Confessions of a Bookaholic

Monday, February 27, 2012

Tour This or That List & Giveaway: Where it Began by Ann Redisch Stampler

I am participating in the tour for Where it Began and today author Ann Redisch Stampler is here to share her This or That list with us.

I was lucky enough to get 2 ARCs of Where it Began so be sure to sign up below for the chance to win a copy!

THIS OR THAT

Peanut Butter or Chocolate

Chocolate. Oh my God, chocolate. I just ate leftover chocolate raspberry birthday cake for lunch.

Coffee or Tea

Mostly tea. Irish breakfast and green.

Writing in quiet or Writing with music

Mornings, maybe music. Night, absolute quiet.

Organized or Cluttered

Aspire to organized. Not entirely successful

Spontaneous or Planner

With writing, in the beginning stages, it has to be spontaneous. No outline. Can’t force anything. Then when I have hundreds of pages of disjointed chapters, and vast numbers of disembodied sentences, lots of catch-up planning.

Beach or Mountains

Beach. I grew up in Santa Barbara. Beach!

Comedy or Horror

Comedy. There’s more than enough naturally occurring horror in the world without cultivating it.

Geek or Chic

I am so chic. Don’t laugh. (There are certain articles of clothing Gabby makes fun of in the book that I actually own.)

Adventure seeker or Couch potato

Adventure seeker. Aspirationally. Unfortunately, writing involves a tremendous amount of sitting on a couch. I actually write on a couch.

Early bird or Night owl

Insomniac. I’m just always up.

Where it Began by Ann Redisch Stampler
Publisher: Simon Pulse (March 6th, 2012)
Reading Level: Young Adult
Hardback: 384 pages

Sometimes the end is just the beginning.

Gabby lived under the radar until her makeover. Way under. But when she started her senior year as a blonder, better-dressed version of herself, she struck gold: Billy Nash believed she was a the flawless girl she was pretending to be. The next eight months with Billy were bliss...Until the night Gabby woke up on the ground next to the remains of his BMW without a single memory of how she got there.

And Billy's nowhere to be found.

All Gabby wants is to make everything perfect again. But getting her life back isn't difficult, it's impossible. Because nothing is the same, and Gabby's beginning to realize she's missed more than a few danger signs along the way.

It's time for Gabby to face the truth, even if it means everything changes.

Especially if it means everything changes.

Prize:

1 winner will receive an ARC of WHERE IT BEGAN.

Rules:

You must be at least 13 to enter.
Name and email must be provided and counts as 1 entry.
Extra entries are possible and links must be provided.
Contest is US Only and ends March 12th.
Once contacted, the winner will have 48 hours to respond.
The form must be filled out to enter.

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Cover Reveal: Luminosity by Stephanie Thomas

Luminosity by Stephanie Thomas

Publisher: Entangled Publishing

Date: November 13th, 2012

Series: Luminosity #1

Add it to Goodreads

Summary:

My name is Beatrice. When I was born, I was blessed with the Sight. I was immediately removed from my parents and enrolled in the Institution. At the age of twelve, I had my first true vision, earning my raven’s wings. And when I turned seventeen, one of my visions came true. Things haven’t been the same since.

The Institution depends on me to keep the City safe from our enemy, the Dreamcatchers, but I’m finding it harder to do while keeping a secret from everyone, including my best friend Gabe. It is a secret that could put us all in danger. A secret that could kill me and everyone close to me.

But the enemy has been coming to me in my dreams, and I think I’m falling in love with him. He says they’re coming. He says they’re angry. And I think I’ve already helped them win.

Cover reveals are so much fun and here is another book I immediately added to my TBR list. What do you guys think? Are you excited for this one?

Paperback Available for Pre-Order from Amazon

Friday, February 24, 2012

Tour Guest Post: Daughter of the Centaurs by Kate Klimo

Kate Klimo is here to talk about her novel Daughter of the Centaurs. She will be sharing with us the journey she took while creating the world inside the story.

Daughter of the Centaurs took an incredible amount of world-building. Can you tell us what that process was like, how you organized the material, and what you hoped to capture when describing Malora’s world?

The fact that there were so few centaurs in the literature inspired me to want to tackle centaurs. World building is an exhaustive and exhausting process. Who knew? I’m sure some writers start from inside their characters’ heads and work outward from there to build up an external reality that’s an extension of the characters’ consciousness. I felt I needed to start from the outside and work in.

The first order of business was to create a history leading up to the present action. In world building, context is everything and isn’t history the ultimate context? So I started by researching centaurs, in art and myth. Those results mystified and even slightly terrified me. Except for the wise centaur named Chiron who taught the healing arts to Hippocrates (father of modern medicine), most of the centaurs were pretty rough trade. They were rock-chucking, stick-wielding, meat-eating, booze-swilling lusty boors. Another mystery was that they were all dudes. There were no women and no children. These dudes were real pieces of work: wedding crashers who liked to run off, not only with the bride, but also with all the female guests. Real dream guests, right?

This depiction baffled me. Since the days of cavemen, humans have enjoyed a close bond with horses. So what made this human-horse hybrid so repulsive and savage? Was it digestive difficulties that made the centaurs so rowdy? Seriously! Horses have very sensitive stomachs. A creature that ate like a human and digested like a horse might be permanently dyspeptic and downright surly. Maybe a steady diet of red meat and brandy made them nuts. So that’s where I started. I wrote the centaurs a shady, tumultuous history as rock-chuckers and rapists. It was the centaurs’ raid of one of the last human settlements of Kamaria that resulted in nearly wiping out the human race. Then a wise centaur named Kheiron (homage to Chiron) came along and converted the centaurs from savagery to gentility. No booze, no tobacco, no stimulants, no red meat. The converted centaurs erected a monument to the humans they had murdered and took over their town, calling it Mount Kheiron in honor of the patron. This gave the centaurs not only a religion but also a code of ethics and conduct. In order to stay on the straight and narrow, centaurs adhered to the teachings of Kheiron. They eschew stimulants, spirits, and the eating of meat and revere the works of the hand. All their efforts are dedicated to overcoming the Beast Within. I liked the idea of high-stepping, refined, fastidious centaurs. In early drafts, my editor said I was making the centaurs too effete. “They can’t all be that sissified,” she said. That gave me the idea of creating social strata within Mount Kheiron, with a working class that was more earthy and practical, as compared to the more leisurely patricians. The present action begins when Malora shows up. Not only is she a freak, a biped in a virtually quadrapedal society, but she is also a living (and uncomfy) reminder to centaurs of their less than savory past.

Somewhere around the second draft, with the introduction of Honus the faun and the Leatherwings, it became clear to me that this was not a fantasy set in an alternative world inspired by our mythic past, as I had originally thought, but a far distant future world peopled by human-created hybrids who had turned upon and destroyed their creators, the humans. (Thank you, Mary Shelley!) I loved the variety of hibes that were possible. Like the Mos Eisley canteen scene in Star Wars, it offered a too-too tempting opportunity to play not just with human-horse combinations, but with other mythological hybrids as well, along with more freaky crosses, like bat-human, sheep-human, etc. As the second book opens up to the world outside of Mount Kheiron, these other hibes come more into play.

At the same time as I was figuring out the centaur society, I had to figure out what it must be like to actually be a centaur. If humans have a mind-body split, how much more radical must centaurs’ be? How did it feel to be half horse? How did they go to the bathroom? What was their furniture like? Stairs would have to be shallow, doorways generous, and furniture very sturdy. I think I gave them the Twani, the half-cat servant class, because I thought they would need tiny, spry helpers, given that even the most graceful of centaurs would suffer from a certain ungainliness. The end result of all this thinking, I hope, is a world that is fascinating and unique.

Thanks for having me on your blog!

Daughter of the Centaurs by Kate Klimo
Publisher: Random House (January 24th, 2012)
Reading Level: Young Adult
Hardback: 362 pages
Series: Centauriad #1

Malora knows what she was born to be: a horse wrangler and a hunter, just like her father. But when her people are massacred by batlike monsters called Leatherwings, Malora will need her horse skills just to survive. The last living human, Malora roams the wilderness at the head of a band of magnificent horses, relying only on her own wits, strength, and courage. When she is captured by a group of centaurs and taken to their city, Malora must decide whether the comforts of her new home and family are worth the parts of herself she must sacrifice to keep them.

Kate Klimo has masterfully created a new world, which at first seems to be an ancient one or perhaps another world altogether, but is in fact set on earth sometime far in the future.