Guest Post and Excerpt: Sex, Lies & Hot Tubs by Elissa …
Elissa Ambrose is now on tour with CLP Blog Tours and Sex, Lies & Hot Tubs. Please enjoy a guest post from Elissa and an…
Author Profile: Elizabeth Marx
Author Name: Elizabeth Marx Website: http://www.elizabethmarxbooks.com/ Bio: Windy City writer Elizabeth Marx brings cosmopolitan flair to her fiction, which is a blend of romance and…
Author Profile: Kat Jorgensen
Author Name: Kat Jorgensen
Website: http://katjorgensen.com/Home_Page.html
Bio: A notorious daydreamer, Kat knew it was only a matter of time before she became a writer. She learned to read by age four and had her first library card before her fifth birthday. To this day, she can lose herself for hours among the books at her local library or neighborhood bookstore. Ebooks and online ordering have made it really easy for her to keep her To Be Read pile from ever going down. A native of Richmond, Virginia, Kat is married with children and has a cranky tuxedo cat named Ben.
See my 4 star review for Your Eight O’clock is Dead
Visit Kat’s tour page!
Guest Post and Excerpt: Sugarfiend by Caroline Burau
Thanks to Caroline Burau for stopping by with a guest post on her cover for Sugarfiend and an excerpt from the book! Please check out…
Author Profile: Jolyn Palliata
Author Name: Jolyn Palliata
Website: http://www.jolynpalliata.com/
Bio: Jolyn’s writing career began in 2009 when she looked across the sea of cubicles at work, and thought, “I was meant for something more than this.” That thought was immediately followed by, “I wonder if I can write a novel.” Four novels and one novella later, that question has been answered. She started with Amber Eyes (Entwined Souls Trilogy – Book One), a young adult paranormal romance. They always say, with the first book, you write about what you know. And she certainly did! Drawing off her teenage years in Oshkosh, WI, Jolyn incorporated her high school and favorite haunts. She even pulled out her favorite music from back then to help recapture the teenager within.
Jolyn has absolutely no qualifications whatsoever to be a writer, other than a knack and a passion. The knack she worked hard for through betas, critique partners, writer sites, editors, etc, but the passion she’s had since she was in middle school.
Being married, and mother to one very precocious six-year-old, doesn’t leave her with a whole heckofalot of time to write – not to mention working full-time – but that is where lack of sleep comes in very handy. Jolyn has a gift of functioning on minimal sleep when totally absorbed by a writing project…although she crashes like dead weight when it’s fully completed/edited (usually 2-3 months later).
See my 4.5 star review for Amber Eyes
Visit Jolyn’s tour page!
Bio retrieved from CLP Blog Tours
Author Profile: Jane Green
Author Name: Jane Green
Website: http://www.janegreen.com/
Bio: British import Jane Green is the author of twelve bestselling novels, dealing with real women, real life, and all the things life throws at them, with her trademark wisdom, wit and warmth.
A former feature writer for the Daily Express in the UK, Green took a leap in faith when she left, in 1996, to freelance and work on a novel. Seven months later, there was a bidding war for her first book, Straight Talking, the saga of a single career girl looking for the right man. The novel was a hit in England, and Green was an overnight success.
The success got even sweeter when her second novel, Jemima J, became an international bestseller. Cosmopolitan called this cheerful, updated Cinderella story “the kind of novel you’ll gobble up in a single sitting.”
Now in her early forties, Green has graduated to more complex, character-driven novels that explore the concerns of real women’s lives, from marriage (The Other Woman) to motherhood Babyville) to midlife crises (Second Chance). The Beach House and Second Chance spent months on the New York Times Bestseller list.
As well as writing a daily blog: www.janegreen.com, she contributes to various publications, both online and print, including Huffington Post, The Sunday Times, Wowowow, and Self.
Most weekends see her cooking for a minimum of twenty people in her home in Westport, Connecticut, where she lives with her husband and their blended family. When she is not writing, cooking, filling her house with friends and looking after their animals, she is usually thanking the Lord for caffeine-filled energy drinks.
Titles: Another Piece of My Heart, Promises to Keep, Dune Road, The Beach House, Second Chance, Swapping Lives, The Other Woman, To Have and to Hold, Straight Talk, Babyville, Mr. Maybe, Jemima J, Bookends,
Bio retrieved from janegreen.com
Author Profile: Ellen Byerrum
Author Name: Ellen Byerrum Website: http://www.ellenbyerrum.com/ Bio: Ellen Byerrum writes the popular Crime of Fashion mysteries, set in bustling Washington, D.C., The City That Fashion…
Author Profile: Randi M. Sherman
Author Name: Randi Sherman
Website: http://randimsherman.blogspot.com/
Bio: Randi Sherman, a native Californian, lives in San Francisco. With her tremendous grasp of the obvious, Randi has always had the ability to find humor in the mundane and share the laughter. She dares to examine and discuss everyday foibles, which obliges people to stop taking themselves too seriously.
Developing characters and writing have been a part of Randi’s life since she was a teenager, umm-mmum-mumm years ago. She spent time performing stand-up comedy at Los Angeles club amateur nights and studied Improvisation in the Bay Area. Realizing that she preferred having an income, living indoors and eating regularly, she reluctantly put her dreams on hold and entered the corporate world, yet never left behind her sense of humor and creative storytelling ability, skills which were not always appreciated during budget and strategy meetings.
Now, after living indoors for a while and eating, albeit too much, her book, Paula Takes a Risk is here. Randi’s unique wit, writing style and candor will surely make the reader sit up, stand up, roll over or assume an interested leaning position and take notice.
Randi would never claim to have a genius IQ, the body of a super model or always have the right thing to wear. However, she can spell the words, “smart” and “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” Randi maintains a trim, well-toned body that is cleverly concealed beneath twenty pounds of soft protective layering and she has the appetite of a bird. (By “bird” I mean vulture.) Her entire wardrobe consists of black, black and varying degrees of black, except for those items that are covered with lint because she put them through the wash with a tissue.
Things that Randi cannot live without: people to laugh with, her car horn, a gym membership where there are chubby women who break into a sweat while putting on a jog bra, wine, waist capes, and her partner, Carol.
Randi does not like mean-spirited people, liver, left-overs, communal dressing rooms, tight underwear, and people who point.
Randi is five-foot-seven.
Title: Paula Takes a Risk
Visit Randi’s tour page!
See my 4.5 star review for Paula Takes a Risk!
Connect with Paula!
paulatakesarisk@gmail.com
http://paulatakesarisk.com
http://randimsherman.blogspot.com/
Buy the Book!
http://www.friesenpress.com/bookstore/title/119734000004536283/Randi-M.-Sherman-Paula-Takes-a-Risk
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=paula+takes+a+risk
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/paula-takes-a-risk-randi-m-sherman/1108568694
Q&A with Polly Young
1. What are your stories about? Mainly, my stories are about young women who have the nagging doubt that they might not be taking the ‘right’ path in life … the trouble is, they have no idea what that ‘right’ path is. They’re about the issues faced by girls – whether they be 14 or 34 – that are familiar to us all and I hope that the stories I write resonate, in part, with everyone who reads them.
2. Did you draw inspiration from your personal life? I’ve never known quite what to do ‘for the best’ in life, but I’ve had a lot of fun trying to find out. At school, I worshipped my English teacher and was fortunate enough to work with wonderful colleagues when I taught secondary English in schools myself. Miss MInt in To Be Honest is an embodiment of those brilliant people.
3. When did you know writing was for you? I started writing ‘real’ books at the age of 24 but I’ve been writing moody diary entries since I was 11, as well as ‘witty’ short stories and embarrassing songs (and annoying a lot of people with them) since I was about 8. Books seem to come more easily to me nowadays than other forms of writing. I love telling a story that involves delving into character, plot and getting to that stage where the writing just carries you along, so that you end up doing it everywhere, obsessively. I almost got run over a couple of times last Christmas, scribbling notes on To Be Honest, crossing roads in the dark on the way to work.
4. How would you describe your books? My books are like Hawaiian sunsets (excuse the simile: I’ve just come back from honeymoon). They appeal to most people; they’re warm and seductive as well as shiny, seductive and escapist … and they’re short. To Be Honest is less than 50,000 words but I like a story to rattle along – it makes people feel compelled to finish it in one sitting, because I know that’s what I look for in a book.
5. What is the hardest part of the writing process for you? The hardest part of the writing process for me is the fine-tuning. I can edit and edit … it’s the English school teacher in me … and I can think it’s finished but then come back to the manuscript a week or two later and see more to add or change. I can be very ruthless and chop whole sections at the last minute. It can be frustrating to destroy work, but I am a perfectionist, so I guess I have to deal with it!
6. What are your favorite genres to read? My favourite genres are ‘edgy’ teen fiction, such as Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now (I’m not a big vampire fan though), young or new adult and contemporary literature. I also love romantic fiction and family sagas, too.
7. What do you want readers to take away from your stories? I would love readers to take away the sense that good things come to those who are brave enough to try them. I truly believe that life is too short not to make mistakes – because mistakes are how you learn the good stuff. Readers should feel engaged and entertained but also optimistic by the end of one of my books.
8. What is the one thing that you want readers to know about you as an author? I would like readers to know that I work quite hard at being myself because I think it is the most important thing, to be honest. I think there are a lot of people who, for whatever reason, feel the need to put on an act or find themselves being ‘sucked in’ to becoming someone they’re not – be that through school or work, pressures from family and/or relationships. If there was one thing I could change about the world, it would be to stop the concept of having to conform and I try to get that message across in my books.
9. How important do you think social media is for authors these days? Social media plays a role in everyone’s lives these days. So, as an author, I have really had to up my game. However, I don’t believe authors should necessarily use social media to shout from the rooftops about their books. Rather, they should use it for interaction with readers and other authors as much as possible. Using social media channels as powerful learning and messaging tools is what savvy authors have been doing for years.
10. What would be your advice to aspiring writers? Do it. It’s such a cliche, but write. Whatever comes out will surprise you – and whatever comes out is yours – to be shaped, pummelled, constructed, polished and wrung out to dry however you like … and, regardless of publication, actually finishing a book is one of the best feelings in the world.
