Category: Uncategorized (Page 2 of 18)

1. Hi! Welcome to my humble blog of all things bookish! I would like for us to start by getting to know you. Give us a short bio, please!

I’m a history teacher and Kung Fu master. I came up with the story “I call him – HIM” when I was a teenager, but I failed miserably to put pen to paper. It took nearly forty years to make a second attempt. This time the words flowed unrestrained. I live in Harlingen Texas with my family and five obnoxious pets.

2. To get to know you just a little bit better, I’d like to ask you some this or that questions. Answer 5 of these (or more!) and explain why you chose this or that, or maybe an entirely different alternative!

Winter, spring, summer or autumn?
Spring or autumn. I live in southern Texas so it’s basically the same thing – gorgeous weather.

Morning or evening?
Definitely evening. I’m very grumpy in the morning.

Witches or wizards?
Wizards. Sorry if I offend the Harry Potter fans, but I’ve always looked at witches as evil. Maybe it comes from watching the Wizard of Oz when I was young.

Ninjas or pirates?
It has to be Ninjas. I’ve studied the martial arts why entire life, so I’ve always been fascinated by Ninjas, Monks, and Samurai.

Plotter or pantser?
I’m more of a pantser. I’ll create a skeleton of the story, but once I start writing, I feel myself become the character. Once this happens, then the character takes over and pull me in all kinds of different directions.

5. What is your most recent release? Give us a short presentation, cover, and a link for where to buy it!

My most recent release is “I call him HIM”.

In a post-apocalyptic world, a warrior and his family are driven underground, fighting for their very survival. 

When they do emerge, the futuristic planet they discover is very different from the one they left behind. Ruled by an evil presence which dominates and controls what is left of mankind, Earth has been reduced to a violent place of darkness, grief and destruction.

I call him HIM follows the journey of this unnamed warrior as he loses both his family and his mind. As he hits rock bottom, all he can think of is his insatiable yearning for revenge until he meets a young girl called Angelica who shows him the true power of faith. Her youth, innocence and strength of character reminds him of everything he has lost and the things which really matter.

But as the armies of the world rise up for the ultimate battle of good versus evil, can Angelica help him regain his sanity and rediscover himself before it is too late?

You can purchase it at the following links…

https://www.amazon.com/call-him-HIM-Post-Apocalyptic-Survival-ebook/dp/B08C7DPQM6

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1050311

https://books.apple.com/us/book/x/id1540316466

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/2940164728878

http://store.kobobooks.com/en-us/Search?Query=9781005847623

7. What is your writing routine? If you have one, give us the run-down!

I need absolute silence. I lock myself in a quiet room and feel myself drift away into another world.

8. If you could go back and give yourself one piece of advice as you started out on the path to become an author, what would it be?

Learn more about marketing and build a larger following before you launch your first book.

9. Last but not least: where can we find you? Drop those links!

www.i-call-him-him.webnode.com

https://twitter.com/ScottKimak

https://www.facebook.com/scott.kimak/

https://www.instagram.com/scottkimak/

1. Hi! Welcome to my humble blog of all things bookish! I would like for us to start by getting to know you. Give us a short bio, please!

I’ve always been terrible at running, so I learned to ride horses. I was even worse at dancing, so I studied martial arts instead. A banshee sings better than I do, so I picked up the violin – and didn’t fare much better, truthfully. When asked what I wanted do when I grew up, I always said “Work with animals,” so I became a Veterinarian Technician and did that for fifteen years. When I got tired of wrestling dogs and herding cats, I got a job at my local library where I get to talk about books with other bookworms all day long.

I read to keep sane and I write… well, I write because what’s more fun than that? My name is Tiffani Collins and I live in a small rural town in the Sierra Nevada mountains of Northern California.  When I’m not braiding hair at Renaissance Fairs, spending time with friends, or helping library patrons find their next favorite read, I’m working on my next writing project.

2. To get to know you just a little bit better, I’d like to ask you some this or that questions. Answer 5 of these (or more) and explain why you chose this or that, or maybe an entirely different alternative!

Winter, spring, summer or autumn?

I’ve lived in Northern California along the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains my entire life, so I’m probably biased, but I am Winter all the way baby!  Drought and forest fire season is a huge source of anxiety and paranoia around here, so we never really take our first deep breath until the first rains of the season, which usually start late October / early November.  Even then, we only really relax and feel easy in our homes after December has ushered in winter.

Plus, I’m really hot blooded.  It has to be below 40 degrees Fahrenheit, rainy, and windy before I trade in my sleeveless shirts and light cotton capris pants for jeans and a top with three quarter length sleeves.  Anything over 80 degrees and I’m dying!  You can always add layers of you’re cold, but you can’t take anything else off if you’re down to skin and still pouring sweat – never mind that you’re going to have issues with public decency laws of you’re walking around town naked!

Then there’s the aesthetics – I love storms!  Well, except when they knock down thirty-foot trees on our houses and cars, but other than that, I love how the world smells with snow on the ground and after a good soaking, listening the to the wind and rain, watching a thunderstorm roll through the canyons and light up the night skies like fireworks on the fourth of July.

Mountains or beaches?

I am so mountains and so not beaches!  I have a Love/Hate relationship with the sun (I’ve had five skin cancer tumors removed and I haven’t even hit forty yet!) and I loath sand.  On the flip side, I love me some cool shade and moss and green growing things and rivers and lakes and snow and high places and the smell of a forest just after a rain, which pretty much guaranties that I will always live on the rainy side of a mountain range.

Plotter or pantser?

I’m definitely a planner and not a pantser, but my outlines often come a little after halfway through the book and more to keep track of the timeline.  I start with a character who has an interesting nature.  I know where she starts out, meaning I know what kind of personal issue she’s dealing with, and I know how she’ll end up, which is happy – because there’s enough misery and tragedy in the real world and I write to escape all that, damn it!

Everything that comes in the middle is a foggy mystery for the most part and I only have a bare skeleton of an idea on how my character gets from point A to point Z.  I spend a great deal of time listening to music, which often conjures cool scenes in my head.  The music and the scenes get shuffled into a logical chain of events as I envision the world my character must navigate. 

The story’s external events evolve around the character.  For instance, I wanted my character, Danny, to belong to a small group of individuals other unscrupulous people could exploit to increase their own power, a kind of human familiar.  Such an arrangement would obviously mean there’s an element of slavery in the world she inhabits.  That observation leads to questions that need answers:

Is it black-market slavery, like human trafficking is in our world; or is it legal and forms the bedrock foundation of her world’s economy and civilization as it did for the Romans, the Vikings, and so many other cultures throughout human history? 

Are there others who fight against the status quo, or will Danny be alone in trying to free herself and others like her? 

What are the difficulties she faces and how does she get free? 

Once free, will she be able to build a life for herself as a full citizen of her world with rights and liberties, or will she forever be on the run, fighting to stay free every moment for the rest of her life because the system is too massive for her to ever shift or dismantle?

These questions and their answers become an If-Then sequence of events that all must culminate in a final outcome where my character is happy and the reader feels satisfied.  But that’s only the skeleton.  Then I have to come up with the flesh and the guts and the brains and the skin – and the devil’s in the details.  I have done more research into history, science, geography, anthropology, psychology, economics, physics, etc. as an alternate history fantasy author than I did to get my GED, Associate of Science degree, and my license in veterinary medicine.

All of that reading and research generates an avalanche of notes that I keep in massive documents that I have hyperlinked and organized like Wikipedia pages so I can keep everything straight.  It’s a lot of work, but when you’re building a world and cast of characters that can support an epic fantasy series that will span over twenty books, you’ve got to be organized.  That organization really comes in handy as your research generates more ideas for more scenes and books that spin off from the book you’re working on now and you need to keep it all straight over the course of years.

Standalone or series?

Standalones are great, but they always feel like a tease!  You fall in love with a character or a world or a story, but you only get three hundred measly pages to enjoy them? 

Whatever! 

Give me a series; the longer, the better, man!  And make those books Super-Sized!  I want to hear a nice solid thump when I drop that sucker on a table.  Anyone ever read Diana Gabaldon or Robin Hobb?  They’ve got the right idea.

Hero or anti-hero?

Anti-hero!

Way more interesting!  Case in point: Kaz Brekker from Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows.  If you haven’t heard of him, then how about Naomi Novik’s Galadriel from A Deadly Education?  It always amazes me how a great author can take a character that lacks many of the qualities we associate with a likeable/relatable protagonist, someone we want to root for, and write them so that despite being disagreeable or even doing some pretty horrible things we still think of them as the good guy of the story and want them to prevail. 

Next to a really good anti-hero, the traditional hero becomes flat.  Boring.  Sickeningly Goodie-Goody.  In fact, with all their flaws, an anti-hero becomes more relatable, whereas by comparison the typical hero almost becomes annoying because they begin to seem too good; an unrealistic example that no one, including yourself, will ever be able to live up to in real life.

And let’s be honest – the anti-hero is only doing what we all wish we could do ourselves.

Long live El and Kaz!

A good type of story with these kinds of characters is the heist, which explains how I discovered Six of Crows, but another one is military SciFi.  The most competent and capable character I can think of that I’ve read is Tanya Huff’s Torin Kerr from the Confederation of Valor series.  One of my all-time favorite series and I am so sad Huff’s wrapped it up for good!

The first book in the series was about how Danny managed to liberate herself from her very powerful family who were exploiting her terribly.  My second book, which I am about to release, is about her struggles to find a new home for herself and a base of operations as she sets out to free others like herself.  This second book was a lot of fun for me to write because I got to introduce everyone to the circus and all of the cool people who call that town-on-the-rails home.  This is book where Danny really gets to start spreading her wings (figuratively and literally) to see just what she’s truly capable of.

5. What real-life inspiration do you draw from, and what are your primary fictional sources of inspiration (books, authors, films, music, etc.)? Name a few!

Wow, um, big question!  But an important one to be sure, so it’s worth taking the time to unpack this and address each one properly, so here goes!

a.   Real-life Inspiration: 

v Historical events and people –

I read a lot of book on history, especially of the American Civil War because I am a lazy author who knows nothing about military operations, war, or conflicts in general.  Yeah me, because that means I’ve been very lucky and sheltered in my life to have never even been near any kind of fight on any scale, but it does mean I have a lot of homework to do and I have to make sure my chosen subjects have been well-covered.  Once I realized slavery was going to be a major driving force in Danny’s story, that there was going to be a war over it, I thought to myself “where can I find source material that covers how a society structures itself around slavery, the problems that arise in such societies, how these societies build up to civil war, how these wars are fought and won, then how they rebuild? 

Duh!

The Civil War!  And, bonus: the American Civil war has probably been documented better than any other conflict on American soil, so I will have tons of material to use for every aspect of my series, including plenty of historical people to base my vast cast of characters on.  Danny and her role in these events is actually heavily inspired by Harriet Tubman.  If you’re a history buff, then that’s a bit of a spoiler, so sorry about that!

v Mythology and Ancient Cultures –

So much of my world and its denizens are based on ancient mythology and cultures.  The pivotal point that split Danny’s world from ours was the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.  In Danny’s world, Judas never betrayed Jesus, who went on to lead a long, highly influential life preaching his important lessons to the masses… but he never died on the cross and was never resurrected.  In Danny’s world, Christianity never gained the following it did in ours and so never gained the kind of influence that prompted the Romans to take it on as their official state religion.  Because of that, Danny’s world still has a lot of Old-World influences from the Celts and the Norse and Native Americans, etc.

I’ve tried to stay as close to the original legends and those ancient cultures as I can get, meaning I’ve done massive amounts of research and note-taking.  Of course, there will always be debate over which versions are the correct ones amongst the myth and legend nerds out there, but I don’t really have to worry which is right and which is wrong in the end.  If I’ve done my best to research a myth and still stir up controversy, then I can always remind people that I’m writing an alternate history fantasy series – I’m the author, so my version is the right one!  Nah-nah-na-Nah-naaah!

And besides, those stories were only the leaping off point.  A lot can happen in two thousand years to change a culture!  I mean, just look at how much the English have changed over that span of time?

b.    Fictional Inspiration:

v Books –

If the phrase ‘related worlds’ sounds a mite familiar, it’s because I robbed Diana Wynne Jones’ Chrestomancy series blind when I was coming up with how the multi-verse works in my story.  I tend to take Aaron Sorkin literally.  He’s the one who said “Good writers borrow from other writers; great writers steal from them outright.”

v Authors –

Dude, Jim Butcher!

Everyone is always – and correctly – impressed with how J. K. Rowling plotted out the Harry Potter series.  She imbedded vital details in the first part of chapter one that you don’t even recognize as important clues until book three or six!

Ok, that’s cool, but that was only a seven-book series.

Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files is a 20+ book series that will be capped off by an epic trilogy where each book is George R. R. Martin sized.  That is what I’m aspiring to with my own long-running series.

I want to be Jim Butcher when I grow up!

v Music –

I listen to a lot of music when I’m trying to come up with my character and scenes.  As a general rule, Lindsey Stirling is my go-to idea generator.  I own every bit of music she ever came up with or collaborated on and I put all of them on a loop when I really have to buckle down and get worlds on the page. 

But there are a few standalone songs that really personify Danny as a character and they are:

• Nine Inch Nails’ The Hand That Feeds
• Halsey’s Gasoline
• Halsey’s Castle
• Lorde’s Yellow Flicker Beat
• Audra Mae & The Almighty Sound’s Ne’er Do Wells

Because I am a slow writer who tends to agonize over every narrative choice, descriptor, and word usage, I’ve given myself the goal of writing 1,000 words in two hours, five nights a week.  Sometimes I get more, sometimes I’m up past eleven o’clock forcing myself to meet that quota before I let myself get some sleep, but since I’ve started doing it, I’ve gone from taking six years to write a book of 260,000 words to writing a 230,000-word book in nine months.  The best part?  So far, my beta readers all come back with favourable reviews and can’t tell the difference in the quality of my writing. 

The moral of this story, therefore, is that if you want to write a book, then you have to put your butt in the chair and write the book!

7. Last but not least: where can we find you? Drop those links!

You can find my books in just about every online retailer’s website for both physical books and ebooks.  Everyone from Amazon, to Barnes & Noble, to Kobo.  Just remember that my name is Tiffani with an ‘i’ at the end when you’re looking for them. 

If you’re looking to talk shop with me online, well…

Ok, so I have a confession to make – I hate social media.  Biggest times-suck ever!  I don’t even have accounts on most of them and the two I AM on are always on the shaky edge of being shut down for lack of use.  I would just much rather be reading, or writing, or researching for my writing, or going to Ren Fairs where I do really cool things with hairbraiding, or doing art, or walking my dogs, or hanging with friends, or playing Skyrim, or, you know… living my life.

But I do have a website, tiffani-collins.com, and a blog and a contact page, so I am reachable and I do love talking with people and being totally nerdy about books.  Hard to get me to STOP talking, really, and I enjoy nothing more than to gush with fellow fans of the same books or learning of new series I might be interested in.  So, please, by all means, come visit my website and drop me a line!

1. Hi! Welcome to my humble blog of all things bookish! I would like for us to start by getting to know you. Give us a short bio, please!

Hello! I’m KT Wilder. I live in Fort Worth, TX with my wife, our 4 dogs, 2 finch birds, 3 fish, 2 horses, and 1 bearded dragon. I self published my first, and currently only, novel Between Worlds on my birthday July 28th. I’ve been competing horses since I was 12. I started with barrel racing, moved into hunter/jumpers and I’m now an eventer. My horse Delaney, whom the book Between Worlds is dedicated to, I’ve had for 14 years as of May. He’s 21 years old and retired. Gandalf is my young competition horse, the first horse I’ve trained from step 1. Most of my spare time is spent with them. The rest of it is spent playing video games or going on adventures with my wife. Survival games are our favorite, but if I’m playing by myself I like farm simulators and Assassins Creed. We like to visit zoos, go to the dog park, or find other shenanigans to get into. Other hobbies of mine involve painting, crochet, and meditation. I hate doing the dishes.

2. To get to know you just a little bit better, I’d like to ask you some this or that questions. Answer 5 of these (or more) and explain why you chose this or that, or maybe an entirely different alternative!

Winter, spring, summer or autumn?

I used to say winter because I love the holidays but after the last 4 days of snowmagedon 2021 I’m going to go back to saying Autumn is my favorite season. It’s cool enough for flannels if I’m lucky, everything is pumpkin spice, and the horses get their fluffy soft winter coats. I’m one of the lucky ones that didn’t lose power but we didn’t have running water for two days. We’re lucky no pipes have burst yet. You can have winter back, I’ll keep my snowless fall season.

Tea or coffee?

Tea. I prefer tea over most drinks – I am southern and sweet tea is life – but most of the time I drink coffee on work days because I need that extra caffeine boost. There is a cabinet in my office that my dad made in highschool. It’s gorgeous and has glass fronts. It is completely packed with loose leaf and bagged teas. I love black teas mostly, with lavender or rose notes. Anything I can put honey in. My second favorite is mint and floral teas. Everyone in my family knows that tea always makes the perfect gift!

Morning or evening?

I have never been, nor will I ever be, a morning person. 100% of Between Worlds was written between midnight and 5 am. The exceptions are: beach vacations, horse shows, and christmas morning. Even then, it’s a chore to get me up. And if left alone long enough, I can fall right back to sleep without issues. My wife hates that. I’ve always been a night person, which was great in college because I worked a night shift job for a while doing security at this classy independent/assisted living/memory care facility. It was amazing and I actually finished the first draft of Between Worlds while working there. I’d go back to night shift in a heartbeat!

Mountains or beaches?

Mountains. I’ve always felt at home in the deep, dense woods and sloping white capped mountains. The Appalachians are my favorite place to be. I prefer cooler weather, and the mountain air is unbeatable. I’ve lived near beaches much of my life and I do enjoy them, but they just aren’t home. Rainy days in the mountains are definitely not conducive to owning and managing horses but it’s still a lingering dream of mine to live deep in those mountain woods someday.

Plotter or pantser?

I fly by the seat of my pants for first drafts. I’m terrible at following outlines, they actually give me frequent writers block. It’s been a struggle with the sequel to Between Worlds since I don’t have a choice, I have to follow the outline for things to line up correctly and to tie up the loose ends from book1. Between Worlds didn’t get an actual plot until draft 2 when I had to clean everything up and make sure it fit together. Book 1 was written in a sequence of scenes that I eventually stitched together and modified to become a lucid story.

Also please, please, give me more stories with gay couples that don’t die. We need more of those. And more stories about gay couples where being gay isn’t the heart of the plot. If a gay couple is going on a dragon riding adventure to save a village, I will buy it and read it a hundred times.

4. What do you write? Tell us about your current projects and the latest happenings!

Currently I’m working on the sequel to Between Worlds, which I am calling book 2. At the moment it’s taking up most of my time. It delves a lot deeper and darker into an ever expanding universe with old characters from the first book and a lot of new faces. There’s a lot more to it that in the first book so it’s proven to be a time consuming challenge.

Another project I’m working on is under the working title of The Story of Us. It focuses on a family of 8 siblings and their parents, with a supernatural twist. The entire family is in a coalition of supernatural hunters that actually work to keep the balance between all the supernatural creatures and the unsuspecting humans that have no idea they exist. Each sibling is touched by the supernatural from two werewolves, a vampire, witches, the child that just wants to be normal, and two that fell down the rabbit hole like Alice into other worlds for several years before returning not quite human anymore. It’s a big project that starts with the mother’s story – and how a horse changed everything. I’m really proud of how it’s grown and developed, I can’t wait to share it!

5. What is your most recent release? Give us a short presentation, cover, and a link for where to buy it!

Between Worlds was published on Amazon last year in July. It’s the story of Faelyn, and her wyre Celestin. Along with their found family, they are still piecing their lives back together in the wake of a virus that destroyed most of the population in their world before mysteriously disappearing. Faelyn comes across Warren, someone important from the years the virus was active, and with him signs of a new epidemic arise. Things are not what they seem (a trope I love!) and all the worlds are at risk if they don’t figure it out.

6. What real-life inspiration do you draw from, and what are your primary fictional sources of inspiration (books, authors, films, music, etc.)? Name a few!

Being out in the woods with the horses is a serious source for me, not quite so much for inspiration but for grounding. It quiets my mind and helps me keep my thoughts straight. I find relief in the horses, so when I go home to write or plot or do anything else writing related I can really focus. The movements of the horses also help a lot with description in the scenes I’m working on currently. I also find a lot of inspiration in settings like airports and coffee shops. Between spaces provide a certain feeling and mood that helps me get those creative juices flowing. If I get really stuck though, I play videogames or read something new to help get back on track. Music is a huge influence to me as well, and pinterest. Movie scores to Imagine Dragons, every song can spark a scene. Pinterest is just a convenient form of media that lets me find visual inspiration for all kinds of projects; great for world building, character creation, prompts, just about anything a writer could need to help get a project going.

I’m a huge fan of Sarah J Maas, her books are my current go to. Her writing style is so fresh and intriguing it’s easy to get lost, and her worlds are gorgeous. Definitely idea sparking! I have to give a lot of credit to Christopher Paolini too, as after I read Eragon the original ideas for Between Worlds started to form. I get a lot of inspiration from emotions and experiences, so poetry is another go to of mine – Tyler Knott Gregson and Nikita Gill are two of my absolute favorite poets. Gregson does a workshop every now and again that aren’t exactly writing focused but immensely helpful with mindset and clarity. Lastly I have to say, Austin Kloen’s book Steal Like An Artist changed my writing life. I highly, highly recommend it to anyone who creates things to read this book.

7. What is your writing routine? If you have one, give us the run-down!

If there is a routine, it’s chaotic at best. My main goal when I do have the time to sit and write is to write something. 80% of the time it ends up being me working on posts for social media and research that usually ends up with me on pinterest for 4 hours. I don’t have a very strict routine as I am not the best at following them. I work 2 jobs and stay pretty busy with the horses, so anytime I sit down and feel like I can write is a blessing. I go days without producing anything, then suddenly a switch flips in my brain and I spit out 4,000 words in two days. The good thing is even when I’m not writing I’m thinking about it. That helps when the writing inspiration hits.

8. If you could go back and give yourself one piece of advice as you started out on the path to become an author, what would it be?

Keep writing what you want. Don’t look back and think, no one is going to like this, it’s weird. Just write for you. Love every moment of it, put your feelings and hope into it, even the ones that hurt. Let the words help you feel better. Something beautiful comes from it, I promise.

9. Last but not least: where can we find you? Drop those links!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1735378917

https://www.facebook.com/ktWild.r

http://wilderwritings.com/