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Sunday 16 June 2013

Rewrite Redemption Tour

 
Rewrite Redemption

Rewrite Redemption is a YA romance with paranormal/sci-fi elements. 

 

 She's sixteen. He's seventeen. They don't know each other…at least not yet. She has a secret and her whole life revolves around keeping it. Every few months and with little warning, she simply disappears, pulled into the past for hours or even days. She's terrified it will happen in front of someone, changing her life forever. So far, the only witnesses have been her parents, and that didn't end well. She has no control over it and no idea why it happens to her.  
She wants answers.
He has answers--at least he understands what's going on. He has a secret, too. He's part of an organization that goes back in time to rewrite reality. But he also has a problem. He broke the organization's number-one rule by altering his own timeline. As punishment, he's been blocked from time travel, which is most unfortunate. Because the changes he made to his timeline, accidentally resulted in disaster for his family. A disaster he's now prevented from repairing. No one can travel beneath the organization's radar except a Shadow. But they're rare, so rare he's never even met one. 


Then he moves to her town. 


~ Amazon ~ Goodreads ~

 
 
J..H Walker 
"My life has been rather unconventional. Born insanely curious into an authoritarian, religious family, I know what it's like to not fit in. My teen years were a struggle, and I remember them in all their intensity. That's why I like writing for young adults. 

I grew up in Central America, surrounded by jungle, and was never too far from the ocean. I observed other cultures, including an indigenous tribe that, at the time, had seen little of the modern world. While there, I slept in a hammock in a bamboo hut, dressed in tribal clothing, and helped bring three babies into the world in at the tender age of fourteen. I survived a hurricane aboard an ocean liner, canoeing through alligator infested waters, P.E., my brother's pet tarantulas, sky diving, parasailing over the Pacific shoreline, rock climbing, a ropes course blindfolded, and walking barefoot across hot coals. I'm not done having experiences.

I attended the University of Colorado, Boulder, but was so obsessed in my quest to understand human behavior; I left midstream to travel the country and study with people doing groundbreaking work in the field. I'm certified in Ericksonian Hypnosis, am a Master of Neuro-linguistic Programming and have worked with world-class athletes, including members of the U.S. Ski Team. I've completed advanced studies with some of the most brilliant minds of my time in the field of NLP and am a perpetual student of sociology and human behavior.

I live with my photographer husband in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies. I'm surrounded by trees. And I will always remain insanely curious."

 




A Little Q&A With J.H. Walker


Q: What was the inspiration behind this book?



I grew up in an extremely strict environment. Self-expression was not something encouraged in my house. Conformity and absolute adherence to a rigid ideology was the rule of the day. (The main reason why I never wrote early in life.) Since I lived in Central America, I wasn’t part of the mainstream American culture. I knew nothing about the real world and was totally unprepared to deal with it when I left home at eighteen. I’ve always wished I could go back in time and talk to my younger self, give her the benefit of the wisdom that begins to come with age. That desire led me to imagine a story about time travel.
Q: Is there a particular theme or message you are trying to convey in your story? If so, what?

One of the most important lessons one can ever learn is that life isn’t fair. The sooner one comes to terms with this the better. Life isn’t fair. It just IS. Not to be a downer—I’m actually an optimist. But I’m also a realist and I’ve been around a while. The truth is that bad things happen to good people all the time…sometimes really horrible things. And when you understand that this is just part of life, it makes it easier to move through the bad times and on to something better.

We receive subtle messages from institutions like religion and icons like Santa Claus, that if we’re just good than good will follow. We will be blessed. But the facts don’t bear that out. Good, honest, and even deeply religious people have their share of unfortunate circumstances. And some of the most crooked despots on the planet are billionaires. But because of these subtle and usually subconscious messages, we tend to react in less than useful ways when bad luck befalls us. We get stuck in what I call a “wallowing-why-me mode” instead of making a plan to deal with the situation. I think this is particularly true of young adults, as they haven’t spent enough years on the planet to realize, “this too will pass.”

In this book, I wanted to include a simple strategy for dealing with what life throws at you. First, realize that life isn’t fair; it’s a mix of both good and bad. It is what it is. So when something bad happens, instead of freaking out, assess the situation and make a plan to deal with it or move through it. If you do this, you’re going to have a lot less heartache. And when good things happen, enjoy them. Celebrate.

Q: What's your next project?


I’m working on the sequel to Rewrite Redemption. In the epilogue, I left a clue as to something that wasn’t quite right. That something becomes paramount in the next book.

Q: Who is your favourite character to write?


I enjoy writing Lex. She’s bold, and she’s smart, and as A.J. says, “Pretty much fearless.” Her parents provide financial support, but that’s about all they give her. In spite of this, Lex has found a survival strategy that has allowed her to remain relatively psychologically healthy.

Her mother, an attorney, requires her to see a therapist once a week. (Lex says her mom is just establishing a paper trail in case anyone ever accuses her of neglect.) Early on, Lex realized that understanding people gave her a certain amount of power…and Lex likes power. So she utilized her “Shrinks” in a somewhat unique way. Since she had to be there an hour a week, she used that time to learn as much as she could about herself, her parents, her friends, and just people in general. It’s given her a unique perspective and a level of maturity uncommon at her age. She’s a loyal and true friend, but you don’t want to cross her. She’s who I would have liked to have been like when I was her age. So I suppose I get a little vicarious satisfaction writing for her character.

Q: What do you like to do when you're not writing?

I’m an artist and I’m very happy spending time in my studio. I’m also a political junkie, and I keep up with what’s going on in Washington. Things are very precarious in politics right now. We have a faction in Congress that doesn’t believe in science and that’s really scary. If we don’t do something about climate change soon, this planet is going to end up being one of those dystopian novels everyone loves so much. Reading a dystopian novel is one thing. Living in one…not so much.

Q: Tell me 3 things about yourself that's not connected to writing.


There was a time in my life when I was connected to the music world. I lived near Chicago. My then boyfriend had a lighting company and did lights for bands, including some big names. I had back-stage passes to all kinds of venues. I met a lot of interesting people and had some wild times. But I have to say, it’s a life that burns you out if you let it. I realized that and moved on for that very reason. I have some fond memories. But I’m way happier living a quieter life.

One of my first jobs was as a ward clerk at a VA hospital. I worked on the spinal cord ward. I saw firsthand the ramifications of war on those brave souls who serve their country. It was a life-changing experience and a big part of the reason I’m politically active. I absolutely support the troops, but these wars we keep getting into…not so much.

I’ve been in every state except Alaska, New Hampshire, Delaware, Vermont, and Maine. When I was a kid, every other year we’d return to the states for three months—a bennie for government workers living overseas. And in a van and a trailer, we’d traverse the country, visiting relatives and friends and national monuments. (Gas was way cheaper then.) We’d fly into Miami and then pick up our van in New Orleans. We had a trailer that we stashed with some missionary friend of my fathers. We’d start in Florida and go all the way up to northern Idaho by the Canadian border where my grandparents lived. And then we’d turn around and return by a different route.

We traveled very frugally, pretty much only stopping to see things that were free or relatively inexpensive. It could be pretty tense at times, eight people in a van and trailer for three months. But I’ve seen almost every amazing national treasure from the Grand Canyon and the Painted Desert to Mount Rushmore and Yellowstone. In hindsight I realize that seeing all those incredible sites contributed to me being an environmentalist today. We live in a beautiful country. It’s worth protecting.

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Wednesday 12 June 2013

Room 3 Tour


Room 3


Bartender and songwriter Kelli Foster had always kept her eyes trained on the dream of stardom as a means to escape her small-town life. That focus blinded her to threat right in front of her: a bar patron who lulls her into a false sense of security and abducts her for a shadowy organization, taking her to a cabin in the middle of nowhere.
Desperate to escape and return to the world she thought she knew, Kelli bides her time, complying with her captors as they force her into a dream world where she must unravel the meaning of a song to free a hostage trapped inside a tree. Failure to free the hostage means only one thing: death, for her and the hostage.
Joined by an important test subject whose sanity unravels almost from the start, Kelli attempts to free them both. When the escape fails, Kelli’s life becomes even more difficult, and she learns that her assumptions about her life – and the world itself – could all be false. As events spiral out of control, Kelli finds herself caught in a battle between godlike beings that hold her fate, and that of the entire Organization, in their hands.
 
Amazon – Smashwords – Barnes & Noble – Kobo – iBooks
 
*~*Make sure to enter the Giveaway at the bottom of this post*~*
 
 
A Guest Post From Jonathan D Allen
 
Being a writer can be a difficult, lonely road, but a writer’s focus often determines his or her happiness as they try to reach their ultimate destination – whether it be fame, fortune, or some sort of artistic appeal to the better parts of the human spirit. It’s a constant struggle: do we keep our eyes on what lies before us, or do we compare ourselves to others on the same journey?  The (many) days without sales can be difficult and make us want to draw comparisons, where we subsequently decide that we’re little more than hacks with unrealistic expectations.
All of this, the lack of recognition, the stagnant sales, the feeling that you’re pushing a massive stone uphill, can be difficult, but I find nothing more difficult than those days where the energy and passion has drained away. That brings me to the most important tool that a writer can keep in his or her toolbox: lateral thinking.
 
Lateral thinking is what the corporate types like to call “thinking outside the box”; it’s the process by which you arrive at new solutions by using unusual modes of thinking. For me, this is the only way to get new ideas and spur creativity on days where the muse just refuses to show her face. Let me give you an example of this by talking about some examples of where this thinking aided Room 3.
The story itself came from lateral thinking. The original concept, an updated version of the film Videodrome, came from a rather straightforward place, but as roadblocks threw themselves up, lateral thinking solved those problems. Early on in the drafting process I realized that the idea of having one woman in a single room was not going to make for hugely compelling drama, no matter how vicious her captors might be. This felt like a pretty damned permanent roadblock. So much of the story revolved around Carla’s plight. The straightforward answer seemed to be to pull her out of that room and abandon the original concept altogether, but I felt I might as well not even write the story at that point.
Then came an intriguing idea, one that arrived as I drove home from work one afternoon: what if she had a neighbor? I had no idea who that neighbor might be, but I could use lateral methods to identify her. When I got home, I went to one of the most popular sources of lateral thinking, a random word generator. Sometimes the answers don’t come right away. Sometimes you have to spin through the words until the right thing grabs your attention.
This was not one of those times. Right away a word came: curly. So the new character would have curly hair. A bit more spinning, and I hit Alabama. She would be from Alabama. Music. She would be a musician. And so on until I had a new character, who I at first named Jenny. She was the answer to some of the book’s drama needs. She would be Carla’s confidante, someone else who struggled through the same things and persevered.
Little did I know that this discovery opened up the true nature of the book. In time, Jenny would morph into Kelli, a Boston girl who just wanted to be an R&B singer and struggled at a bar job to do so. Kelli would go on to eclipse Carla as the main character and provide an interesting protagonist in her own right in a novel that I happen to think is pretty good.
All because of lateral thinking.
Those moments are the ones that can keep you going when all else seems lost. The best you can do is to cling on to them and hope that they show up often enough to tell good stories.
  
Jonathan D Allen
Jonathan D Allen
Born and raised in the rural Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, Jonathan wrote his first fantasy/sci-fi novel at the age of 13. After studying writing and communication at James Madison University, Jonathan turned his passion for writing into a full-time technical writing career in the DC Metro area, working for companies like Sprint/Nextel, Time Warner Cable, and Sirius XM Radio, where he had an opportunity to combine his love of music with his love of writing. He may have drifted away from fiction at times, but it was always his first love – and he always returned to it. Now living in Bethesda with his wife, two cats, and two quirky guinea pigs for which his publishing company is named, he crafts the kinds of stories that he had
 always hoped to read but just couldn’t quite find.
Website – Blog – Twitter – Facebook – Pinterest – Tumblr


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Tuesday 4 June 2013

Skin Deep Cover Reveal.




Title:  Skin Deep
Author:  Megan D. Martin
Series:  #1 of The Eternal Forces
Genre: New Adult Paranormal Romance
Publisher:  Dragonfairy Press
Expected Release Date:   Fall 2013

What would you do to have the body of your dreams?

Kiera hates being overweight and hides behind thick layers of clothing. One night, her friends present an opportunity that seems impossible to believe. With a single spell, she can have the thin physique she's always coveted.

But all magic comes with a price: no sex or she'll revert back to her old body. Kiera accepts the cost. It's not like she has men lined up at her door. Obeying this one tiny rule isn't difficult at all—until the night she meets Cain, a were-tiger and a soldier with the Eternal Forces.

When a slew of unexplained murders forces Kiera and Cain together, they'll have to face the horrors of their pasts. Will Kiera realize she is worth more than her outward appearance? Or will she make the wrong the choice and lose everything—including her life?



About the Author
Megan D. Martin is a multi-published author, mother, student and editor. In her spare time she enjoys decorating her house with strange things that do not match, playing her old school Nintendo Entertainment System, and buying fish for her many fish tanks.
You can find Megan on pretty much every social networking site that exists.

Vine: Meeegann
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Monday 3 June 2013