New Blog -Book Reviews

Here's my new blog, to anyone who missed my stuff. Hope you like it.

10 Major Challenges of Writing a Book

I always thought being a writer would be my ideal job, because it comes pretty naturally to me, I enjoy it, and I have a never ending imagination!

It's the toughest thing though. Here's why:

1) You are your own boss - no one is going to tell you when to write and what to write, and the deadline. It's up to you. You have to find that motivation, even when writer's block isn't an issue.

2) Creating a GOOD story is tougher than you think - so you have a plot, you have an outline, but now you have to fill in the details. Or you have the details of your characters, and the world they are in but you have to create a good story, that includes growth of the character and change. Etc. etc. etc. It's amazing what Jane Austen, and the Bronte sister's did. Oh goodness! We still have material - social issues in our world to base our stories on, but their characters development was so well done!

3) Its gonna take time, a whole lot precious time - to do it, to do it, do it right! yeah, so as we grow older we find we have less time. Time begins to slip away so easily. Yet when we are children a day seems to take forever. I wish I had that type of time now. Oh and then there are random chores, obligations that need to be taken care of like an oil change, or cleaning! So making time, and committing time to writing is tough as a grown up adult. Like the saying goes- "health is wasted on the young" so is time!

4) Remembering what you wrote yesterday - few chapters in and you forgot the deets from chapter one, and then 30 chapters in you forgot the details from chapter 15! Creating a timeline, or some sort of organization of characters is important. For instance, I know the world well, and I know my characters, but sometimes I forget what I put in her bag. At the time i put the things in her bag I knew what they were and why they were, but then 4 chapters later, I forget. Kind of like, you have a list of things to tell your significant other at the end of the day, and then you see them and you forget half of it. Then you remember it just when you are both about to fall asleep!

5) Setting deadlines and goals - these are hard to stick to, because of all of the above. So kick it out the window. You'll find that once you do that, you'll be able to write more, and then you'll set a goal, 'I want to finish it by the 20th of Jan'. Then once you set it, it get's tough again.

6) Thinking of Publishing? - these thought or worries rather, come and go; for me, more often than not. Self publish, or find an agent, or approach a publisher? Which one is right for you. I say finish writing, have a manuscript. Edit it twice and then worry about publishing. Maybe do some research in your free time, yes that time which is so hard to come by. I will be posting information on that soon! So stay tuned!

7) Worries of failure - you could be the next JRR Tolkien of JK Rowling or George RR Martin, but it's such a competitive world, and you're better off making video games honestly, cause I rather play video games than write cause it's easier :-P kids today rather play video games than read. There are those who read, but I fear those numbers are decreasing rapidly. Then there are those who write for Movies... aaah! Worries of failing will plague the author, but to write knowing the chance of success is very low, is quite comforting. Accept that and write.

8) Atmosphere from noisy to quiet, finding a balance for writing - so I've always dreamt of writing a novel at a cafe, where there's a fire sizzling, and I got me some hot chocolate. I am brandishing my wonderful ink pen, and writing on some wonderful parchment... scratch that. Over full Starbucks, noisy, Christmas music, no fireplace, and yeah the baristas shouting about. Nope, need to find that ideal setting, yet. It's hard to find a perfect atmosphere or ambiance that nurtures writers. The right amount of noise, as to not being distracting, as well as not to quiet to be creepy. Yes silence can distract me, so I find playlists that inspire but also help keep me focused (so different from my running play list, or driving play list!). Then there's the internet, def don't connect to the WIFI, and if you need to look something up use your phone, keep it to the minimum!

9) Prioritizing writing, life, friends, balancing? Maybe not balanced but being smart about it - writing is important, but if you have a different job that sustains you while you are writing, that should take priority. Then there are life things, as in a friend needs you, friendship is very important, don't ditch your friend, then again a good friend would understand. So setting these priorities and working around them. Sometimes you might prioritize and set up a schedule, that schedule will change! Be flexible. I set time to write, but sometimes it doesn't flow well, until my head hit's the pillow at 11:30 pm and then I get mega-inspired. I have to teach at 8 am the next morning, but I go with the flow and deal with it. Its the only way it's going to get done, sometimes I just write it on note-cards, and try to pick it up later. When I do stay up late to write, I suck it up although i am tired, and I deal with it the next morning, and drink tea and look awesome (somehow) and make sure I teach well (tea does the job for me).

10) Word count goals - so publishers have set an average word count for various genres. Fantasy / sci-fi fiction lands at about 80,000 - 100,000 words. So with length in mind, and matter of course, it's good to pace yourself, and build. Setting a word goal per day/ week is good but eventually I've found that difficult to work with.

Lastly: editing, but since I'm not there yet, I'll leave it for the next blog entry. So stay tuned!
And yes I have not really edited this blog!

:-P

Breathe
(always remember to breathe while writing!)

Remembering Maya Angelou

She is gone, but
Her words live on:

Never make someone a priority when all you are to them is an option.

If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

I do not trust people who don't love themselves and yet tell me, 'I love you.' There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.

We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.

You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.

My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.

Try to be a rainbow in someone’s cloud.

I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life's a bitch. You've got to go out and kick ass.

The love of the family, the love of the person can heal. It heals the scars left by a larger society. A massive, powerful society.

Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently.

Nothing will work unless you do.

It's one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, to forgive. Forgive everybody.

I've learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way (s)he handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights.

Thank you The Gaurdian for the quotes and info.



Breathe

Painting with My Fingers

Pick up a book!

The spark of creativity
Thus unfolds
The innocence and naivete
That imagination often holds.

To frolic and dance,
To paint trees and mountains,
To play with unicorns perchance,
And to swim under magical fountains...

From my mind
To the paper or screen,
Do my fingers tap dance, in kind,
To make what never was, to have always been.

That spark of creativity,
Awakens my mind,
In my heart an raging energy,
With words giving vision to the blind.

Tingles in my fingers
Longing to paint and dance on paper with a pen,
Creating amazing imagery, and stories that linger,
Tales of fantasy, fright, women warriors and loyal men...

This spark of creative energy
What will I create today?
Where will I travel?
Who will I meet? What adventures will I embark on?
Will you share them with me...?





-Breathe-

Falling Water's reading room...

This is what I envision when I think of reading... oh and hot chocolate, the fireplace crackling...

Re-post: The Importance of Reading

A sweet friend of mine re-posted this article, which of course I loved It emphasizes the importance of reading fiction in a world of cell phones, movies and video games. My favorite line "Albert Einstein was asked once how we could make our children intelligent. His reply was both simple and wise. "If you want your children to be intelligent," he said, "read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales." He understood the value of reading, and of imagining. I hope we can give our children a world in which they will read, and be read to, and imagine, and understand."

Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming
A lecture explaining why using our imaginations, and providing for others to use theirs, is an obligation for all citizens

It's important for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whether they might be biased. A declaration of members' interests, of a sort. So, I am going to be talking to you about reading. I'm going to tell you that libraries are important. I'm going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do. I'm going to make an impassioned plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things.

And I am biased, obviously and enormously: I'm an author, often an author of fiction. I write for children and for adults. For about 30 years I have been earning my living though my words, mostly by making things up and writing them down. It is obviously in my interest for people to read, for them to read fiction, for libraries and librarians to exist and help foster a love of reading and places in which reading can occur.

So I'm biased as a writer. But I am much, much more biased as a reader. And I am even more biased as a British citizen. And I'm here giving this talk tonight, under the auspices of the Reading Agency: a charity whose mission is to give everyone an equal chance in life by helping people become confident and enthusiastic readers. Which supports literacy programs, and libraries and individuals and nakedly and wantonly encourages the act of reading. Because, they tell us, everything changes when we read. And it's that change, and that act of reading that I'm here to talk about tonight. I want to talk about what reading does.

What it's good for. I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons – a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth – how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn't read. And certainly couldn't read for pleasure. It's not one to one: you can't say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations. And I think some of those correlations, the simplest, come from something very simple.

Literate people read fiction. Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it's a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it's hard, because someone's in trouble and you have to know how it's all going to end … that's a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, you're on the road to reading everything. And reading is key.

There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far. The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them.

 I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children's books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. I've seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy. It's tosh. It's snobbery and it's foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn't hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the first time the child has encountered it. Do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is a route to other books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste as you. Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child's love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian "improving" literature. You'll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.

 We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy. (Also, do not do what this author did when his 11-year-old daughter was into RL Stine, which is to go and get a copy of Stephen King's Carrie, saying if you liked those you'll love this! Holly read nothing but safe stories of settlers on prairies for the rest of her teenage years, and still glares at me when Stephen King's name is mentioned.) And the second thing fiction does is to build empathy. When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. You're being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you're going to be slightly changed. Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals. You're also finding out something as you read vitally important for making your way in the world. And it's this: The world doesn't have to be like this. Things can be different. 

I was in China in 2007, at the first party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one point I took a top official aside and asked him Why? SF had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed? It's simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.

 Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you've never been. Once you've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different. And while we're on the subject, I'd like to say a few words about escapism. I hear the term bandied about as if it's a bad thing. As if "escapist" fiction is a cheap opiate used by the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the only fiction that is worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirroring the worst of the world the reader finds herself in. If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldn't you take it? And escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with(and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real. As JRR Tolkien reminded us, the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers.

Another way to destroy a child's love of reading, of course, is to make sure there are no books of any kind around. And to give them nowhere to read those books. I was lucky. I had an excellent local library growing up. I had the kind of parents who could be persuaded to drop me off in the library on their way to work in summer holidays, and the kind of librarians who did not mind a small, unaccompanied boy heading back into the children's library every morning and working his way through the card catalogue, looking for books with ghosts or magic or rockets in them, looking for vampires or detectives or witches or wonders. And when I had finished reading the children's' library I began on the adult books. They were good librarians. They liked books and they liked the books being read. They taught me how to order books from other libraries on inter-library loans. They had no snobbery about anything I read. They just seemed to like that there was this wide-eyed little boy who loved to read, and would talk to me about the books I was reading, they would find me other books in a series, they would help. They treated me as another reader – nothing less or more – which meant they treated me with respect. I was not used to being treated with respect as an eight-year-old. But libraries are about freedom.

Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information. I worry that here in the 21st century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them. If you perceive a library as a shelf of books, it may seem antiquated or outdated in a world in which most, but not all, books in print exist digitally. But that is to miss the point fundamentally. I think it has to do with nature of information. Information has value, and the right information has enormous value.

For all of human history, we have lived in a time of information scarcity, and having the needed information was always important, and always worth something: when to plant crops, where to find things, maps and histories and stories – they were always good for a meal and company. Information was a valuable thing, and those who had it or could obtain it could charge for that service. In the last few years, we've moved from an information-scarce economy to one driven by an information glut. According to Eric Schmidt of Google, every two days now the human race creates as much information as we did from the dawn of civilisation until 2003. That's about five exobytes of data a day, for those of you keeping score. The challenge becomes, not finding that scarce plant growing in the desert, but finding a specific plant growing in a jungle. We are going to need help navigating that information to find the thing we actually need. Libraries are places that people go to for information. Books are only the tip of the information iceberg: they are there, and libraries can provide you freely and legally with books.

More children are borrowing books from libraries than ever before – books of all kinds: paper and digital and audio. But libraries are also, for example, places that people, who may not have computers, who may not have internet connections, can go online without paying anything: hugely important when the way you find out about jobs, apply for jobs or apply for benefits is increasingly migrating exclusively online. Librarians can help these people navigate that world. I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark.

Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them. They belong in libraries, just as libraries have already become places you can go to get access to ebooks, and audiobooks and DVDs and web content.

A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it.
That includes health information. And mental health information.
It's a community space. It's a place of safety, a haven from the world.
It's a place with librarians in it.
What the libraries of the future will be like is something we should be imagining now. Literacy is more important than ever it was, in this world of text and email, a world of written information. We need to read and write, we need global citizens who can read comfortably, comprehend what they are reading, understand nuance, and make themselves understood.

Libraries really are the gates to the future. So it is unfortunate that, round the world, we observe local authorities seizing the opportunity to close libraries as an easy way to save money, without realising that they are stealing from the future to pay for today. They are closing the gates that should be open. According to a recent study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, England is the "only country where the oldest age group has higher proficiency in both literacy and numeracy than the youngest group, after other factors, such as gender, socio-economic backgrounds and type of occupations are taken into account". Or to put it another way, our children and our grandchildren are less literate and less numerate than we are. They are less able to navigate the world, to understand it to solve problems. They can be more easily lied to and misled, will be less able to change the world in which they find themselves, be less employable. All of these things. And as a country, England will fall behind other developed nations because it will lack a skilled workforce. Books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over.

There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told. I think we have responsibilities to the future. Responsibilities and obligations to children, to the adults those children will become, to the world they will find themselves inhabiting. All of us – as readers, as writers, as citizens – have obligations. I thought I'd try and spell out some of these obligations here. I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good thing. We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future. We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. Use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside.

We have an obligation to use the language.
To push ourselves: to find out what words mean and how to deploy them, to communicate clearly, to say what we mean.
We must not to attempt to freeze language, or to pretend it is a dead thing that must be revered, but we should use it as a living thing, that flows, that borrows words, that allows meanings and pronunciations to change with time. We writers – and especially writers for children, but all writers – have an obligation to our readers: it's the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were – to understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are.

Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all. We have an obligation not to bore our readers, but to make them need to turn the pages. One of the best cures for a reluctant reader, after all, is a tale they cannot stop themselves from reading. And while we must tell our readers true things and give them weapons and give them armour and pass on whatever wisdom we have gleaned from our short stay on this green world, we have an obligation not to preach, not to lecture, not to force predigested morals and messages down our readers' throats like adult birds feeding their babies pre-masticated maggots; and we have an obligation never, ever, under any circumstances, to write anything for children that we would not want to read ourselves. We have an obligation to understand and to acknowledge that as writers for children we are doing important work, because if we mess it up and write dull books that turn children away from reading and from books, we 've lessened our own future and diminished theirs. We all – adults and children, writers and readers – have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.

Look around you: I mean it. Pause, for a moment and look around the room that you are in. I'm going to point out something so obvious that it tends to be forgotten. It's this: that everything you can see, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided it was easier to sit on a chair than on the ground and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you in London right now without us all getting rained on.This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, this city, exist because, over and over and over, people imagined things. We have an obligation to make things beautiful. Not to leave the world uglier than we found it, not to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation. We have an obligation to clean up after ourselves, and not leave our children with a world we've shortsightedly messed up, shortchanged, and crippled. We have an obligation to tell our politicians what we want, to vote against politicians of whatever party who do not understand the value of reading in creating worthwhile citizens, who do not want to act to preserve and protect knowledge and encourage literacy.
This is not a matter of party politics. This is a matter of common humanity.

 Albert Einstein was asked once how we could make our children intelligent. His reply was both simple and wise. "If you want your children to be intelligent," he said, "read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales." He understood the value of reading, and of imagining. I hope we can give our children a world in which they will read, and be read to, and imagine, and understand.

Shudder Cover Reveal!

Samantha Durante released the cover of the second book in her Stitch Trilogy!

This is one young-adults novel which I can't wait for but it comes out at the end of summer. Why? As I mentioned before in an earlier post, the protagonist Alessa is someone I can identify with: strong, takes the lead, takes initiative, does not give up. I can understand her college habits: studies in bed, she falls asleep, sometimes her mind is somewhere else when she is studying (with a certain someone!), and she feels obliged to take part in social activities in the sorority. The mundane college life get to her, because she knows there is something bigger! Lucky for her, things change drastically from the normal college life to a more interesting scenario. A scenario I always hoped I would wake up to, to make the mundane life not so mundane. To make studying for an exam something minuscule compared to what was happening in the world. Be careful what you wish for, because suddenly when your hold world is turned upside down, all you want is your dorm bed back, although at one point you hated it.

Boys, parties, college, is just the beginning, the world is a bigger, harsher, messed up place than you ever imagined .... in this book, and oh in real life too!

This is just the cover, can't wait to read book 2 "Shudder"!

In March I did a short review/ summary of "Stitch", if you haven't read it yet it be found on Amazon (print $9.99, Kindle $2.99)!

Also there is a is a raffle going on:

(Prize is 1 Print ARC of Shudder, open internationally) Enter the Giveaway HERE!!!


So if you are looking for summer reading (depending on your age it is either light or heavy)... try Stitch and then lookforward to Shudder in the fall!

Shudder Synopsis:
It’s only been three days, and already everything is different.
Paragon is behind her, but somehow Alessa’s life may actually have gotten worse. In a wrenching twist of fate, she traded the safety and companionship of her sister for that of her true love, losing a vital partner she’d counted on for the ordeal ahead. Her comfortable university life is but a distant memory, as she faces the prospect of surviving a bleak winter on the meager remains of a ravaged world. And if she’d thought she’d tasted fear upon seeing a ghost, she was wrong; now she’s discovering new depths of terror while being hunted by a deadly virus and a terrifying pack of superhuman creatures thirsting for blood.
And then there are the visions.
The memory-altering “stitch” unlocked something in Alessa’s mind, and now she can’t shake the constant flood of alien feelings ransacking her emotions. Haunting memories of an old flame are driving a deep and painful rift into her once-secure relationship. And a series of staggering revelations about the treacherous Engineers – and the bone-chilling deceit shrouding her world’s sorry history – will soon leave Alessa reeling…

The second installment in the electrifying Stitch Trilogy, Shudder follows Samantha Durante’s shocking and innovative debut with a heart-pounding, paranormal-dusted dystopian adventure sure to keep the pages turning.

Breathe!

Stitch - A New Trilogy to Read

Stitch Synopsis
Her heart races, her muscles coil, and every impulse in Alessa’s body screams at her to run… but yet she’s powerless to move.
Still struggling to find her footing after the sudden death of her parents, the last thing college freshman Alessa has the strength to deal with is the inexplicable visceral pull drawing her to a handsome ghostly presence. In between grappling with exams and sorority soirees – and disturbing recurring dreams of being captive in a futuristic prison hell – Alessa is determined to unravel the mystery of the apparition who leaves her breathless. But the terrifying secret she uncovers will find her groping desperately through her nightmares for answers.
Because what Alessa hasn’t figured out yet is that she’s not really a student, the object of her obsession is no ghost, and her sneaking suspicions that something sinister is lurking behind the walls of her university’s idyllic campus are only just scratching the surface…

The opening installment in a twist-laden trilogy, Stitch spans the genres of paranormal romance and dystopian sci-fi to explore the challenges of a society in transition, where morality, vision, and pragmatism collide leaving the average citizen to suffer the results.




 
Stitch is about a college going girl, Alessa, who finds herself wrapped up in a ghost  love story. Alessa is identifiable, a college student with a tragic past, trying to figure out a life and college when things change all of a sudden. The life she thought she lived unravels into a bigger plot of social control, a dystopic future, and adventure.


What really got me was that Alessa, the main character, is a strong determined character, and smart (unlike Bella Swan and Ana). She takes charge, is intelligent and will do what's right, not wallowing. So that's what drew me in. Secondly the slow building of relationships, between her friend, and the ghost. Third the mysterious dreams that haunt her, it reminds me of my dreams. The fourth reason was it would help me with my book. The fifth is when you get to the twist... it gets you! I thought it would be supernatural, or worm-hole type sci-fi, but it turned out ... different. It really picks up from there on out, and you want more. I am scared to even finish reading the book because I cant wait 6 more months for Shudder. I did wait for the Harry Potters, and other books. I suppose I shall finish it!



I began reading Stitch, after emailing the author Samantha, who also happens to be my cousin's wife. She helped me out with some writing issues I had been having myself. It was so helpful talking to her, also finding out we have books, TV shows, music and video games in common, intrigued me to the point I had to read this book. Then I found myself identifying with the heroine and her approach to college life, studying etc.

The beginning starts off slow, but its necessary for the plot, plus it building up to something big. The story unfolds one way, and the characters develop, which leads one to see patterns. So the main character is a messy girl, who is trying to get through classes, days, find purpose in her life after her parents die in a car accident, seeing ghosts in her dorm room, and Janie (her bestie) has her life together and is immense help to her friend Alessa. Then the twist happens... and a juicy twist it is. It flips the whole story. I have read this sort of a plot twist very rarely, and it is hard to do, without gaping plot holes. Also remember this is fiction.

If you have time, looking for a book to read, enjoy science fiction, a book with a strong female character, a futuristic dystopian setting, a lite read, definitely pick up Stitch!



About tips on writing, this article by Sam really helped me: On Bad Reviews.



Oh I hope to help her with promoting her second book in the trilogy! So stay tuned for more on Stitch, and Shudder!