Re-Release Book Blitz: Slumber by Christy Sloat + Giveaway!

Hello everyone!

I am so excited that SLUMBER by Christy Sloat is available now and that I get to share the news! If you haven’t yet heard about this wonderful book by Author Christy Sloat, be sure to check out all the details below.

This blitz also includes a giveaway for a finished copy of the book courtesy or Christy. and Rockstar Book Tours. So if you’d like a chance to win, enter in the Rafflecopter at the bottom of this post.

Title: SLUMBER (Slumber Duology #1)

Author: Christy Sloat

Pub. Date: January 12, 2018

Publisher: CHBB Publishing 

Pages: 234

Formats: Paperback, eBook

Find it: Amazon, B&N, TBD, Goodreads

Not all princesses get their happily ever after...

They tell me I killed my boyfriend Phillip in cold blood. I stabbed him twenty one times. I’m only seventeen years old, and I am serving life in Spindle Ridge Asylum for the Criminally Insane.

I don’t remember killing him, so it’s really hard to believe I’m capable of murder. In fact I don’t remember anything before I came to Spindle Ridge, not even my boyfriend.

I can only grasp onto my realistic dreams while the madness of the asylum threatens to pull me under. I dream I’m a beautiful princess and there is an evil faerie named Maleficent who is bent on my destruction. The dreams are the closest thing I have to memories of my life, except they aren’t real.

I’m crazy. I’m not a princess.
They’re the mad illusions of an irrational teenage girl, right?

They’ve assigned me a new doctor, and she says I can trust her, and that she’ll help me see the truth of who I really am.
When she arrived she brought a new patient, Sawyer, who is everything Spindle Ridge isn’t: exciting, mysterious and beautiful. He promises he’s here to rescue me. Trusting either of them frightens me.
Could it be possible that my dreams are more than just the imaginings of a delusional girl? Could they be truth?

I woke in the middle of the night hearing screams fill the air. This was not uncommon at all, but tonight I wasn’t expecting it. Normally when Adele’s meds are changed, she wakes screaming that she can’t sleep. Adele’s room is across from mine. She is roughly in her twenties and I never learned how she ended up here. I try not to talk to the other patients. I don’t know why it is, but I don’t fit in with these people. To them I’m the murderer and they tend to think less of me. That’s fine. I am what they say I am. That’s why I’m here, right?

They told me I stabbed my boyfriend, Phillip, but I don’t remember doing it. I actually don’t remember Phillip at all. No recollection of having been in a relationship either. I must have killed him or else I wouldn’t be in Spindle Ridge.

Dr. Altman says that I have to believe that I did it or we will never get anywhere. I’ll admit it’s hard to believe that these hands could stab a person twenty times. No matter how I imagined it, it is always hard to believe. 

I sat up listening hard for the screams. When they came again I noticed they were not female, they were male. The screams were deeper and reached a longer distance than Adele’s cries ever could. I wondered if the whole building could hear him.

I pulled my covers up over my neck and covered my face. I just wanted to sleep and fall back into the dream I was having. It was beautiful, and if I had my way, I would stay there forever.

Wait!

I sat up fast. Closing my eyes, I tried to remember the dream to the last second. It wasn’t the same dream as the one’s prior. This dream was different! This dream was me and a boy.

I never dreamt of anyone but my parents and the evil woman. The dream’s soft lullaby came back to me as I remembered where I was.

The smell of fresh grass came across my senses.

The sky so blue as I lay on a blanket. I rolled over and saw the face of a boy. He was everything that Spindle Ridge wasn’t; he was beautiful. He had long, shaggy, but not unruly, hair that touched his collar. When he smiled at me, he looked like a boy in love. In love with me.

“Get up you lazy sack!”

I opened my eyes and was pulled back into the now. I was forced to leave the dream behind as I was being pulled out of bed by two nurses.

I am Southern California native, now living in New Jersey! How did that happen? I am married and have  two beautiful little girls who love to read just like Mommy. I have had a passion for books since I was a little girl and an imagination for just as long. I hope my books can inspire others to read and to write too.

Website | Twitter | Facebook

Instagram | Goodreads

Giveaway Details:

1 winner will win a finished copy of SLUMBER US Only.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Read More

Blog Tour: Twisted: The Girl Who Uncovered Rumpelstiltskin’s Name by Bonnie M Hennessy || Guest Post + Giveaway!

Twisted: The Girl Who Uncovered Rumpelstiltskin’s Name

by Bonnie M Hennessy

Genre: YA Fantasy

Date of Publication: November 19, 2016

ISBN13: 978-1539753421  

ISBN-10: 1539753425

ASIN: B01N3MC1K4

Number of pages: 306

Word Count: 75,000

Cover Artist: Andreea Vraciu

An old tale tells the story of how a little man named Rumpelstiltskin spun straw into gold and tricked a desperate girl into trading away her baby. But that’s not exactly how it happened. 

The real story began with a drunken father who kept throwing money away on alcohol and women, while his daughter, Aoife, ran the family farm on her own. When he gambled away everything they owned to the Duke, it was up to her to spin straw into gold to win it all back. 

With her wits and the help of a magical guardian, she outsmarted the Duke and saved the day. 

Well almost…

Her guardian suddenly turned on Aoife and sent her on a quest to find his name, the clues to which were hidden deep in the woods, a moldy dungeon, and a dead woman’s chamber. 

This is not the tale of a damsel in distress, but a tenacious, young woman who solved a mystery so great that not even the enchanted man who spun straw into gold could figure it out. 

Not until Aoife came along. 

Purchase on Amazon

Chapter 1 Excerpt

The morning mist had almost lifted in the village of Stanishire, the farmers and fishermen were readying the market, women were shouting chores to sleepy children, and Aoife was on her way to collect her father from the town brothel, where the painted ladies entertained men’s nocturnal needs.

When she reached the main street, she dismounted and tied her horse to a hitching post. She walked around the corner of the brothel where no one could see her, adjusted her skirt, and ran her fingers through her hair. Practice had taught her how to jiggle the finicky latch so its reluctant grip released and granted her entrance. The back hallway was dark and quiet. Maggie, the young girl who helped cook and clean, was opening windows to release the sweat and perfume-laced air. Broken glass littered the floor, and cards from unfinished games lay scattered on tables.

“Maggie,” Aoife whispered.

Maggie turned into the dust motes in a sliver of daylight. Over the years, Aoife had learned to call her gently and not to sneak up on her lest she startle the young girl as she had done the first time they met here when Aoife was eleven and Maggie just nine.

“Eeeeef-uh!” Maggie’s eyes lit up as she called Aoife’s name. She had always over-enunciated each syllable in what sounded like a sigh of relief.

She took hold of Aoife’s hand, pulling her around the corner and into the kitchen, one of the only places in the residence that passed for a respectable room.

“Wait here,” Maggie said, kissing Aoife on the cheek. “I’ll be right back.”

Aoife looked around at the pots hanging on the wall that Maggie kept so shiny. A rolling pin on the counter was coated with flour and the smell of bread baking in the oven filled the dimly lit room. In the corner was Maggie’s chair with a basket of women’s stockings waiting to be darned. Aoife turned her back to the parlor door and everything that happened there, pretending her visits with Maggie by the fire were no different than a visit with any other village girl. The sight of Maggie humming as she patched up stockings always made Aoife think of her younger sister, Tara, lying under her heavy blankets, sewing away at some pattern their mother had her working on. Aoife felt that Tara and Maggie would have enjoyed chatting over their sewing, if only Tara were not stuck in bed with a perpetual cough and Maggie the progeny of a brothel.

“Aoife. You look quite bright and alive considering the early hour.”

Aoife jumped as Maeve strolled over and pulled a leaf from Aoife’s hair.

“I see you’ve been busy with your studies,” Maeve added.

Aoife touched her hair, searching for more debris. Maeve’s dressing gown exposed her cleavage and her long, dark curls draped over her bare shoulders without apology. Aoife had seen her dressed, powdered, and painted since she was a girl, and she admired the way her gaze, so piercing, seemed to command respect from everyone. But what had captivated Aoife the most was something more powerful and more impressive than Maeve’s beauty. Although crow’s feet now punctuated her eyes, and her waistline had thickened, the most powerful men deferred to her, bowing their heads in her direction when she traveled through the streets.

“I couldn’t resist the path through the woods,” Aoife replied, knowing she could hide nothing from her.

Maeve stared at her. The affection in her appraisal was always slightly distant, stopping just short of motherly.

“Seamus is taking care of things,” Maeve said with her usual calm.

Aoife nodded and looked again at the shiny pots, trying to focus on anything but Seamus’ highly embarrassing ritual of waking her father, the fairly infamous Finnegan, from wherever he had ended his evening and saddling him on his horse. Maggie pulled a loaf of steaming bread from the oven and set out plates, knives, and a bowl of fresh butter. Each of them took their place around the table as Maggie generously portioned out the bread. Maeve let her shawl fall over the back of her chair and straightened up her shoulders, exposing even more of herself. Aoife flushed and bit quietly into her bread, savoring the flavor and the moment.

There was an honesty and warmth in this kitchen that she never felt in the presence of her own mother. Conversation and warm bread was what made coming to get her father for all these years worth the lashings she used to receive from her mother when she returned home.

“I hear that your latest suitor was seen heading out of town yesterday,” Maeve said. “I gather his hasty departure means that there will be no nuptials?”

Aoife shook her head and cast a quick smile at Maggie.

“I can’t imagine why you didn’t want to marry that one,” Maeve said. “Lots of gold, a manor house to the east with more land than you and your horse could ever discover, and handsome, too. What more could a girl want than a man with piles of gold and a good set of teeth?”

“A man who is blind and deaf and preferably feeble – with deep pockets, of course. Then I can live my life in peace and never have to worry about his teeth – or mine for that matter.”

Maggie giggled, and Maeve raised an appreciative eyebrow, offering her signature half-smile, half-smirk. Aoife grinned and took another bite of the steaming bread.

“And what do your parents say?” Maeve asked. Her features had softened, but her thoughts remained inscrutable. “I can’t imagine they find your refusals as entertaining as we do.”

Aoife fell silent. This was an unexpected detour in the script. They avoided direct references to Aoife’s family. It made breaking bread between them possible, since the money Maeve took from Aoife’s father by night was one of the greatest strains on her family’s resources, reputation, and love. The medicine that Tara often went without after her father’s reckless trips was reason enough for Aoife to despise Maeve, but she had learned to avoid dwelling on these realities. She needed Maeve enough to tolerate her father’s indiscretions, since rescuing him had now become a means of escaping her life. Discussing her family jeopardized everything.

“Well, no, they are not exactly pleased,” Aoife replied, her brashness fading.

Maeve wiped the corner of her mouth and cleared her throat. Something in the air had changed.

“You know, at some point, perhaps sooner than you might expect, they will stop coming. First, the young ones with stacks of gold and good teeth. They have the most fragile egos and will seek out friendlier pastures. Then eventually, even the wrinkly ones, with and without gold, will find calling on you not worth the effort,” Maeve paused. “The tales of your beauty will be replaced by tales of new faces with more welcoming smiles. The choices left to you will be slim.”

The bread balled up in Aoife’s throat. She could have had breakfast in her own home if she wanted this type of talk. She suddenly felt incensed that Madame Maeve dared to criticize her.

“My mother mires me in these traps daily,” Aoife dusted the crumbs from her hands. “She appreciates neither the risk to my reputation I take coming here nor the fact that I am the one who has run the farm for years now.”

“This is true. Your family would be in the poor house and your sister probably with God if not for your courage and your brains,” Maeve said. “But I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about you and your future. You must understand that there are consequences for you, whether you say yes or no to the suitors who come your way.”

She raised an eyebrow, which seemed loaded with a warning left to Aoife to decipher. It had a familiar ring to it, like the warnings her mother made so often about the consequences of Aoife’s trips to Maeve’s house.  

“No respectable man will ever want to marry a girl who consorts with vile women, not when he thinks he can pay a few coins for her instead,” her mother would say.

Her mother lived in such a dream world she did not recognize that Aoife was trying to protect the family’s reputation and as much of their finances as was possible. Her mother worried more about Aoife’s reputation than the food on the table and Tara’s medicine. And because of that, a chasm had grown between them too deep to ever cross.

“My choices are just as narrow as every other girl’s. I know that,” Aoife said standing up abruptly. Her shawl dropped to the floor, its power to protect her no match for the storm brewing in the kitchen. “But I’d never compromise myself – or give men control over my body for money like you do. Of that you can be sure.”

“I wasn’t suggesting that,” Maeve replied, completely unruffled. “But it’s interesting that you did. And, Aoife, no matter what choice you make – your husband’s house, my house, or the nunnery – you are exchanging control over your body for money. Of that you can be sure.”

“I have given half my life already to protecting my family. Everyday, whether I’m seeing that fields are reseeded and sheep are sheared or carting my father home from here, I am picking up the pieces of my family’s fortune that my father has broken apart,” Aoife said with less command of her voice than she would have liked. “And now, after I’ve done everything I can to save this family, they – and you – expect me to sell myself off to the next buyer, supposedly to protect them? I can’t do it.”

Aoife knew there was no way for a woman to survive in the world without the protection of a man, yet the security they offered was never guaranteed. Her father’s choices still chipped away at the pieces of what was once her mother, Bronagh. Still bedecked in the jewels of their courtship, she found her only solace and comfort in embroidering ornate and regal designs and patterns by the night fire, awaiting his return from Maeve’s as if her delicate hands could somehow stitch back together the girl he had unraveled and the lives he had torn apart at the seams. Bronagh would not even consider selling her tapestries or needlework to help support her family, for that would have been beneath a woman of her status. Aoife, however, was not built to sit and sew while their fortune and Tara’s health deteriorated at the hands of her father. She needed to be on her feet fixing the problem, not decorating the home they were sure to lose if no one intervened.

Bronagh had traded away her soul for a broken promise of safety and love, and she expected Aoife to do the same. But now Maeve, too? Her advice was nothing less than a betrayal.

“For women not made to curtsey obediently through life, there is no easy choice.” A subtle urgency belied Maeve’s calm. “However, refusing every suitor is not a means of controlling your life, but rather giving over control to whatever or whomever is left over.”

“So I should marry the next man who comes along or end up in a whore house like you?” Aoife said, wincing at her angry words.

She was angry that Maeve had taken her mother’s side, but she did not relish wounding the one person who had always been a source of strength and understanding. Despite her words, Maeve’s features revealed not even the slightest hint of hurt.

“What I am saying is that you ought to turn away any option which would leave you without hope of peace and contentment,” Maeve replied. “But do not fool yourself into waiting for a perfect choice to present itself, because it never will.”

Aoife felt her stomach lurch. She needed to get away from this house, this woman, and the truth. Turning around, she marched outside where her father was standing. She walked to her horse and looked to see if he needed assistance. The legacy of too much mead weighed on his haggard figure as Seamus helped him to his horse.

“I’m so sorry to have inconvenienced you this morning, my sweet Aoife,” her father’s worn voice eschewed sadly.

“I know, father,” she replied. “You’re always sorry.”

He swayed precariously in either direction and then took Aoife’s hand suddenly.

“You’re too good to me, Aoife,” he whispered. “You should be reaching for the–”

“Stars,” she finished. “I know, Father.”

He closed his eyes and pressed her hand between his.

“My hand’s grown since we spent our nights stargazing.”

He nodded and Aoife felt a pang of nostalgia sweep over her. She missed the way he used to pick her up from her mother’s side by the fire and take her out of doors to look at the moon and stars. The memory of the polished scent of him from her childhood came back over the stench of mead that clung to him now. He had been a good father once upon a time. She looked up, searching for any fragment of the man who tossed her high in the air as a little girl. The sparkle of a tear danced at the corner of his eye. There he was. She kissed his forehead tenderly and he sighed with the soft smile reserved only for Aoife. His favorite.

Walking Contradictions

American culture, which is rooted in the Puritanical thinking of our ancestors, is innately moral and dualistic in its thinking. In any given situation we try to separate and label the good guys and the bad guys. Part of growing up is realizing that this either-or thinking is not only overly simplistic, but perhaps causes more problems than its simplicity tries to solve. No one is all good or all evil. Some of the best stories are those where the good guys make some really bad choices and where the bad guys prove to have some good in them, no matter how deep down and hidden. 

This idea that good characters are not always perfect and bad guys are not all bad is what made creating the characters in Twisted so much fun. I fleshed them out and then set them in difficult situations and let them figure out how they were going to handle their problems, allowing for them to mistakes and redeem themselves wherever seemed natural. Thus Aoife’s maternal instincts to protect her child drive her to do some pretty terrifying lengths and Ronan and the little man, who both want nothing more than pure love and affection, engage in some shameful behavior as well. Like most stories, the pages of Twisted end when most of the characters have managed to redeem themselves to some degree. However, even as I write this blog, I know that if I picked up the story again and wrote a sequel (which I do not have plans to do), I would find the ‘good’ characters making mistakes and the ‘bad’ characters revealing their softer sides again and again. Characters, like people, are only as good as the given moment at which we see them. 

This shift away from viewing character, people, political parties, candidates, and cultures as all good or all bad is just the type of shift I think we could all use in today’s world. 

Who are some of the real life people, historical or current, who have surprised you in some way by revealing that they are more than the simple label we tried to apply to  them?

Find Bonnie @

Website | Twitter | Facebook | Goodreads

Bonnie grew up a shy, quiet girl who the teachers always seated next to the noisy boys because they knew she was too afraid to talk to anyone. She always had a lot she wanted to say but was too afraid to share it for fear she might die of embarrassment if people actually noticed her. Somewhere along the line, perhaps after she surprised her eighth grade class by standing up to a teacher who was belittling a fellow student, she realized that she had a voice and she didn’t burst into flames when her classmates stared at her in surprise.

Not long after that, she began spinning tales, some of which got her into trouble with her mom. Whether persuading her father to take her to the candy store as a little girl or convincing her parents to let her move from Los Angeles to Manhattan to pursue a career at eighteen as a ballet dancer with only $200 in her pocket, Bonnie has proven that she knows how to tell a compelling story.

Now she spends her time reading and making up stories for her two children at night. By day she is an English teacher who never puts the quiet girls next to the noisy boys and works hard to persuade her students that stories, whether they are the ones she teaches in class or the ones she tells to keep them from daydreaming, are better escapes than computers, phones, and social media.

Win these prizes:

3 copies of Twisted

2 $10 Amazon cards

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Read More

Blog Tour: Blood Red Snow White by Marcus Sedgwick | Guest Post & Giveaway!

Blood Red Snow White
by Marcus Sedgwick
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Release Date: October 25th 2016
Genre: Young Adult, Historical Fiction, Russia, Fairy Tales

It is 1917, and the world is tearing itself to pieces in a dreadful war, but far to the east of the trenches, another battle is breaking out - the Russian Revolution has just begun... 

Blood Red, Snow White captures the mood of this huge moment in history through the adventure of one man who was in the middle of it all; Arthur Ransome, a young British journalist who had first run away to Russia to collect fairy tales. 

Told as three linked novellas, part one captures the days of revolution but retells the story as Russian Fairy Tale, with typical humour and unashamed brutality. Part two is a spy story, set over the course of one evening, as Ransome faces up to his biggest challenge, and part three is a love story, full of tragedy and hope, as every good Russian love story should be.

Character development: The importance of writing a great main character, talk about what makes for an interesting and likeable one. Also, discuss one of your favorite characters from your novel and the process of developing him/her.

It’s timely to be asked this question as I have just returned from teaching at a creative writing retreat, at one point of which, I wrote a list of ‘GOLDEN RULES OF WRITING’ on the board.

The list included various things, many of which you will see repeated again and again in creative writing books, or on the Net, such as:

• Show, don’t tell

• Write what you know

• Repetition is bad

• We have to care

• Write every day

And then I proceeded to argue that actually only one of these are golden rules, and the rest are all either more or less true, and at the very least debatable. By now you’ve probably worked out the one that I believe is the only fundamental rule of writing, namely: we have to care.

It sounds a touch abrupt, this ‘Why do we care?’ but it’s what I encourage all aspiring writers to give a lot of thought to as they work on their books. It’s what my first agent asked me, when I was working on developing my writing, and it’s what I still ask myself now, when working on a book. The point is this; a book is the product of a writer’s imagination – it is, to be blunt, all made up - so why should anyone else (namely a reader) care about the strange, fictional products of anyone else’s mind?

The answer, when this process succeeds, is the underlying magic trick of all Story – that we are able to empathize not just with other people, we are able to empathize with other people who don’t actually exist. 

(If you’re interested in this subject, there are lots of books around at the moment that discuss the role of ‘mirror neurons’ in the brain – a relatively recent discovery – which are quite extraordinary. Here’s an example: – you see someone pick up a pen. When you do, mirror neurons fire in your own brain – put simply, you rehearse the same action in your own brain. It gets interesting for those of us interested in writing, however, when we learn that mirror neurons fire even if we merely read about someone picking up a pen. From here, there’s a lot of discussion about the role of story in the brain, why it evolved and why we find it so powerful, how story is our attempt to understand the world and particularly human social interaction. And the stunning conclusion to all this recent research is that it’s now been proven that reading fiction makes you more empathetic, kind, tolerant and better looking too. (I might be lying about one of those).

But there’s a big ‘however’ in all this: the success of this process (the empathy of a reader for a character) is not a given, and therefore it’s worth pointing out that a writer can never assume the reader will automatically like or engage with their protagonists etc. and therefore that one has to earn this.

So how does a writer make a reader care about a new character they’ve introduced? Well, it’s worth spending some time thinking about why we like any new real person that we meet. Why do we like people? (or maybe not like them per se, but find them interesting, or fascinating, or the topic of much discussion) Such people may be some or all of these things: funny, kind, in need of our sympathy, have interesting things to say, have things in common with us, have things that are outside our experience but which are fascinating, etc. etc. etc. What I’m describing are the various ways real people engage us, and a fictional person must do the same.

It’s time to end, but in conclusion, in writing Blood Red, Snow White, the situation was a slightly different one. Being a true story, my character was a real person, which much written about him, one whose diaries and letters and autobiography I read again and again, and he was a very likeable man, even if he did some very silly things from time to time, some very risky and hasty things. That’s how real people behave, with complexity, and even if they are sometimes frustrating, we still love our loved ones. My challenge in this book therefore, was not to create a ‘real’ character, but to translate him, bring him to life, as well as possible for the reader of my book.

Follow the Blood Red Snow White Blog Tour and don't miss anything! Click on the banner to see the tour schedule.

Marcus Sedgwick was born in Kent, England. Marcus is a British author and illustrator as well as a musician. He is the author of several books, including Witch Hill and The Book of Dead Days, both of which were nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award. The most recent of these nominations rekindled a fascination with Poe that has borne fruit here in (in The Restless Dead, 2007) the form of "The Heart of Another" - inspired by Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart." Of his story, Sedgwick says, "This was one of those stories that I thought might be a novel originally but actually was much better suited to the tight form of the short story. I had the initial idea some years ago but was just waiting for the right ingredient to come along. Poe's story, as well as his own fascination with technique, provided that final piece of the puzzle."

He used to play for two bands namely playing the drums for Garrett and as the guitarist in an ABBA tribute group. He has published novels such as Floodland (winner of the Branford Boase Award in 2001) and The Dark Horse (shortlisted for The Guardian Children's Book Award 2002).

 

Prize: Win a set of Marcus Sedgwick's books: BLOOD RED SNOW WHITE, THE GHOSTS OF HEAVEN and MIDWINTERBLOOD (US Only)

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Read More