short stories in the series. The first novel, The Scourge, was a finalist for the 2013 Next Generation Indie Book Award.

RECOMMENDED SERIES READING ORDER:
The Scourge
The Keeper (novella)
The Defiance
The Gatherer (novella)
The Fire Sisters
  

Purchase:

AUTHOR BIO:
A.G. Henley is the author of the BRILLIANT DARKNESS series. The first novel in the series, THE SCOURGE, was a finalist for the 2013 Next Generation Indie Book Award.

A.G. is also a clinical psychologist, which means people either tell her their life stories on airplanes, or avoid her at parties when they've had too much to drink. Neither of which she minds. When she's not writing fiction or shrinking heads, she can be found herding her children and their scruffy dog, Guapo, to various activities while trying to remember whatever she's inevitably forgotten to tell her husband. She lives in Denver, Colorado.

Author Links:






Friday, September 25, 2015

NEW #Fantasy release: THE SECRETS DRAGONS KEEP by K.C. May & India Drummond

The Secrets Dragons Keep
Book 2 of The Dragons of Kudare

Outcast from the temple, brothers Caden and Deshic journey with their family to the Plains of Fire to seek absolution for their crimes. There they endure cruel punishments under the unrelenting eye of the woman who rules over every soul at the temple compound.

When the faithful's true plans for their sister, Rane, come to light, she and Caden flee to dragon territory in search of help. They must act before time runs out to save Deshic and their parents from unthinkable horrors. But the elder dragon lord has troubles of his own that could unbalance the races and spell the end to a peace accord that has lasted for centuries.

  Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B015IH53J2
  B&N: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/2940151155229
  ibooks: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-secrets-dragons-keep/id1041105349?ls=1&mt=11
  Kobo: https://store.kobobooks.com/en-us/ebook/the-secrets-dragons-keep

If you haven’t read book 1 yet, you’re in luck. The authors have put it ON SALE for only .99. Grab it now because the sale won’t last long!
The Lies Dragons Tell
Book 1 of The Dragons of Kudare

A mysterious illness strikes down a young woman pledged to the god of the Blessed Empire. Two brothers, as helpless as the healers who say there's nothing more they can do, watch while their sister fades away. 

Determined to save her, they approach a dragonborn alchemist who promises help but leads them along a path of hardship, darkness, sacrilege, and death. Impossible choices divide the brothers as their love and loyalty are tested. What price is too high to save someone you love?

  Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00N1Y8FVI
  B&N: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/2940150626850
  ibooks: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-lies-dragons-tell/id915345863?ls=1&mt=11
  Kobo: http://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/the-lies-dragons-tell

India Drummond

India knew from age nine that writing would be her passion. Since then she's discovered many more, but none quite so fulfilling as creating a world, a character, or a moment and watching them evolve into something complex and compelling. She has lived in four countries and four American states, is a dual British and American citizen, and in order to be near her family, she has recently returned to the US where she's writing her next epic fantasy.

Author web site: http://www.indiadrummond.com
Blog: http://www.indiadrummond.com/category/blog/
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/india.drummond.author
Twitter: http://twitter.com/IndiaDrummond
Amazon author page: http://www.amazon.com/author/indiadrummond

K.C. May

K.C. May started writing as a kid with a dream of being a professional writer. She started her career in 1990 writing technical manuals for software companies. In 2005, after she attended the Viable Paradise writers' workshop in Martha's Vineyard, her debut novel was published. Her acclaimed epic fantasy series The Kinshield Saga has reached #11 on the Amazon Kindle bestseller list. 
 K.C. grew up in the mid-western USA and in Hawaii, and earned a B.A. in Russian from Florida State University. After a year in Taiwan teaching English and studying Mandarin Chinese, she lived in the Arizona desert where she founded a Rottweiler rescue organization. Her interests include dog training and computer programming.

Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Excerpt: A FISTFUL OF CLONES by Seaton Kay-Smith


Excerpt:
As the sun rose over Duelham, a pair of brown leather boots stepped off the curb and onto the road. Cut from a long-dead cow, turned inside out, cleaned and stitched onto a foot, they walked down the grey-gold street and through the gates to Mingum’s Mill: a seemingly abandoned mill which towered over the rest of the town and imposed a certain enormity on the suburb. Previously home to rats, drunks, youths, and young drunk rats, Mingum’s Mill had recently opened its doors to a new venture. Though the youths, rats and the drunkards hadn’t been entirely evicted, “Medicine” was open for business and Henry, the owner of the boots, had the telegraph-pole advertisement to prove it.

Entering the abandoned mill’s front office, Henry passed the security guard fiddling with his phone and approached the receptionist, a young woman in a smart white blouse and navy-blue skirt. She looked up at Henry, who stared into her amber eyes with a steely look of determination.

Henry’s hand moved slowly but steadily to his breast pocket, his eyes never leaving the receptionist’s. Her heart beat faster. Henry could hear it. His hand disappeared into his jacket and promptly returned, not with a gun, but with a piece of paper: an advertisement, yellowed and weather-bleached.

Henry slammed it on the table in front of her. “I’d like to do it,” he said. Then remembering his manners, “Please.”

The receptionist looked across her desk to the paper she was presented with. She picked it up and studied it once more before returning her gaze to Henry. “Do you understand all the risks?”

“There’s understanding and there’s accepting,” Henry said with a gritty resolve, “and I see no reason to need both.”

The pair remained locked in their stranglehold gazes, neither willing to be the first to look away, to give in, to show weakness. The security guard watched on, his hand resting on his taser, ready for action but unsure of what action to take.

Finally, the increasingly tense silence was broken as the receptionist offered Henry a standard ballpoint pen. “Sign here.”

Henry cocked his head and smiled briefly. “The name’s Henry,” he said as he signed the document with that very name. Then, raising the pen to his mouth as if he was blowing smoke from a recently fired pistol, Henry pursed his lips and blew.

“What are you doing?” asked the receptionist, confused by his inappropriate and disease-spreading behaviour. That was her pen; she had to use that pen.

Henry’s gritty resolve dropped; his awkward self-awareness returned. It was as though he had suddenly sobered up at a party and realised he wasn’t actually having fun. An overwhelming sense of average took over his entire body and his mind went blank. Gone were his delusions of grandeur. He felt like a child in a world of adults. “I was just …” He stammered, unsure of what to say. “I was just blowing the pen.”

The receptionist leaned forwards in her chair. “Don’t.” She snatched the pen back from him.

Henry, shaken, feeling small, his voice almost a whisper, replied, “Sorry, I’ll take a—”

“Take a seat,” she said.

He was no cowboy, no western hero. He was just a man with a signature, a name, and little else. Henry took a seat and, fighting off a blush, picked up a magazine. It was a celebrity gossip magazine. Sometimes, it seemed, Henry couldn’t win anything.


BLURB:
Henry Madison is an apathetic young man with little to no ambition. When he loses his job and his girlfriend in one day, he is destitute and signs up for paid medical testing. The doctor creates clones of Henry and when these clones escape and start causing havoc in Henry's life, he is hired in secret by the strange doctor and trained to hunt the clones down one by one and kill them.

Henry soon finds out, however, that personality isn't genetic but made of the experiences you have, and as time progresses, his clones become less carbon copied than he was lead to believe, growing their own identities and challenging Henry's perception of what it means to be Henry Madison and of what it is right and what is wrong.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

AUTHOR Bio and Links:
Seaton has written for The Roast on ABC2, Lost Pilots on FBi Radio, and is a regular performer of stand up comedy. Currently he is Head Writer at Paper Moose, a film and design collective based in Sydney.

You can get in touch with Seaton on Twitter. @seatonks



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Monday, September 21, 2015

Guest Post: Writers Block and Self Doubt by Theresa Kay, FRACTURED SUNS


For me, the most discouraging part of the writing process is self-doubt, something that goes hand in hand with every writer's foe-- writer's block. I struggled with both when I was writing Broken Skies, and there were two things that got me through it: the support of my amazing writer friends and giving myself permission to write garbage.  
I had no problem cranking out the first draft of Broken Skies. I wrote it during a session of Camp NaNoWriMo (the summer extension of the regular November challenge to write 50k words in thirty days). It was my fourth time doing a NaNo challenge, so I knew it didn't have to be pretty. For the most part, I did fine with meeting my daily word counts and rarely got too far behind. So, at the end of the month, I had a book. Well...sort of.
Broken Skies as it is now is very different from what I had on July 1, 2013. There were very few things I liked about my first draft, but there were some. I had the bones of the story and characters who wanted to talk, so I decided to rip it apart and rewrite it.
I got about two chapters into the rewrite when I hit my first wall. That sneaky little voice in my head (the one I'd managed to block out when all I had to concentrate on was word count) spoke up and said my writing wasn't good enough, my story wasn't good enough, and I might as well give up.
I listened. I closed the file I was working in and didn't open it again for almost two months.
Thankfully, the main character, Jax, is a stubborn one and she refused to shut up until I got back to work. This time, I made it to about the halfway point before the doubt crept in again and laid down another roadblock for me.
It was the same old chorus of 'not good enough' but this one hit me much harder. Already frustrated because I was having trouble fitting the pieces of the story back together, I just wanted to wipe my hands of the whole thing. But my crit partner talked me down and rescued Broken Skies from the recycling bin. Soon after that, I joined a writing group that went on to become The Rebel Writers.
The rewrite was coming along nicely. There were still places where I stumbled, but the support system I had in place was invaluable.
And then along came writer's block. I was confident enough with the story and my writing, but only four or five thousand words from the end I became completely stuck. I knew what needed to happen, but I just couldn't get there. Nothing was right. Nothing was good enough. I'd write a few sentences and then immediately delete them.
Writer's block is a vicious self-feeding monster. The more blocked I was, the more stressed I got. The more stressed I got, the less I wrote. The less I wrote, the more guilty I felt. The more guilty I felt, the more stressed I got...and so on.
It was awful.
And this time I had no idea what to do about it.
I went back and forth for about a week. A sentence here. A paragraph there. But no real progress. Then, I came across an article posted by Rachel Higginson on her Facebook page.
I won't repeat the entire article, but the premise was just writing and giving yourself permission for it to be garbage. It's one of the main tenets of NaNoWriMo too, but I'd never heard it worded in that way and it was just the shift in mindset I needed.
So I did it. I gave myself to write whatever came to mind even if it was awful. I started about an hour after I finished reading the article and banged out the last four thousand or so words of Broken Skies over the course of a couple hours.
It wasn't perfect, but I had something I could work with. There were still two months of read-throughs and revisions ahead of me, but it was still an amazing feeling.
I still struggle with both self-doubt and writer's block, but I know I can get past them with the support of my writer friends and by learning to let go of perfection and just get the words down on paper.


Book & Author Details:
Fractured Suns by Theresa Kay
(Broken Skies #2)
Publication date: September 18th 2015
Genres: Post-Apocalyptic, Young Adult

Synopsis:
We came in peace. Lie.
We had no role in the Collapse. Lie.
I have always been honest. Lie.
I never lied to her. Truth.
Reunited with her brother, and surrounded by Flint, Peter and her new-found grandfather, Jax Mitchell has still never felt more alone. The choice to follow Rym back to the city to find answers and see Lir is an easy one, but their reunion is cut short and Jax is forced to leave Lir behind. She finds herself traveling with some unexpected companions and heading back toward a place she’d hoped to never see again.
After being imprisoned—and tortured—on the orders of his uncle, Lir hasn’t seen daylight or linked to anyone in weeks. After a lifetime of connection, the pain and loneliness is almost too much to bear. Elated that Jax actually came, Lir finds renewed hope and strength to continue fighting his uncle’s influence over the E’rikon, even when things look hopeless and Lir’s been branded a traitor by the very people he’s trying to save.

While Jax and Lir fight separate battles, their missions have more in common than they realize. It’s a race against time to stop men driven only by greed and power. But the people they trust the most might be the very people working against them—and “family” doesn’t mean what it used to. Will they recognize their friends from their enemies in time to save the people they love or will they lose each other in the process?


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AUTHOR BIO:
The only person she knows who had a subscription to Writer's Digest at eleven and was always excited to write research papers, Theresa has been putting words to paper since a young age. Living in the mountains of central Virginia with her husband and two kids, she works as a paralegal by day, binges on Netflix at night and finds bits of time in between reading almost everything she can get her hands on and laundry to craft stories that tend to feature broken characters in sci-fi or paranormal worlds, with a touch of romance thrown in for good measure.

She's constantly lost in one fictional universe or another and is a self-proclaimed "fangirl" who loves being sucked in to new books or TV shows. Theresa originally wanted to write horror novels as an ode to her childhood passion for Stephen King novels, but between her internal Muse's ramblings and the constant praise for her sci-fi pieces from her writer's group - The Rebel Writers - she knew she should stick with what was working.

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