Paws on Books

Friday, January 3, 2014

#AmReading - Dead Set by Richard Kadrey @Richard_Kadrey

Dead Set by Richard Kadrey

Acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Richard Kadrey creates a wonderful, stand-alone dark fantasy

After her father's funeral, Zoe moved to the big city with her mother to start over. But change always brings trials, and life in the city is not so easy. Money is tight, and Zoe's only escape, as has always been the case, is in her dreams—a world apart from her troubled real life where she can spend time with her closest companion: her lost brother, Valentine.

But something or someone has entered their dreamworld uninvited. And a chance encounter at a used record store, where the vinyl holds not music but lost souls, has opened up a portal to the world of the restless dead. It's here that the shop's strange proprietor offers Zoe the chance to commune with her dead father. The price? A lock of hair. Then a tooth. Then . . .

Author Interview - Caroline Kennedy @StephenWardBook

Image of Caroline Kennedy

WHAT GENRE ARE YOU MOST COMFORTABLE WRITING IN?

I love reading fiction but I definitely prefer writing non-fiction. I think this is because I have always been fascinated by people’s personal stories. Sometimes these stories can truly be stranger than fiction. I believe there is something unique in everyone’s life. And that everyone’s life is worth documenting. It’s incredible to me how often I have heard someone say, “Oh, your life sounds so extraordinary. Mine is very boring and mundane in comparison.” And yet, if I talk to that person long enough I can always find something special and unique that is worth writing down. This, for me, is the thrill of writing non-fiction.

HAVE YOU EVER HAD WRITER’S BLOCK? AND, IF SO, WHAT DO YOU DO ABOUT IT?

Yes, indeed, I have had writer’s block. Sometimes it can last not just weeks but months. I used to stress about it a lot and try to force myself to write when clearly nothing was going to emerge on the page. I have since learnt the best way to deal with writer’s block is to ignore it, find something else creative to do – in my case making elaborate belts, necklaces and bags – anything just to keep my fingers busy and my mind off the fact that I have temporarily lost the ability or the desire to write. This usually works for me. And, at least, when I finally the words do start flowing again, I have produced something in the interim that is creative and that I can sell or give away as presents.

WHAT MAKES YOU HAPPIEST?

I love to travel. I love to meet new people, see new places, taste new food and learn about different cultures, religions and customs. Living and working with refugees with disabilities and with indigenous communities gives me so much pleasure. Listening to their stories, learning about their lives and seeing for myself how content they are with what we, in the West, would consider so little. So many of us forget today that simple living can often be the most satisfying life to lead. I would love one day to show my grandchildren how to live simply and how much pleasure there is in scaling down one’s life to the minimum.

WHO IS YOUR FAVOURITE FICTION AUTHOR?

Currently my favourite author is Rohan Mistry whose towering novels about India are so vivid, so descriptive and so visual that I can totally immerse myself and believe I am there experiencing everything he is writing about. I end up knowing the characters so well and empathizing with them. I feel their pain, their anguish, their sorrow, their joys and their afflictions. There is so much going on in his books, like a vast kaleidoscope of sounds, smells, colours, life and death. I would love to write such epic novels – fiction, so true in every minute detail, that it seems like non-fiction.

WHERE DO YOU GET INSPIRATION FROM?

Since I write mostly non-fiction I get my inspiration from life in its many shapes and forms. I observe people. I listen to conversations. I like to blend into the background so people don’t notice me. That way I can be like a video camera, overhearing, watching, recording mental notes in my head and then scribbling them down later. Not, of course, in any sinister way but simply as a fascinated observer. I love the process. I learn so much from watching and listening to others.

Buy Now @ Amazon

Genre – Politics, Espionage, Scandal

Rating – PG-16

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Peter Clenott – Why Females Make Better Lead Characters @PeterClenott

Why Females Make Better Lead Characters

When I began writing fiction many years (decades) ago, I didn’t put a lot of thought into the sex of the main character. My early novels usually had male leads even if the main characters were chimpanzees as in PANDORA ISLAND. I think the first novel I wrote with a woman as the protagonist was RED ROSA, but this was a fictional account of an historic person, Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish-Jewish revolutionary at the turn of the 20th century. Subsequently, most of my novels have had female leads.

LIGEIA is the story of Ligeia Taylor, a slave in the White House in 1850. This novel was intended to be the initial saga of a new and distinctive pair of detectives. In the premier story, Ligeia must find out who poisoned her master, President Zachary Taylor.

In ALBERTVILLE, Alma Jesse Westcott is a young black woman who grows up in the segregated Alabama of the 1940s and 1950s. She experiences the horror of racism before going onto a Harvard degree and n assignment by the State Department to the Congo upon its independence from Belgium. Here she bonds with the new nation’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, only to learn that her government is planning to assassinate him.

At this point in my career, I went with young adult and wrote a new adaptation of PANDORA ISLAND. Here trhe female lead was a 16-year-old girl named Chiku Flynn whose father disappears in the Congo. She must return after years in civilization, having been raised alongside to uncover what happened to her father and she must do so with the help of the chimpanzees he has been studying. Chiku can communicate with them through sign language.

BECAUSE I CAN is about another tough and tumble teenager, named Jemma Dalembert, who is 21st century Eponine, a kid raised in a dysfunctional family, who helps them make it by using her fists. Her hero is Gina Carano the renowned MMA fighter and actress who starred in FAST AND FURIOUS.

Finally, DEVOLUTION with Chiku Flynn. Why do females make stronger lead characters in all of these stories. Because, by nature, they have greater barriers to overcome than their male counterparts. Greater barriers make for higher drama. The goals for these characters are harder to attain and so more powerful once reached. In my GOSPEL OF HANNANIAH, the main character is the illegitimate daughter of Jesus of Nazareth. The greatest story ever told would have been even more dramatic had the reluctant messiah been female.

Buy Now @ Amazon & Smashwords

Genre - Young Adult

Rating – PG

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Connect with Peter Clenott on Facebook & Twitter

Website www.peterclenott.net

Jade Kerrion – Alpha males and the women who can kick their butts @JadeKerrion

Alpha males and the women who can kick their butts

I’ve read a great deal of paranormal fiction in the past few years, many of them romances. In keeping with the alpha male archetype, many of the novels portray the man as not just an alpha male, but possessed of superhuman qualities. He’s a vampire or a werewolf; he may be a demon, or possibly an angel.

Either way, he’s far more capable than the human woman who falls in love with him.

Those archetypes don’t work for me.

I’ve always enjoyed writing about strong men and strong women. I trace those enduring archetypes back to Robotech, one of the foundational series that shaped my affection for science fiction. In Robotech, Lisa Hayes always outranked Rick Hunter. He did physically save her a time or two, but it didn’t keep Rick, a take-charge alpha male, from addressing his admiral wife, in public, as “ma’am,” and it certainly didn’t keep cool-headed Lisa from managing the star fleet or, on occasion, vetoing her husband’s military decisions.

In my Double Helix series, Danyael Sabre is an alpha empath with the power to heal or kill with a touch. His conscience however, frequently gets in the way of him exerting the darker side of his mutant powers. However, the human woman he loves, Zara Itani, rarely lets her conscience get in the way of anything. She is an assassin and has trouble expressing herself without a gun or a blade in her hand. On a good day, she can wreak more havoc with love than most people can with hate.

Naturally, the theme of the alpha male who loves an alpha female would find its way from my science fiction novels into my first foray into fantasy. In Eternal Night, it’s all well and good for Jaden Hunter to be an alpha male, but he’s human, and Ashra, the woman he loves, is an immortal icrathari who can break bones as easily as a child snaps a twig. More importantly, no matter what happens as a result of their love for each other, no matter what he transforms into, he will never be as strong as she is.

So, what’s an alpha male to do?

It’s not stopping Jaden from protecting Ashra, much to her exasperation. He’s not trying to prove anything to her or to himself; it’s just who he is. It means learning to fight side-by-side while admitting that her hair-raising aerial acrobatics turn his stomach and he’d rather keep his two feet on the ground. For Ashra, it means accepting his misplaced concern for her as his way of expressing his love for her. It means recognizing the courage and heroism in his spirit as equal to hers, constrained though it is in his frail human form.

It certainly guarantees a great deal of friction and conflict as they come to terms with their love for each other.

Real life relationships often walk as delicate a balance as Jaden and Ashra’s relationship. Real life relationships are often as fraught with friction and conflict, but in the end, I’ve always believed it’s not really about who’s stronger or about who’s the alpha in a relationship. It’s about what you can do together, and ensuring that the outcome is greater than the sum of its parts.

It worked for Rick Hunter and Lisa Hayes, for Danyael Sabre and Zara Itani. Perhaps it’ll work for Jaden and Ashra too…

E-books available at Amazon / Amazon UK / Apple / Barnes & Noble / Kobo / Smashwords

Paperbacks available at Amazon / Amazon UK / Barnes & Noble / Book Depository

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jade Kerrion developed a loyal reader base with her fan fiction series based on the MMORPG Guild Wars. She was accused of keeping her readers up at night, distracting them from work, housework, homework, and (far worse), from actually playing Guild Wars. And then she wondered why just screw up the time management skills of gamers? Why not aspire to screw everyone else up too?

So here she is, writing books that aspire to keep you from doing anything else useful with your time.

Her debut novel, Perfection Unleashed, spawned the Double Helix series which has won a total of seven science fiction awards, including first place in the Reader Views Literary Awards 2012 and the gold medal in Readers Favorites Awards 2013. She is also the author of Earth-Sim and When the Silence Ends, which placed first and second respectively in the 2013 Royal Palm Literary Awards, Young Adults category.

She lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida with her wonderfully supportive husband and her two young sons, Saint and Angel, (no, those aren’t their real names, but they are like saints and angels, except when they’re not.)

Connect with Jade: Website / Facebook / Twitter

Buy Now @ Amazon

Genre - Fantasy, Paranormal

Rating – PG-13

More details about the author and the book

Connect with Jade Kerrion on Facebook & Twitter

Website http://www.jadekerrion.com

Once Humans by Massimo Marino @Massim0Marin0

Memories

From Dan Amenta’s Journal

We had the perfect life in the French-Swiss countryside until that mysterious windstorm in February. No one realized anything unusual has happened, but the next morning, while driving Annah, my daughter, to school, I discovered that vehicles littered the highway, with their dead occupants still inside.

Returning home, no one answered the phone at any of the emergency departments nor could I or my wife, Mary, reach our relatives and friends. Checking on the neighbors, I found them dead.

We soon realized we might be the only survivors of a global catastrophe. We stock up on emergency supplies, turn the house into a stronghold, and collected food and medicines. The Internet still worked so I launched a large, online campaign to find other survivors with the hope of learning more about what we were facing. While waiting for any response at all, I managed to befriend some neighborhood dogs and we armed ourselves with survival gear.

At first, it felt weird and disturbing to go into stores and take things without paying but, of course, there was no one to pay. The whole world had become a ghost town.

Buy Now @ Amazon & Smashwords

Genre – Science Fiction

Rating – PG-13

More details about the author and the book

Connect with Massimo Marino on Facebook and Twitter

Website http://massimomarinoauthor.com

Thursday, January 2, 2014

Author Interview – David Litwack @DavidLitwack

Location and life experiences can really influence writing, tell us where you grew up and where you now live?

I grew up in Boston, in a section called Dorchester (if you know Boston, you’ll understand what that means—not the most affluent neighborhood). I went to Boston Public Schools. Now, I’m fortunate enough to spend the summer months on Cape Cod and the winter in Florida. Both places are beautiful in season, and I can write anywhere.

How did you develop your writing?

Someone once said that to be a good writer, you have to write for ten years and a produce a million words. I must be getting close to that. I took classes, read dozens of books on the craft and participated in writer’s groups and conferences. All of these helped. But the most important thing is to read and to write. A lot.

Where do you get your inspiration from?

I’ve never had a shortage of ideas—at least not so far. Ideas are everywhere as long as you’re open to them. But when you write every day, you’re better able to connect the dots, to fit those ideas into your story.

What is hardest – getting published, writing or marketing?

Getting published is a challenge, especially with today’s fast-changing industry. Marketing is time consuming. But writing well is really hard work.

What marketing works for you?

Book bloggers are great, though they’re inundated with requests today. They’re generally wonderful people who love to read. Once an author earns their respect, they’re a good resource to promote books. Facebook, Twitter and other social networking vehicles are just the megaphone that lets you be heard by more people, as long as you have something interesting to say. But the best form of marketing is to keep writing, to constantly aim to perfect your craft and to produce more books that people will like.