Meet Jaclyn Weist~ one of the authors of The Gates of Atlantis Series

Today, I've got an author interview for you. Let's meet Jaclyn Weist, one of the authors of the Gates of Atlantis series.

Welcome Jaclyn! Can you tell me a little about your writing journey? How you got to this point?

~ I have loved writing since I was a little girl. In high school I would spend my library aide class writing short stories about animals. Four years ago I had a bookstore and took a dive into writing again. I met several different authors that helped me learn more about the writing/publishing process. I came up with a short story about a leprechaun who steals a girl's luck for my writing group and it was a hit. I decided to see what I could do with it, and it's now three books and a novella! I've written a few other books and then my friends and I came up with the idea for this series.

Can you give me an idea what Magicians of the Deep is about?

~ My book is part of The Gates of Atlantis series. It follows Colin and Alleya as they learn more about the damage that Phoibos is causing in Atlantis. Colin is trying to figure out his magic, and Alleya just wants to be free from her prison. She is part-mermaid, part-Atlantian and that's something that's not accepted in Atlantis at that time.

Do you have any particular themes in your writing that you love?

~ I write family a lot. There's always a strong family system for me. Even Colin, who is an orphan, finds a strong family. I always like have my characters solve their own problems. They never give up, no matter what I throw at them. I'm also a strong believer in happy endings.

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know about you or your book?

~ My son was reading the book the other day and he said "Does anyone else see that Colin is just exactly like me?" I thought about it and Colin really does have a lot of Jakob's personality. I hope my readers will relate to the characters and the story as well as my son did.

 

Read more about the whole series on my blog!

Please Welcome Chapter Book Author Melissa Moraja~

Today, I've invited Melissa Moraja to the blog for an interview about her and her Wunderkind Family chapter books. Welcome to the blog, Melissa!  

Can you tell me a little about your writing journey? How you got to this point?  

Truthfully, I never planned on being a children’s writer. It happened by complete accident. I was on maternity leave from IBM and while my three kids were napping (they were all in diapers and only 15 months apart), I thought I’d try to paint a mural of Madagascar in what was soon to become my kids playroom. I have always wanted to be an artist, but was guided by my high school art teacher to get a business degree first. I did and then found it hard to leave the corporate financial success. Going back to painting the mural. As I was painting, a drop of paint splattered onto the floor. I ended up doing an ink blot of it. As I stared at it, I saw it come to life. This green ink blot became my first children’s character – Splatter! That same day there was a double rainbow in Chicago. It was my oldest son’s excitement as he pointed to it that gave me the idea of where Splatter lived. From there, I started to create friends and family for Splatter. And after about six months, I had created Splatter and Friends and their story. For some reason, I showed it to a friend of mine and he connected me with a licensing agent for Pokémon and Wiggles. He said, “This is such a fresh idea and what the market needs.” He then encouraged me to brand the characters by making them into children’s books. I then spent years learning how to write, illustrate and publish a children’s book and in 2009, I had self-published my first two Splatter and Friends children’s picture books.

But that was just the beginning of a career I never foresaw. In 2008, as I was writing a self-help book, I had included a story about how my husband had all the time in the world to kill this stupid fly in our house, but didn’t have time to read a book to Jake (our oldest child who was five years old). The more I read the story, the more I started to think that it would make a cute children’s chapter book. So I began learning everything I could about how to write, illustrate and publish a children’s chapter book. In 2009, my first proof arrived. And when I showed it to my twins (Josh and Madison who were now five years old), with big smiles, they both asked me when I would write and publish their book. As their mom, I had to create a book for them, about them, just like I did for their older brother. This is when my career as a children’s writer truly began. I took their strengths, their quirks, their beliefs and incorporated all of it into a fictional story that each of them told growing up as a Wunderkind. That is the uniqueness of the Wunderkind Family children’s chapter books. Each story is told by one of the extraordinary Wunderkind siblings. Every child, every person has their own perspective on what happened. And each one of the Wunderkind Family siblings gets to tell their story from their point of view.

As I continued to write and illustrate, I found that I loved what I was doing. I have never been happier. And I’ve found my passion in writing and illustrating has encouraged my kids and their friends to write, illustrate and read.

Can you give me an idea what your book series is about?
Josh and the Gumshoe News Crew ‘The Super Secret’ is the fifth book in the Wunderkind Family children’s chapter book collection. The Wunderkind Family children's book series is a collection of humorous, fantasy stories, each told by one of the four whimsical Wunderkind sibling characters, about what it’s like growing up as a kid with extraordinary abilities in an unusual, yet charming family in the small town of Boring Brook. (Target age: 6 – 12 years old).

In ‘The Super Secret’, Josh Wunderkind, the middle-child sibling, finally discovers his super Wunderkind ability. Every Wunderkind that has existed was born with an extraordinary ability, unique from every other Wunderkind. Josh, however, was the only Wunderkind sibling that didn’t know what his special ability was, until one day a mammoth-sized bird hit him smack on the face with a glob of neon green bird poop. triggering his superhuman Wunderkind ability and leaving him with the responsibility of caring for a baby falcon he named Max. Josh soon realizes that being superhuman isn’t all fun and games. And his previously simple life becomes even more complex when his two siblings and a couple neighborhood friends persuade him to lead a super crime-solving, neighborhood news team—the Gumshoe News Crew. In this story, Josh not only learns more about his ability and how to use it, but also responsibility and leadership. This story if filled with many funny moments and illustrations that share Josh’s humorous life.


Do you have any particular themes in your writing that you love?

I love writing stories that teach kids about themselves. Each of us have been blessed with certain strengths and these stories encourage kids to discover and develop theirs. All of my stories encourage self-awareness, self-confidence and perseverance. In ‘The Super Secret’ Josh is discovering his strengths and how to use them. He also is learning about what it’s like to have responsibility. I also stress that it’s okay to make a mistake. That is the primary theme in Madison Wunderkind’s stories, even Madison’s guardian angel isn’t perfect. Every Wunderkind Family story share’s how each person learns, grows and perceives differently.

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know about you or your book? 


All of my books were written and illustrated with the help of my oldest three children. They helped me come up with the story that they wanted to share with the world. They chose their theme, what they wanted to teach, and what they wanted to include. They even chose their extraordinary ability, which is also based off of their real life strengths. They created their fictional character, strengths and growing moments. Every title and every word was reviewed by them before it ever went to publishing (as well as a professional editor). But in the end, I let them be the final decision-maker on what was to be taken out, changed or added. For they were the one’s telling their fantasy, fictional life. In fact, I told them that one day they can take over writing their Wunderkind Family story.



Thank you so much for the interview! If you'd like to find Melissa or her books on the web, check out the links below.


Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/The-Super-Secret-Gumshoe-Wunderkind/dp/0989829324

iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-super-secret/id839988029?mt=11

B&N: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/madison-and-ga-melissa-perry-moraja/1114926342?ean=9780989829335


Website: http://www.melissaproductions.com

Blog: http://www.notyourordinarypsychicmom.com

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/melissaproductions and http://www.facebook.com/thewunderkindfamily

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/melissaprod

 

 

 

Interview with Jessica Arnold~ author of The Looking Glass

Hey peeps! I've got a guest today. Say Hello to Jessica Arnold~ 

It’s so nice to have you visit my blog, Jessica. Can you tell me a little about your writing journey? How you got to this point?

 Great to be here! The first word that I can think of to describe my writing journey is loooonnnnggggg. Writing, querying, revising, submitting, and editing (and editing and editing) The Looking Glass has taken several years! I was fortunate enough to sign with a great agent, Carrie Pestritto, who has believed in this book from the beginning and worked tirelessly to help make it happen. Getting to this point has required persistence, patience (read: “gritting my teeth and waiting despite my impatience”), and a touch of insanity. But it’s been an amazing journey and well worth all the effort.

  The Looking Glass looks awesome. Can you give me an idea what it’s about?

The Looking Glass is about Alice, a fourteen-year-old girl who is visiting a “haunted” hotel with her family. After hitting her head on the bottom of the pool, Alice wakes up in the hotel lobby with no clue how she got there. And, when she happens to glance into a mirror, she sees her body being rushed to the hospital. Trapped, alone, and only able to see the real hotel through the mirrors, Alice realizes that the place she’s in is nothing more than a copy, and she herself is no better. The real Alice is in a coma.

 As Alice explores her prison, she realizes that the hotel she’s stuck in isn’t an exact copy of the modern one. Everything here is older, and everywhere there are portraits of the same woman—an actress named Elizabeth Blackwell. When Alice discovers Elizabeth’s bloodstained diary, she finds herself delving into the hotel’s horrifying history, a never explained murder, and a curse from the 1800s that might still be intact. And if Alice can’t find a way to break the curse before it’s too late, her real body, still comatose in the hospital, will die.

The book has such a beautiful cover. How did it come to be and what it does it represent?
The cover IS amazing. Thankfully I didn’t have much to do with the actual design. My publisher asked me how I imagined my cover, and I came up with something about mirrors and glass and … probably not the most illustrative ideas. When I received a mock-up of this design, I was over the moon in love with it. I think of the cover as the starting scene of the book—Alice unconscious in the pool, just fallen under the curse that puts her life in jeopardy.

Do you have any particular themes in your writing that you love?

In The Looking Glass, I worked in particular with the theme of reflection. Mirrors are major players in the story—and play a huge part in deciding the fate of both Elizabeth and Alice. Beyond just mirrors, the accuracies and distortions in the way we perceive ourselves is one of my favourite concepts to explore. What “flaws” do we endlessly obsess over? And what aspects of ourselves do we try to ignore?

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know about you or The Looking Glass?

 My website is www.iamjessicaarnold.com and I tweet @jess_s_arnold. I love digital friends, so feel free to say hi!

Thank you so much for stopping by my blog, Jessica. Good luck with the tour!

Thanks for having me! It’s a pleasure!



~~~

Find the diary, break the curse, step through The Looking Glass!

Fifteen-year-old Alice Montgomery wakes up in the lobby of the B&B where she has been vacationing with her family to a startling discovery: no one can see or hear her. The cheap desk lights have been replaced with gas lamps and the linoleum floor with hardwood and rich Oriental carpeting. Someone has replaced the artwork with eerie paintings of Elizabeth Blackwell, the insane actress and rumored witch who killed herself at the hotel in the 1880s. Alice watches from behind the looking glass where she is haunted by Elizabeth Blackwell. Trapped in the 19th-century version of the hotel, Alice must figure out a way to break Elizabeth’s curse—with the help of Elizabeth's old diary and Tony, the son of a ghost hunter who is investigating the haunted B&B— before she becomes the inn's next victim.

ABOUT JESSICA ARNOLD:


Jessica Arnold writes YA, codes ebooks, and is currently a graduate student in publishing at Emerson College in Boston. She spends most of her time in class or work or slogging through the homework swamp. If she has a spare moment, she’s always up for a round of Boggle. Given the opportunity, Jessica will pontificate at length on the virtues of the serial comma, when and where to use an en dash, and why the semicolon is the best punctuation mark pretty much ever.



Author Links: Website | Twitter | Facebook | Goodreads

 

Giveaway Information: (OPEN INT.) – Winner will be drawn May 9, 2014

· Four (4) winners will receive an ebook copy of The Looking Glass by Jessica Arnold (INT)

· One (1) winner will receive an ebook copy of The Looking Glass by Jessica Arnold AND a $10 Amazon Gift Card or B&N Gift Card – Winner’s Choice (INT)

 

 

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Interview with Scott Craven, author of "Dead Jed: Advenures of a Middle School Zombie"

Today I've got Scott Craven, author of Dead Jed from Month9Books here for an interview. This books looks like something my zombie-obsessed second grader would love!

Tell me a bit about yourself…where you’re from and how you came to be a writer…

I was a high school sophomore in search of an elective when I saw that Journalism 1 was offered right before lunch, just the gap I needed to fill. I loved to read but cared little for writing at the time. And as the class went on, I still was disinterested in writing, yet the class would lead to a journalism career that now is in its 35th year. Over the years I’ve heard journalists talk about how they were motivated by a need to tell the truth, to defend the downtrodden, to pursue ideals leading to a better America. But the first time I saw my name in print in the high school newspaper, I was hooked. Turns out I was just 30 years or so ahead of my time when it comes to fashionable self-obsession. (Full disclosure – I am no longer motivated by ego, I swear).

 Tell me what genres you write and why?

 It seems I write in middle-grade speculative, which I had no idea was even a genre when I started writing “Dead Jed.” Even as I dashed out the first chapter, I had no idea who might be interested in such a story. Turns out it’s children in 4th through 7th grades, an audience that seems so narrow. My hope is the book will catch on with parents. Ideally the child asks them to read the first chapter, and adults get such a kick out of it, they grab it after the child’s in bed and continue with the story.

 What's your latest book about?

 My latest, and only, book is narrated by Jed Rivers, a pretty normal 13-year-old whose limbs may fall off when he gets nervous. He had no idea he was a zombie until he blew out candles on a cake, and his lips rocketed into the frosting. Now he is entering the scariest year of anyone’s life – seventh grade. And he has to do it as a zombie. The school bully does what school bullies do, and starts to take Jed apart piece by piece. Fortunately for Jed, all he needs is duct tape and staples to keep it together. He spends his year fending off bullies while teaching students that not all zombies shuffle around eating brains. Some of them just like to fit in, maybe play some football.

 What themes do you particularly like to use in your writing and why?

 As with the genre, “Dead Jed” was not about certain themes. But as writing progressed, the bullying subject came through loud and clear. The second book continues that theme, though Jed is much more confident about himself as he’s learned what it means to be a zombie. I hope young readers take from the book that being different is nothing to be ashamed of. Differences are to be celebrated, because they are what makes us who we are, lending to individual talents that can make the world a better place.

When creating characters for your books, how do you go about it?

 As protagonist, Jed is the most flawed of the characters. Not because he is undead, but because he fails to realize his capabilities by not embracing who he is. As such, Jed needed a strong supporting cast of friends. I also tried to give depth to the bully because cardboard figures are too easy to knock down. 

What advice do you have for a beginning writer?

 Simple. Read and write. Then write and read. “Dead Jed” is my first attempt at a book, and I am told I am very lucky because most authors have a handful, if not a dozen, of unsold manuscripts scattered about their homes. But I’ve been a writer for 35 years. Rather than unsold manuscripts, I’ve had thousands of stories published in newspapers. I write seven days a work, either for work or on my own. This week, for example, I started a story on a physician who happens to be a nun (or a nun who happens to be a physician) that runs a medical clinic for homeless people. On weekends I work on the blog, or marketing for the book (this interview, for example). The more you deal with words, the better you will get. At some point you will find your voice. Congratulations. Success will come any moment now.

 Is there anything else you’d like to mention? (i.e. where you get your inspiration?)

 Don’t tell anyone, but some of the worst things that happen to Jed happened to me in seventh grade. Thrown head-first into a trash can? Check. Allowing the bully to copy off my test to avoid getting beaten up? Check. Stuffed into a display case? Check. Seventh grade was a miserable year. There were days I just wanted to stay in bed. But my only regret was that I never told anyone how I felt. I suffered in silence, made it through, and went on to bigger and better things. But if I’d leaned on a friend, or a trusted teacher, or my parents, I wouldn’t have had to face that alone. It’s true I can look back and laugh at it all, especially through Jed’s eyes, but that doesn’t mean I’d want to go through anything like that again.

ABOUT DEAD JED:

Title: DEAD JED: ADVENTURES OF A JUNIOR HIGH ZOMBIE
Publication date: December 1, 2013
Publisher: Month9Books, LLC.
ISBN-13: 978-0-9883409-0-9
ISBN eBook: 978-0-939765-56-7
Author: Scott Craven

Dead Jed is Shaun of the Dead meets Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Jed's not your typical junior high geek. He is, to use the politically-correct term, cardiovascularly-challenged. And while his parents have attempted to shield him from the implications of being 'different' for as long as they could (Jed was 8 and at a friend's sister's birthday party when he blew his lips off onto the cake in front of everyone, finally prompting the “Big Talk” from his parents and an emergency SuperGlue repair by his dad), 7th grade at Pine Hollow Middle School as a target of Robbie the supreme school bully and his pack of moronic toadies is rapidly becoming unbearable.

From being stuffed in a filled trash can as “dead meat” and into a trophy case as the bully's “prize,” to literally having his hand pulled off in the boys' room (Jed's always losing body parts. Luckily, a good stapler and some duct tape and he's back in the action) and a cigarette put in it and try to frame him for the recent reports of smoking in the school, Jed's had enough and is ready to plan his revenge. Besides, it's awesome what you can do when you're already dead!
 

ABOUT SCOTT CRAVEN:

 

Proud graduate of Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, have one son who will turn 18 in March 2013, now a features writer for The Arizona Republic.

Links:

Website: http://scott-craven.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Scott_Craven2

 

Link to the Tour Schedule:
http://www.chapter-by-chapter.com/tour-schedule-dead-jed-by-scott-craven-presented-by-month9books/

Link to Goodreads:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18158040-dead-jed

Purchase Links:
Amazon:  http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Jed-Adventures-Middle-School/dp/0988340909/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1385603438&sr=8-1&keywords=dead+jed+scott+craven
B&N: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dead-jed-scott-craven/1112950167?ean=9780988340909
TBD:  http://www.bookdepository.com/Dead-Jed-Scott-Craven/9780988340909
KOBO: http://store.kobobooks.com/en-ca/books/dead-jed/n1lHdb5Q8EeiNAcVklcTnQ
Indiebound:  http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780988340909

Giveaway Information:
·        Three (3 ebook copies of Dead Jed by Scott Craven (International)
·        One (1) signed paperback copy of Dead Jed by Scott Craven (US only) a Rafflecopter giveaway