“Inspirations and Influences” is a new series of articles in which we invite authors to write guest posts talking about their…well, Inspirations and Influences. The cool thing is that the writers are given free reign so they can go wild and write about anything they want. It can be about their new book, series or about their career as a whole.

We are delighted to welcome Sean Cummings, Canadian UF writer as our guest for the day. His debut novel Shade Fright is coming out next week and it features a female protagonist who can see the preternatural world and whose job is to locate other people who can too, for the Government. She will do that with the help of her best (zombie) friend and the ghost of former Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. Sean is here today to talk about his inspirations for writing the novel.

Ladies and Gents, Sean:

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First off, I’m really very grateful to The Book Smugglers for joining my blog tour and doing a giveaway, good luck to everyone who enters.

What inspired me to write Shade Fright ?

1. Comic books

From an early age, I developed a passionate love affair with comic books and in particular, a series of comics Marvel put out in the 70’s called “Werewolf by Night”. It was, and still is the starting point for urban fantasy in my eyes. Think about it for minute – it’s 1977, you’re ten years old and there’s a second hand comic book store on the way home from school. I collected pop bottles and delivered flyers to make enough to replenish my supply of comics and while I loved Batman and Spidey, I was completely blown away by a character named Jack Russell who could turn into a werewolf any freaking time he wanted – forget about the full moon. He lived in an urban setting and he battled all kinds of supernatural baddies, so you can imagine, I was hooked! Voila! Urban Fantasy!!

2. Canada, eh? Why the heck not?

A second inspiration for Shade Fright and one that is featured throughout the novel is that it takes place in Calgary Alberta Canada as opposed to Chicago or New York or Paris or some other world class city. (Not that Calgary isn’t world class – I mean we did have a winter Olympics there twenty-two years ago. Holy crap! Has it really been that long?)

I wanted to write an urban fantasy that was uniquely Canadian because I think hey, why the heck shouldn’t there be a Canadian ass-kicking female protagonist who throws magic at supernatural bad guys? Shade Fright is inspired by Jim Butcher’s bestselling series, The Dresden Files. There’s a splash of Simon R. Green, a sprinkle of Tanya Huff and a smattering of Kelley Armstrong. It’s a uniquely Canadian take on urban fantasy and it’s chock-full of little known facts about Canada and how we look at the world.

3. My final inspiration: Writing a book in three days! What are you nuts?

I wrote the first draft for Shade Fright on Labour Day weekend 2007. I’d entered the 3-Day Novel Contest to see if I could actually pull it off and after 72 hours of coffee, typing, retyping, swearing and banging my head against the desk, Valerie Stevens emerged as my main character and the ghost of Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King (who in life was a big time occultist) showed up to help Valerie solve a mystery that threatened to kill everyone in the city. After revising the crap out of the story, and doing a full rewrite, I started submitting it to publishers and agents in the fall of 2008. In May 2009 I received an offer from award winning independent publisher Snowbooks so I decided to jump at the opportunity.

Since then I’ve completed the second volume in the series, Funeral Pallor, and I’ve introduced some new characters not to mention a few surprises that speak to the entire story arc. (I have six books outlined.)

I’m kind of pinching myself because I’ve been writing for more than twenty years with the goal of one day getting a book in print. Some of the stuff I put out two decades ago should have been burned and buried instead of submitted to publishers in a self addressed stamped envelope – oh those poor editors! My writing was so bad it probably made their eyes bleed! But you know what? I kept at it because I believed in myself – that’s really my advice to any fledgling author. Keep at it, learn the craft, make mistakes, take your lumps, take NOTHING personally because writing is entirely subjective.

I do hope readers get a kick out of my debut novel. Oh – and if you’re wondering whether it was difficult for me to write a female protagonist in first person POV given that I’m a guy, all I can say is that Valerie is an amalgam of all the women I served with in the military. She’s not overly feminine, she’s definitely not butch. She’s got a soft spot for Greek food and she has a hate-on for evildoers.

Enjoy!

About the author: Sean Cummings is a comic book geek of the highest order and self-described nerd. He’s been writing since 1978 (as a means of liberating his “inner nerd”) He’s a huge fan of the television series Being Human and asserts that if urban fantasy happened in the real world, Being Human is as close to real as you can get. His interests include speculative and science fiction, the borg, cats with extra toes, east Indian cuisine and quality sci-fi movies/television. He lives in Saskatoon, Canada. You can read a great review of Shade Fright here.

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Thank you, Sean!!!

GIVEAWAY DETAILS

“I fell into this job quite by accident, when I discovered that I possessed the ability to see the preternatural world. There are a handful of people with similar abilities, and part of my job is to locate them, since Government Services and Infrastructure Canada likes to keep track of these things. Don’t ask me why.”

There’s a malevolent force in town, and it’s quite literally Valerie Stevens’ job to determine who’s behind it and why they want to destroy the world, starting with Calgary.

She’ll have help, in the form of her best friend (now more or less a zombie, unfortunately), a powerful dwarf troll, and the ghost of former Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King (but he goes by ‘Bill’ these days). But that’s not all – Valerie has some tricks up her sleeve and, she hopes, luck on her side. Oh, and her boyfriend, Dave. He drives a dump truck.

We have one copy of Shade Fright courtesy of the author to giveaway. In order to enter, leave a comment on this post telling us which is your favorite movie or book set in Canada. Contest is open for residents of UK, US and Canada ONLY and will run till Saturday February 27th 11:59pm (PST). We will announce the winner next Sunday in our weekly stash! Good luck!

“Inspirations and Influences” is a new series of articles in which we invite authors to write guest posts talking about their…well, Inspirations and Influences. The cool thing is that the writers are given free reign so they can go wild and write about anything they want. It can be about their new book, series or about their career as a whole.

Today’s guest is debut author Rose Lerner, whose Historical Romance novel In For A Penny is about to be released next week. The book, about a marriage of convenience based on companioship and mutual respect between a ruined lordling and a rich Cit, shook Ana’s world and brought back her love for the genre with a vengeance. And we are delighted to have the author here today to talk about her Inspirations and Influences behind the book:

Please give it up for Rose Lerner:

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There are plenty of things that show up in In for a Penny that I love wholeheartedly: making lists, men who speak foreign languages, and ballads about girls who run away to sea, for example. But the influences at the heart of the book are all things that make me angry, and matter to me a lot.

1. A Civil Contract, by Georgette Heyer.

I adore Georgette Heyer. I envy her prose style to the soles of my shoes. And A Civil Contract makes me want to throw it at the wall every time I read it.

It’s about a penniless lord who marries the daughter of a self-made man for her money. Jenny is “too commonplace and matter-of-fact to inspire…passionate adoration,” unlike the woman Adam loves, a high-strung aristocratic girl with beautiful eyes. So far, so good. Except at the end of the book, Jenny’s in love with Adam and he is still not in love with her. Instead, they discover that a marriage of quiet content can be more enduring than passion.

I’m not opposed to that sentiment, and I know a lot of readers love the book for that very reason. But why Jenny? Why is Jenny denied what every other Heyer heroine gets: the passionate adoration of her hero? What if , I thought, I wrote a marriage of convenience between a penniless lord and the daughter of a self-made man where he’s the one who feels inadequate, and she’s the one with the ex-boyfriend?

Until his father’s death, my hero Nev has never had to deal with either responsibility or business management. And my heroine, Penelope, grew up helping with the books in her father’s brewery. Nev is impressed and a little turned on by her accounting skills, but he can’t shake the lingering fear that she’d be better off with sensible, ultra-competent Edward…

2. Jane Austen, especially Sense and Sensibility.

Jane Austen is another writer who remains a huge influence not just on me, but on the entire romance genre. She writes the best comedy of manners ever. She does amazing banter. She writes strong female characters (mostly) and charming heroes (mostly).

And yet, Sense and Sensibility makes me angry. Jane Austen sets up her world so that a girl can be an Elinor, and be sensible and level-headed and live up to her responsibilities, or be a Marianne and be enthusiastic and talkative and willing to take emotional risks. By dividing those traits up into two characters and then making Marianne silly and kind of obnoxious, Austen says that you can’t be both.

I don’t want to choose between being a girl worthy of respect and being a girl who says out loud how she feels. In order to become an Elinor, I’d have to lop off entire parts of myself, lock them away and be ashamed of them and never look at them again. Which is, I think, a thing that people do to themselves. It’s something my heroine Penelope, who wants desperately to be an Elinor, has done to herself. (Luckily, Nev comes along to help her find those bits of herself again…) This brings me to Influence #3:

3. Trying to be taken seriously.

I think we’ve all had the experience of not being taken seriously, of being treated like someone whose thoughts don’t actually count for whatever reason. It’s an awful feeling.

Penelope’s whole life has been shaped by that feeling. Her nouveau-riche parents started out as working-class Londoners, but they sent their daughter to a finishing school for young ladies. The other girls all made fun of her–for the way she ate, the way she talked, the way she dressed. So she watched everything she did, trying to prove that she wasn’t vulgar, that a working-class girl could be just as good as the daughters of lords. That’s something I haven’t experienced personally, of course. But I drew on personal experiences and family history to help me figure out how to write about it.

As a teenager I struggled to present my opinions in a level-headed manner, so that my dad would take me seriously. (Alas, I frequently ended up crying in the bathroom and/or yelling…) As a girl majoring in math in college, I tried to seem confident and smart, and always wore my most serious clothes to seminar. There were whole years of my life when I wouldn’t wear pink. And I love pink!

My grandmother (whose parents came to the U.S. from Poland) made the transition from being very poor as a child to being middle-class as an adult. She remembered showing up to her first day of school speaking only Yiddish, so she didn’t teach her children Yiddish at all. She was very proud of her education. She tried not to speak with a Brooklyn accent. She wanted my mother to be a doctor even though my mother was one of the most squeamish people I’ve ever met.

Don’t get me wrong, my grandmother loved her family and was proud of where she came from. And she really did like opera, it wasn’t just an affectation. But she also censored herself and her kids, and had some bizarre blind spots. For example, she believed that she had a more classy taste in clothes than her own mother, and was always complaining that my mother looked schleppy and giving her fashion advice. Let’s look at some family photos.

My great-grandmother (in the middle):

My grandmother with her mother, and one of my grandparents together (making a joke with their Old-Timey Married People pose):

My mother. On the left she’s in a dress my grandmother bought for her (with her two brothers), and in the right she’s in a dress she bought for herself (with her youngest brother):

To find out if the trend continues into my generation, all you have to do is look at my author photo:

Clearly bright, busy patterns run in the family. Is that because we’re peasants at heart? Maybe, maybe not–but who cares? Of course, I can say that. I can really not care, because I don’t have to prove anything to anyone. My grandmother did.

I tried to show that with Penelope. I tried to show that she’s playing a losing game, but at the same time I didn’t want to criticize her for playing. Because in her situation, I think it’s impossible not to want approval, and not to feel like you should be a credit to where you came from.

So there you have it, three of my inspirations and influences! Thanks Book Smugglers for having me!

About the author: I discovered Georgette Heyer when I was thirteen, and wrote my first historical romance a few years later. My writing has improved since then, but my fascination with all things Regency hasn’t changed. When not reading, writing, or researching, I enjoy cooking and marathoning old TV shows. I live in Seattle with two roommates, four cats, and too many books and DVDs to count. You can learn more about the author on her website, where you can find an awesome excerpt of the book, cool characters’ interviews and a contest to win not only her book but also a package of 10 of her favorite Regency-themed books.

Thank you, Rose!!!

GIVEAWAY DETAILS

IN FOR A PENNY

No more drinking. No more gambling. And definitely no more mistress. Now that he’s inherited a mountain of debts and responsibility, Lord Nevinstoke has no choice but to start acting respectable. Especially if he wants to find a wife-better yet, a rich wife. Penelope Brown, a manufacturing heiress, seems the perfect choice. She’s pretty, rational, ladylike, and looking for a marriage based on companionship and mutual esteem.

IN FOR A POUND

But when they actually get to Nev’s family estate, all the respectability and reason in the world won’t be enough to deal with tenants on the edge of revolt, a menacing neighbor, and Nev’s family’s propensity for scandal. Overwhelmed but determined to set things right, Nev and Penelope have no one to turn to but each other. And to their surprise, that just might be enough.

We have one signed copy of In For A Penny to giveaway. In order to enter, leave a comment on this post. Contest is open for residents of US and Canada ONLY and will run till Saturday February 20th 11:59pm (PST). We will announce the winner next Sunday in our weekly stash! Good luck!

“Inspirations and Influences” is a new series of articles in which we invite authors to write guest posts talking about their…well, Inspirations and Influences. The cool thing is that the writers are given free reign so they can go wild and write about anything they want. It can be about their new book, series or about their career as a whole.

Today’s guest is Alexandra Bullen, a Young Adult writer whose debut novel Wish was released on January 12th. The book is about lost sisters, magical dresses and granting wishes. And it asks the question: if you could have anything, what would you wish for? We are pleased to have the author here today talking about the inspirations and influences behind her book:

Ladies and gents, please give it up for Alexandra Bullen!

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One of the reasons I was so intrigued by the idea of magic in Wish is that I’m constantly amazed by how much I can’t explain. I wouldn’t say that I believe in magic in the fairy godmother sense of the word (though I could probably be easily convinced, especially if the right dress was involved…) but I definitely believe that there is a little bit of magic in all sorts of every day things.

Being inspired to write is on the magic list, for sure. I usually have no idea where an inspiration for a character or idea comes from. One minute I’m doing something totally boring and mundane (dishes, laundry…anything I can do without too much thinking involved) and the next minute I’m frantically scribbling notes on whatever crumpled napkin or scrap piece of paper I can find.

So it’s hard for me to say exactly what it is that inspires me to write. I doubt it’s the dishes. But once I have an idea, once I’m working on a project, there’s a different kind of inspiration involved. And that’s one that’s easier to define, because it’s usually something I go looking for.

And the places I go for this kind of inspiration, the jump-start kind, when I’ve already got something bouncing around but need help kicking it into gear, are much easier to talk about.

Poems: Particularly by E.E. Cummings and Mary Karr. Something about poetry, the succinct language and small observations taking on big meaning, never fails to get me back to work.

Music: Usually songs without words. Or words in a language I can’t understand. That way I’m free to let my mind wander, instead of focusing on the story in the lyrics. Examples vary, depending on what direction I need to be motivated towards.Miriam Makeba is great for loosening up. Sigur Ros for when I need to be still.

Walks: I do a lot of story exploring on walks with my dogs in the woods. There are tons of trails where I live and they are perfect for getting lost in. I’m not much of a nature-writer, but I wouldn’t be any kind of writer at all, without easy access to the woods. (And a couple of dogs to run around with.)

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Alexandra Bullen has been a playwright, waitress, barista, gardener, script reader, yoga instructor and personal assistant. She grew up in Massachusetts, went to college in New York City, and lives most of the year on Martha’s Vineyard (except when she’s visiting San Francisco.) WISH is her first novel for young adults.

Thank you Alexandra!!

Now, for the giveaway:

For broken-hearted Olivia Larsen, nothing can change the fact that her twin sister, Violet, is gone… until a mysterious, beautiful gown arrives on her doorstep. The dress doesn’t just look magical; it is magical. It has the power to grant her one wish, and the only thing Olivia wants is her sister back.

With Violet again by her side, both girls get a second chance at life. And as the sisters soon discover, they have two more dresses-and two more wishes left. But magic can’t solve everything, and Olivia is forced to confront her ghosts to learn how to laugh, love, and live again.

For a chance to win an authographed copy of Wish , leave a comment answering the question:

If you could wish for anything, what would you wish for?

The contest is open to residents of the US and Canada only, and will run until January 30th at 11:59PM (PST). We will announce the winner next Sunday in our weekly stash! Good luck!

“Inspirations and Influences” is a new series of articles in which we invite authors to write guest posts talking about their…well, Inspirations and Influences. The cool thing is that the writers are given free reign so they can go wild and write about anything they want. It can be about their new book, series or about their career as a whole.

Today’s guest is Molly Harper, author of the awesomely hilarious, compulsively readable Jane Jameson (“Nice Girls Don’t…”) series. Part chick lit, part urban fantasy, part paranormal romance, with a healthy dose of snark and comedy throughout, Molly Harper’s got the writing thing down pat. When we were offered a chance to read and review her books, we were ecstatic – and we loved them. Then, when we were given the opportunity to have Molly over here to chat about her sources of inspiration and various influences, and to participate in an interactive Q&A with YOU, dear readers, we were even more stoked.

Ladies and gents, please give it up for the lovely Molly Harper!

I know there’s a post-Millennium backlash against holding your parents responsible for how you turn out, but really, my parents have no one to blame but themselves.

My parents are voracious readers. They can sit down with a good book and finish it in an afternoon. So it wasn’t a huge surprise to my mom when four-year-old me started sounding out words on the Lucky Charms box. My parents indulged my love of reading with trips to the library and a membership in the Especially for Girls book club. Sunday afternoons were usually marked with a sojourn to Waldenbooks and a new Babysitters Club paperback.

There were early warning signs. People asked what I wanted to be when I grew up- I said, “Mad Scientist.” I checked out those non-fiction “Mysteries of the Paranormal” books from the school library so many times that the librarian sent a concerned note home. I was repeatedly caught reading Stephen King tucked inside my seventh-grade English textbook while everybody else was working on diagramming sentences.

(I ended up marrying that seventh-grade English teacher’s nephew, David. If I had known that the Stephen King incidents would be brought up at every major family event for the rest of my life, I probably would have just done the assignments. Learn from my example, kids.)

My family is “blessed” with a dry, sarcastic wit. If you want to survive Thanksgiving, you learn to quip. Writing was a chance to get all the words in my head out on paper, because no voice could keep up with my runaway brain. I liked the puzzle that writing presented, fitting the different words together in a way that sounded pleasing, but still got my point across. And it turned out that while my humor was probably inappropriate in say, a Sunday School setting, it was pretty darn funny on paper. The self-deprecating thoughts I didn’t dare express to friends, the comebacks I couldn’t come up with on the fly, they all came out on paper. And eventually, I could voice those thoughts and sling the comebacks… and survive Thanksgiving.

Still, I never considered a career in writing until a teacher compared my voice to a young Erma Bombeck. After I looked it up and realized that was a good thing, I developed an interest in journalism and humor columns. My parents were baffled. I said I wanted to be a newspaper reporter and my mom asked, “What happened to Mad Scientist?” We’d never had a writer in the family before. We were a staunch clan of nurses, teachers, construction foremen. And it wasn’t exactly the sort of talent you could “show” people. Their friends’ kids were musicians and dancers and athletes. What was my dad going to do, pull one of my essays out of his back-pocket and show his buddies my thoughts on being flat-chested?

Still, they supported me. I said I wanted to study at a college we knew nothing about. They took me on a campus tour. I spent my summers doing newspaper internships that paid very little. They helped me survive the rest of the year. I got a job writing for our hometown paper. They didn’t gripe when I wrote columns poking fun at them.

For six years, I covered education for The Paducah Sun, writing about school board meetings, quilt shows, a man “losing” the fully grown bear he kept as a pet in his basement, and a guy who faked his death by shark attack in Florida and ended up tossing pies at a local pizzeria. There was also an incident involving potentially explosive feminine products. But I think a statute of limitations has to run out before I’m allowed to discuss it publicly.

When people wonder where I developed my sense for the odd and quirky, I tell them I was steeped in it like overbrewed sun tea. Weird things happen in Paducah. My hometown has been featured on Unsolved Mysteries twice, which is twice more than any town deserves. Combine that with the bizarre tales David brought home from his police shifts and you have a recipe for dark, hyberbolic comedy.

I loved my job at the paper. I loved meeting new people every day and never knowing where I would end up. But somehow, the ever-shifting schedules of a police officer and a reporter did not equal “family friendly.” One of us needed to take a normal job for the sake of our young daughter. I took a secretarial position at a local church office, which left me with dependably free evenings for the first time in my adult life. We were living in “The Apartment of Lost Souls” while building our new home. This was the place where appliances and small electronics went to die. Every night I would tuck our snoozing child into bed and wait for the washing machine to start smoking or the dishwasher to vomit soap on the floor. It was either write a book or go nuts. I think I made the right choice.

I wanted to write something I would enjoy reading; something funny, outlandish, Southern. I wondered what would be the most humiliating way possible to be turned into a vampire- a story that a vampire would be embarrassed to share with their vampire buddies over a nice glass of Type O. Well, first, this poor woman just got canned so her boss could replace her with someone who occasionally starts workplace fires. She drowns her sorrows at the local faux nostalgia-themed sports bar and during the commute home she is mistaken for a deer and then shot by a drunk hunter. And then she wakes up as a vampire. And thus, Jane Jameson and the wacky denizens of Half-Moon Hollow were born.

It took me almost a year to complete and edit a draft of the book. My mom, a lifelong romance reader, was a great barometer for what worked in the story and what didn’t. David figured this was a weird way to spend my time, but if it kept me out of a padded room, he was happy. Dad promised to never, ever read a love scene I’d written. Ever.

I spent three months using agentquery.com to ruthlessly stalk potential literary agents. I was gently rejected by at least half of them. I corresponded with some very nice, very patient people, but ultimately signed with the fabulous Stephany Evans of Fine Print Literary Management. The book sold quickly, which was great. Then came the hard part, telling family members, my employers at the church, heck our own church family, that I was about to be launched as a vampire romance author. Some were shocked, confused. One sweet little old lady, pursed her lips and said, “But you’re such a nice girl.”

For my parents’ part, and David’s, they just shrug and tell me they figured this was how I would turn out. Decidedly odd, but theirs all the same.

Molly Harper is a former newspaper reporter and humor columnist. She studied print journalism at Western Kentucky Unversity. She lives in western Kentucky with her husband and children.

Check out Molly’s web site at mollyharper.com. For a daily dose of snark, friend her on Facebook or follow her blog at singleundeadfemale.blogspot.com.

A huge THANK YOU again to Molly!

And now, for the Giveaway:

As with our Adrian Phoenix interactive Q&A last month, Molly will be here to answer your questions. And it gets even better – courtesy of Simon & Schuster and Molly, we’ve got TWO sets of the Jane Jameson (“Nice Girls Don’t…”) books up for grabs. Entry is easy and simple – just leave a comment here asking Molly a question (about her I&I post, her books, her writing process, her favorite authors or films, etc). The contest is open to residents of the US only, and will run until January 30th at 11:59PM (PST). Good luck, and let the questions begin!

“Inspiration and Influences” is a new series of articles in which we invite authors to write guest posts talking about their…well, Inspiration and Influences. The cool thing is that the writers are given free reign so they can go wild and write about anything they want. It can be about their new book, series or about their career as a whole.

Our guest today is Lavie Tidhar author of The Bookman, released this week in the UK (by publisher Angry Robot). The novel is the first in a Steampunk series (with the tags: Alternate Victorian London | Reptilian royalty | Diabolical anarchists | Extraordinary adventure!) about a terrorist who kills by planting bombs inside books. We are happy to receive the author here so that he can talk about the inspiration behind the story.

Ladies and gents, Lavie Tidhar:

My Inspirations for The Bookman

Lavie Tidhar

I blame the whales.

It’s hard to track the earliest seeds for The Bookman – my just-released-in-the-uk steampunk novel (the American edition comes out in August). In some ways they go back to my first published short story, The Ballerina in Nemonymous 3, and even earlier, to a never-written novella. What did prompt the actual writing of the book, though, is easier: it was that lost whale in the Thames.

That, and Munich.

I went into Munich dreading a heavy-handed political message film. It turned out to be an almost pitch-perfect 70s B-movie (heavy-handed politics and a very weird sex scene notwithstanding). A group of guys go around blowing people up, hiding the bombs in all kind of everyday objects, phones and light bulbs and so on. Wouldn’t it be cool, I thought, leaving that wonderful old Richmond-upon-Thames cinema (it used to be a theatre), if some sort of mysterious assassin used books for the same purpose?

You sometimes hear that refrain, “books are dangerous”. And they are, or can be. But what if they were literally explosive?

And so the Bookman was born, in a Richmond cinema, on the banks of the Thames – the same river a lonely whale made the mistake of coming to, at around the same time.

The whale was front page news. Like many Londoners, I went out to look for him – along the South Bank embankment, and along the Hungerford Bridge, looking for that impossible image – a whale rising from the water of the Thames, blowing a fountain of spray into the air beside Parliament. I never did get to see it, and the whale ended up the way so many other transplanted Londoners did over the centuries – which was dead in the water.

But…

Wouldn’t it be cool if the whales really did come to London? And wouldn’t it be cool if someone was using books to assassinate people?

And how the hell does that become a book?

My first published short story, then. It was less than a thousand words, a semi-made up history of a mechanical doll across the centuries. The thing about history, see, is that you don’t need to make up a lot of the truly weird stuff – Edison’s obsession with creating a mechanical doll, for instance, or the fact Jacques de Vaucanson worked on a secret project to build an artificial man for Louis XV…

And what would have happened if he had been successful?

And so the first part of The Bookman was coming into existence. It was only meant to be a novella, but then, I was telling my friend Nicola about it in an old London pub (is there another type?) and she said, ‘Make it into a book.’

So I did.

The Bookman is partly a love letter to London. Some of those strange old pubs had to make their way into the novel, of course. Like the Nell Gwynne,

forever in a dark alley just around the corner from the Adelphi Theatre. Or the Red Lion in Soho, where Karl Marx used to drink (and write Das Kapital). And some of my other favourite places, my very own secret map of London – Davenport’s magic shop under Charing Cross Station, or Simpson’s on the Strand, the same restaurant Sherlock Holmes used to dine in… London is best in the fog, in winter, along the embankment – a dark and secret city with a history written into the very stones of the city.

And of course, The Bookman is also a love letter to steampunk itself, an affair that began for me when I picked up a remaindered copy of Tim Powers’ On Stranger Tides many years ago. There was a lizard on the throne in Paul di Filippo’s Victoria…

Which I just had to steal.

And so it came along, with a tip of the hat to Powers and Blaylock, di Filippo and Sterling & Gibson and Kim Newman – and to Arthur Conan Doyle, and Jules Verne, and all the other great writers who have been writing this particular imaginary space, this Victorian-era-that-never-was, not quite – because The Bookman, thirdly but most importantly, is a love letter to books themselves.

Books are dangerous. Books can, occasionally, kill.

But they are dangerous precisely because of what they are. They are keys, into other universes. Gateways in space and time. At their best, the entertain us – and make us think. They ask questions we sometimes find hard to answer. About identity, and purpose, and right and wrong. About the meaning of life, or death. And they are also mirrors we hold up, reflecting our own prejudices and doubts and misguided certainties back at us.

They can be everything we want them to be, and everything we don’t.

And so The Bookman is, in many ways, a book about books. The books I love. It has chases, and escapes, and love, and loss… and giant lizards. It has intrigue, and secret tunnels, conspiracy, and pirates.

And it asks some questions, too, but what they are, and how we answer them, depends on each bookonaut on their own journey through the book.

Lavie Tidhar is the author of The Bookman , released this week in the UK, and forthcoming sequel Camera Obscura. Other books include linked-story collection HebrewPunk , novel The Tel Aviv Dossier (with Nir Yaniv), novella An Occupation of Angels and a host of to-be-released novels and novellas including Cloud Permutations , Gorel & The Pot-Bellied God and Martian Sands. He also edited The Apex Book of World SF and runs the World SF News Blog .

A big thank you to Lavie Tidhar for the post!

“Inspiration and Influences” is a new series of articles in which we invite authors to write guest posts talking about their…well, Inspiration and Influences. The cool thing is that the writers are given free reign so they can go wild and write about anything they want. It can be about their new book, series or about their career as a whole.

Our guest today is debut author Lori Brighton. Her first book, Wild Heart (released last week by Kensington Books) is a paranormal historical romance with a bit of mystery on the side, and the first in a series. You can read more about the book here. We are happy to open the floor to the author so that she can talk about the inspiration behind the story.

Ladies and gents, Lori Brighton:

One of the most common questions an author receives is where do you get your ideas? It’s rather like asking a bird how they fly and for a brief moment there’s usually a confused pause as we frantically search for something to say. If we’re lucky a memory will come to mind, something seemingly insignificant, yet important for the basic fact that the tiny detail, that tiny moment, started the ball rolling. For my debut book, Wild Heart, that significant moment started with a children’s cartoon.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start where most things start…at the beginning. I got my imagination and creativity from my mom, a woman who writes poetry and always has a book in hand. As a child I read, a lot, but I never really wanted to be a writer. The grammar rules that went along with English class bored me to tears. It didn’t stop me from making up stories in my mind. When I was upset or bored, it was the perfect time to retreat into my make-believe world. Also, growing up in a family with little money to travel, forced me to use my imagination; it was the only way I could go places. ?

Then one fateful day when I was around sixteen years old, I discovered Julie Garwood. Instantly I fell in love. England, Scotland, alpha heroes and that suspenseful adventure she does so well, all influenced how I would write my own books. I’d always been interested in history, but now it was romantic. Living in the Midwest in the U.S. I was surrounded by the Victorian Era, so its not surprising that my books often take place during this era. It’s also the time period in which one of my favorite books takes place, Jane Eyre.

You can find the influence of Charlotte’s gothic writing style in my own book. It’s also that dark, gothic style that has fueled my interest in the paranormal. I’ve always enjoyed the paranormal. I’m pretty sure we lived in a haunted house when I was a child. When I wrote Wild Heart, it seemed almost natural to add the paranormal element. I figured by adding in the paranormal, it would make it more unique.

So how did Wild Heart come about? This is going to sound odd, but the Disney Cartoon Tarzan.

My son was watching it a few years back. Around the same time, I saw a documentary on Discovery or some equally educational channel about feral children. I’d seen them both rather close together and thought, hmm, what would it be like if my hero had been lost in the wild during his childhood? And so with one little question, a book was born.

So what about you? Who or what has influenced where you are at this moment? Leave a comment. Two people will win a copy of my debut book, Wild Heart.

A big thank you to Lori Brighton and good luck to all who enter! Contest is open to US and Canada residents and runs till Saturday 14th November 11:59 PM (Pacific). Go!

“Inspiration and Influences” is a new series of articles in which we invite authors to write guest posts talking about their…well, Inspirations and Influences. The cool thing is that the writers are given free reign so they can go wild and write about anything they want. It can be about their new book, series or about their career as a whole.

Today our guest is debut author Leanna Renee Hieber. Her book, The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker, is being released tomorrow 08/25 and is the first in her Strangely Beautiful series of ghostly, Gothic Fantasy novels. Reviewed today here .

Since the book has a diversity that I happen to love (Gothic!Victorian!Romance!) , I just had to invite the writer to talk about her inspiration behind the tale.

And here she is:

Thanks Book Smugglers for allowing me to come visit, I dearly love your blog, I thank you for the engaging, clever resource it provides authors and readers.

When talking about my Inspirations and Influences, it usually leads into a discussion about cross-genre work.

The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker, first in the Strangely Beautiful series, has “Historical Fantasy” on its spine. It has also been described by reviewers and/or marketed with the words Gothic, Paranormal Romance, Gaslight, Suspense with light Horror elements, with a lyrical voice and a late-teen YA cross-over appeal. I love every single one of those descriptors, though I couldn’t choose just one to describe the book. If I was pressed to, I’d choose Gothic. (As in the genre, not necessarily the sub-culture. Though being a life-long devotee of corsets, chokers, Goth bands and Goth clubs is certainly its own inspiration in my life and my work).

And so these myriad descriptors come from my myriad influences. Early in life I fell in love with these things that would serve to define my writing style and lifestyle:

- British Accents
- Greek Mythology (and Mythologies in general)
- Ghost Stories
- Writing (since I could hold a pen and finish a sentence, it’s my favourite thing to do with my time)
- Helpless romanticism
- Brooding, brilliant, magical men who seemed wicked but weren’t- (Just like Anne of Green Gables says, she wants someone who isn’t wicked but has the possibility of being wicked. I’m so Anne.)
- Fantasy novels
- Gothic novels/literature
- Jane Austen
- Theatre
- The Victorian Era – (I have no idea why as a child I was flouncing around in doubled skirts and makeshift corsets, speaking in a British Accent in rural Ohio. I credit a past life because I don’t know how else to explain my long time love affair with the era or why London felt uncannily home when I went there.)
- Birds
- Making things up that were utterly impossible and/or utterly non-traditional.
- Ghostbusters
- Fine Art
- The BBC

In college I majored in theatre, got a focus study in the Victorian Era with a particular eye for Gothic literature, and began adapting Victorian literature for the stage. I graduated, interned with the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company working silly-long hours, and my list of defining obsessions grew as I fell head over heels in love with all things J.K. Rowling and Neil Gaiman and somewhere, after having watched Sense and Sensibility for the thousandth time, in the thick of night in a bout of delirious exhaustion 9 years ago… In walks ghostly eighteen-going-on-nineteen Miss Percy Parker- into a 19th century school office, speaking in a British accent, wearing Victorian clothes and saying something about Greek Mythology and Shakespeare. She so sweetly asked if I would deprive myself of sleep for the next many years and tell her tale. She was just too dear, and too persistent, to turn down. Somewhere I have an audio tape that I recorded just to get the thoughts down (Percy had terrible timing, I had a long drive ahead of me the next day). I started off by saying: “My life has just changed.” I knew the day she appeared to me that I’d never be the same, blessedly haunted by her. This was my first yearning to become a career novelist, and I knew dear, sweet, weird Miss Percy Parker would be the one to introduce me to the world. And vice versa. I continued in professional theatre, published plays, essays and short fiction, some won awards and things, but my heart kept coming back to Percy Parker.

I couldn’t have known it would take about 9 years to get here, or that the cross-genre nature of the book would be a hindrance to selling it along the way, or what the market would look like now (about right for my book at the moment- Victorian seems to be “in”) as opposed to then, all I knew was I wanted to write the book I wanted to read. New York Times Bestselling author Alethea Kontis wrote in her glowing review on Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show that my book is “…Bulfinch’s Mythology and Harry Potter and Wuthering Heights mashed in a blender.” Now that was an awesome compliment. She understood my list of inspirations. Blended and beloved; swirled into the ‘book of my heart’.

Now for those pre-published writers to whom I might enthusiastically declare that yes, “write the book of your heart, no matter what,” let me just say also: be careful, you’re also much more emotionally invested, so if someone thinks your baby is ugly it hurts more. Steel yourself, be flexible and have faith. My entire adult life is wrapped up in this book. That feels like a lot of pressure here, just a couple of days before release day. However, my greatest dream is coming true.

This book is honestly my love-letter to the world, all my favourite things in one series. I hope that a story of love conquering all odds, of a meek outcast finding strength, confidence and an unlikely family, a story of indomitable friendship amidst a backdrop of magic and hell, will make the world just a tiny bit better for the huge love, wild dreams and all those inspirations wrapped up in it.

Thank you, peace, and blessings.

Leanna Renee Hieber

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Thank you Leanna!

Now for the giveaway: we have one copy of The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker to giveaway. Leave a comment here by Saturday 29th 11:59pm (Pacific) to enter. Contest is open for residents of US and Canada only. Winner will be announced in our Sunday stash. Good luck!

Check out other reviews here: Lurv a La Mode’s; Babbling About Books and More’s, The Discriminating Fangirl)

Alexander Gordon Smith is the writer of the Inventors series for children and the YA/Fantasy Furnace series. I met  Gordon  in London at a Forbidden Planet’s event (the Guillermo del Toro signing) and prompted by his passionate talk about his books, I decided to give Furnace a go and wouldn’t you know, I LOVED it.

When we decided to extend our YA Month, I thought we should invite Gordon to write a guest post and he came up with what we think is one of the bravest Inspirations post we have ever been graced with:
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Inspiration for Furnace

Alexander Gordon Smith

It’s often difficult to pinpoint exactly where the inspiration for any book comes from. But I guess with Furnace: Lockdown it can be boiled down to one truth:

Alex Sawyer is Alexander Gordon Smith. Or at least he’s the person I could have become.

In the first draft, Alex (the main character) didn’t have the name Sawyer, he had the name Smith. And it wasn’t just my name he shared – in many ways he was me, with the same loves, the same fears, the same insecurities. I never set out to write a book with myself as the main character, but as soon as Alex took life on the page I realised that he was one version of the teenager I had been. He was me, but a me that had never been allowed to exist. And his story, his horrific ordeal in Furnace, was a parallel version of my history that, fortunately, was never written in reality.

This makes more sense when you know what kind of character Alex is. He’s no hero, not the conventional kind anyway. He’s the bad guy, a school bully who robs kids of cash so he can buy himself new trainers, new bikes, new computers. He’s a burglar too, the kind of person who would steal a wedding ring from a lonely old woman so he can play the latest computer games. He knows he’s in the wrong, but this only makes his behaviour worse: there’s nothing innocent about Alex’s criminality, he does it because he consciously buries those bad feelings so deep that they can never rear their ugly heads.

Now, I was never as bad as Alex when I was a kid, but for a while I could have been. I remember all too well that lure of easy money – the desire to control at least one thing at a time when it feels as though your life is spiralling into chaos around you. I never robbed a house, but I was a thief: I stole money from my Mum and Dad, never more than ten or twenty quid at a time, but I stole other stuff too, things I could sell. Sentimental things. Things I knew I could never get back. Those same horrible feelings clawed their way through my gut every time I betrayed someone I loved, but like Alex I knew how to force them down, so deep inside me I could pretend they weren’t there at all.

And it got worse, too. I began hanging out at a biker bar, drinking lots, absorbing hours of heavy metal then letting it all out of my system in drunken scraps. I wasn’t a bully like Alex – I never picked a fight with anyone – but I was just as lost as him. And with each bloody nose and lost tooth I found my grasp on life, on myself, slipping away a little bit more. I hated it, but it was fast becoming who I was – without it, I faced the far greater fear of being nothing at all. And when you’re that age, absence is so much worse than substance, even when that substance has begun to rot.

I don’t know how bad it could have become. I’m guessing it never would have gone too far – I had the best family in the world, a safety net that was always there for me no matter how bad my behaviour became. Maybe that’s why I felt I could get away with it – I knew I could never lose myself completely. After I’d failed my A-Levels (not just because of my behaviour, I should say, I’d also written my first novel and assumed I wouldn’t need qualifications as a famous writer) I calmed down. I started to uncover some of those buried emotions – the guilt, the loathing, the shame – and only by confronting them and coming to terms with what I could have become did I truly realise what I wanted to be.

The Alex in Furnace has the same realisation, but in his version of history there is no escape. In his version of history there is the Furnace Penitentiary. Alex Sawyer is punished for the crimes that I committed, he suffers the worst fate that I could have imagined for myself when I was a teenager. This is why the events that take place in Furnace feel so real. When I was writing the book, Alex wasn’t just a character – he was me and I was him. I had to do everything in my power to try and find a way out, because if he couldn’t escape, then neither could I. Our lives may have taken different paths, but for as long as Alex was buried alive in the guts of the world we were one and the same again. His actions were mine, his terror was mine, the friends he made were my friends, the pain he felt was pain I felt too. And, most importantly, we were making a break for freedom together.

Being a writer sometimes means you have all the power in the world – in the world of your story, that is. But with Furnace I felt just as powerless as Alex. I didn’t plot the books, the story just unfolded, sometimes in a way that I never could have predicted. And there were many times when I had no idea how a scene would turn out, whether or not Alex would even survive. During these periods I felt that the pages of the manuscript were a mirror backed up against some impossible inter-dimensional void; the words on the page bars, through which I saw myself fighting tooth and nail just to stay alive. It was the same feeling I had when I was a teenager, wanting to be free but unable to control the chaotic world around me, unable to find a way out of the depths to the light and air on the surface.

I don’t know what will happen to Alex over the course of the series, but I know one thing: I’ll be there with him until the end. There’s no way I could abandon him in the pit of Furnace Penitentiary. Everything he goes through, I go through too, and when he changes – and he does change, so much, over the course of each book – so do I. His life is mine, and mine is his. And if I ever need a reminder of that I only have to read back over this piece of writing and notice how similar it is to Alex’s. That was unintentional, but I guess it was also inevitable when you not only become close to your character, but have always been him.

********
A HUGE thank you to Gordon for this incredible piece.
Find out more about his Furnace books here . If you already read Furnace: Lockdown and wants a sneak peek for the first chapters of book 2, Solitary, check this out. Warning: contains spoilers for book 1!

Now for the giveaway: Gordon is generously offering copies of Furnace books 1 AND 2 plus assorted goodies to 4 lucky winners! All you have to do is to leave a comment here. The contest is open to all and runs till Saturday 22 August 11:59PM Pacific Time. Good luck!

Earlier this year, after Thea read (and loved) Secret Society Girl, Diana Peterfreund’s debut novel, we Book Smugglers started to follow her blog and look for more titles and news from this talented author. When we first heard about her upcoming Young Adult book, we were instantly hooked: Rampant is a novel that takes the unicorn (one of the most beloved, magical creatures of myth) and turns it into a bloodthirsty killer. We had to read it. And wouldn’t you know it? We loved it. And we’re well on our way to developing huge girl-crushes on Diana.

So, when the opportunity arose to have the author over for our Young Adult Appreciation Month, we were absolutely thrilled! Ladies and Gents, without any further ado, please give it up for the lovely Diana Peterfreund!

I could probably talk for ages about my inspiration for the book (the non-western facets of the unicorn legend) and my love of stories about female warriors (my first hero was Princess Leia). But there’s also the way I combine these fantasy elements with the real world – in this case, Rome, Italy and how the truth of this amazing city is far more fantastical than anything I could make up.

One of my personal rules for setting up a fantasy world is to make everything else beyond the magic make perfect sense. I look for real-world analogs like a lawyer building a case looks for precedents. Rome, in this capacity, is a veritable gold mine.

Using examples as varied as the Vestal Virgins and the Knights Templar, I created an order of warrior nuns: women born with the power to be unicorn hunters who were tithed to the church as celibate servants of God. Their service just happened to be with a bow and arrow. It really wasn’t so outlandish an idea. Religious orders were a deeply entrenched, unbroken chain of history and learning, and a vow of celibacy was the most reasonable way to make sure that your unicorn hunters stayed eligible. It was common throughout much of European history for families to pack their daughters off to nunneries (Christian or otherwise, as the Vestal Virgins were just another type). The question was, once unicorns were hunted to supposed extinction (160 years before my story starts) and the order disbanded, what becomes of all that stored knowledge? And how does a new generation of unicorn hunters, not necessarily Catholic (and definitely not down with being tithed or cloistered anywhere!), react in a world that has changed completely, both in terms of female empowerment, and also in terms of what one does with deadly, but endangered, animals?

Once I chose Rome as the seat of the ancient Order of the Lioness (in the legends, the lion was one of the only creatures who could kill a unicorn, plus it was one of the signs of Alexander the Great, and therefore an obvious choice for my nuns’ official mascot), I decided a research trip was in order. I’d already had an idea of having my hunters’ nunnery – my invented Cloisters of Ctesias — feature walls studded with the trophies from unicorns that their ancient counterparts had killed. But the monks of Rome were way ahead of me.

Behold the Capuchin Bone Chapel beneath the church of Santa Maria della Concezione in Rome. For hundreds of years, members of this monastery donated their bodies to this massive work of funerary art, which first began when they moved their church, and dug up the pauper graveyard at their old location. After I saw this, I realized my problem with my “bones in the wall” idea was only that I hadn’t gone far enough!

I’d also come to Rome with a plan to check out some of the architecture of various monasteries and Cloisters, to help plan mine. Well, look what I found in a small cloisters at the Cathedral of Rome:

That’s right. Columns shaped like unicorn horns. Gates shaped like arrows and guarded by statues of stone lions. A mosaic of maidens and unicorns (along with other fantastic beasts). And all in the exact same neighborhood and built in the same time period as I planned to set my fictional nunnery. It was too good not to steal. So I did.

The location of my hunters’ nunnery is another robbery. I put it in the same spot as the Basilica of San Clemente, a small church near the Colosseum that’s a major archaeological site. San Clemente is a Renaissance church built on the bones of a medieval church (seriously, you can go underneath it and see where they stole some of the columns) built on top of an ancient Roman temple, built on top of an even more ancient Roman mansion. Every time you take a set of stairs down, you uncover a whole new facet of history. This seemed to fit well with my idea of a modern corps of hunters reconstructing the knowledge of an ancient order whose incarnation changed depending on the prevailing culture, religion, and model of institutional virginity. Here’s a picture of the exterior (public) courtyard, which is the only visual I stole for my Cloisters (except I put a dome in).

Then there’s the Galleria Borgese, where a pivotal scene in my novel is set. My heroine’s love interest is an art student and has been studying all the amazing art Rome has to offer. He takes my heroine to this famous museum and shows her the following:

This is Raphael’s “Lady with a Unicorn,” and I found it a most inspiring work of art. This painting was likely a bridal portrait, sent to the groom’s family so they’d know what they were getting: in this case a young woman, a virgin (symbolized by the unicorn in her lap), who brings to her marriage a large dowry (symbolized by the giant jewels she wears). But my favorite part of this portrait is that the unicorn, far from being horse-like, is perhaps a baby lamb or kid, and therefore much more similar to the goatlike zhi that the hunters in my book domesticate and keep as pets.

Remembering my theory of worldbuilding precedent, I love it any time real artwork coincides with my imaginary world – such as showing a dangerous unicorn, or a unicorn that does not look like a big white horse. In the novel, my heroine Astrid sees this painting and instantly recognizes it as a portrait of a hunter with a zhi in her lap.

Finally, I traveled north of Rome to research the final battle scene (no spoilers) for my book. One of the most common questions I get is how there can be unicorns hiding in Rome. Rome (pop. 2.7 million) is not as dense a city as, say, Manhattan (pop. 18.8 million), and it also features one of the largest areas of parks and greenspaces of all European capitals. It’s also surrounded by vast tracts of countryside and farmland, and the city proper is riddled with archaeological sites that are closed off from the public and foot traffic, not to mention miles upon miles of underground catacombs and ancient remains of Roman apartment buildings (not unlike the kind found at the very lowest level of San Clemente). The few larger unicorns I have hiding out in Rome in my book can certainly discover ways not to be seen.

However, when it came to hiding a large pack of them, I needed a more rural area, and so I found Cerverteri. Smack dab in the middle of the beautiful Roman countryside lie the ruins of an Etruscan City of the Dead, a twisting warren of pyramid-like tombs hollowed out from tuffa – a soft volcanic stone common in the area. Nowadays, the tombs look like giant green hills. There are some that are excavated and open to the public (and whatever wildlife happens to wander by) but miles and miles more buried under vineyards and olive groves. Here’s a picture of me standing beside one:

And here’s a view from the top of another hill/tomb.

Plenty big enough for a pack of killer unicorns to hide out in. And a truly spooky setting for the climax of my book.

Thank you, Diana!

Diana Peterfreund has been a costume designer, a cover model, and a food critic. Her travels have taken her from the cloud forests of Costa Rica to the underground caverns of New Zealand (and as far as she’s concerned, she’s just getting started). Diana graduated from Yale University in 2001 with dual degrees in Literature and Geology, which her family claimed would only come in handy if she wrote books about rocks. Now, this Florida girl lives with her husband and their puppy in Washington D.C., and writes books that rock.

You can read more about Diana on her website HERE, or follow her blog HERE.

And Now, For the Giveaway!

We are giving away ONE copy of Rampant! The contest is open to residents of the US and Canada only, and will run until Saturday August 15 at 11:59 PM (PST). To enter, simply leave a comment here and let us know what your hunter name would be if you were an evil unicorn slayer. (For example, Thea would be Stormhilda Baroness of Hurricanes, and Ana is Pearlfang the Wise Warrior)

Good Luck!

Rachel Vincent is a popular UF novelist, author of the Shifter series. Her first book in her new Young Adult Soul Screamer series has just hit the shelves and Ana reviewed it here. We invited the author to be part of our YA Appreciation Month by writing a piece on her Inspiration to write the series.

Please say hello to Rachel Vincent:

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Hey Book Smugglers! Thanks for having me!

You want to know what inspired my YA debut, My Soul to Take? That’s easy enough. The main character, Kaylee Cavanaugh. Who Kaylee is and what she can do—those are the things that inspired and shaped her story. So what was my inspiration for creating Kaylee herself? That one’s not such a simple answer.

Kaylee was inspired by the girl I was in high school, and by the girl I could never have been, even if I’d had her abilities.

Kaylee is a bit of a dichotomy. On one hand, she’s a normal high school junior. She’s neither beautiful nor ugly. She isn’t popular, but she neither is she a pariah. She’s bright, but not at the top of her class. In short, she doesn’t stand out in the crowd, and that’s fine with her because Kaylee has a very serious problem. She gets panic attacks that make her scream at the top of her lungs, filled with the grim certainty that someone near her is going to die. Very soon. And if she had to choose between standing out as a total freak or blending in with the background, Kaylee would gladly fade into the wallpaper anytime.

But in spite of her perceived normalness, though she doesn’t know it yet at the beginning of the book, Kaylee is a bean sidhe (the proper spelling for banshee). Her panic attacks are really premonitions of death. And that’s only half the story.

What does this mean for Kaylee? That she doesn’t fit in anywhere. She’s more human (thus more defenseless) than most of the other non-human species she’s about to discover, but not quite human enough to truly fit in at school. Especially once classmates start dropping dead and Kaylee is compelled to wail for them.
Obviously, the human half of Kaylee is the bit that was inspired in part by my own experiences blending into the walls of my high school. But the part of herself Kaylee discovers in this first book—aside from the whole being-a-bean-sidhe-thing—that’s the girl I never could have been. Kaylee is determined and compassionate, even on behalf of classmates she truly doesn’t like. She is courageous in the face of true danger. She faces down death repeatedly—and literally. She has guts, and brains, and a mind of her own.

And with any luck, that and a few good friends will be enough to get her through those last two years of high school, no matter what this brave new Netherworld throws at her.

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Rachel Vincent is the author of the Shifters series, about a werecat named Faythe Sanders, who is learning to define her own role in her family and fighting to claim a place in her Pride.

Rachel’s young adult debut, My Soul to Take, will hit the shelves on August 1, 2009. My Soul to Take is the first in the Soul Screamers series, about a teenage bean sidhe (banshee) trying to balance a normal high school experience with the terrifying, hidden world she’s just discovered.

A recent transplant into the deep south, Rachel Vincent has a BA in English and an overactive imagination, and consistently finds the latter to be more practical. She shares her workspace with two black cats (Kaci and Nyx) and her # 1 fan. Rachel is older than she looks-seriously-and younger than she feels, but remains convinced that for every day she spends writing, one more day will be added to her lifespan.

Thanks to Rachel for her post and now, for the giveaway! We are giving away ONE copy of My Soul to Take to a lucky reader!

The contest is open to EVERYONE, and will run until Saturday August 15th at 11:59 PM. We’ll announce the winner on Sunday during our weekly stash. In order to enter, simply leave a comment here.