Now, a special THANK YOU to the good folks at Sourcebooks, the place to go for all your romance reading needs, for sponsoring this giveaway! As we get ready for the release of Thrill Ride, they’re offering a copy of Rev It Up: Black Knights Inc. by Julie Ann Walker, the book where we first meet Rock and Vanessa.

The rules are simple:

1. The giveaway is open to readers in the US and Canada.

2. The giveaway runs through midnight EST on Sunday, April 28th.

3. To enter, use the form below. Your email will not be visible, I promise.

4. The winner will have 24 hours to respond with their mailing address, so watch your email to see if you’re my winner!

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. You know the rules: grab your current read, open to a random page and share a two sentence teaser with us (no spoilers!). Be sure to tell us about the book, so we can add it to our TBR list!

This week, my teaser is from NOS4A2 by Joe Hill. It’s a book about a serial killer, a girl with a magic bicycle, and the world of imagination that we keep in our heads. At least, most of the time it stays in our heads.

“Vic smelled the vast vault filled with books before she saw it, because her eyes required time to adjust to the cavernous dark. She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness.”

What a terrific description! It makes me want to run off to my favorite used book store, see if it smells the same way.

What’s teasing you this week?

WordPress and I are not getting along lately. I have had several posts just disappear into the ether. Others, like this one, are scheduled to post and just never appear. My apologies to the good folks at Tor/Forge for missing the review date.

Virus Thirteen by Joshua Alan Parry presents a scary vision of the future. Amazing medical advances have cured cancer and many other health problems, but they’ve left a frightening bureaucracy behind. The Department of  Homeland Health Care tackles smokers on the street and sends them to rehab. Patients who are obese, hypertensive, diabetic or depressed are corralled into “health retreats” that are little more than fitness boot camps:

“Now, the watch you just put on is actually a calorie counter. It has a computer chip in it, much like the identity chip in your wrist, that will help us monitor how many calories you’re burning during your workouts. How we work here is simple. You have a meal with four hundred calories coming up, but in order to receive that meal, you must burn at least six hundred calories. If, by the end of this session, you haven’t reached that goal goal, you will have to wait for the next meal.”

Perfectly in line with a lot of current thinking – that thin equals healthy, even though the facts don’t always support that idea.

There’s an undercurrent here. GeneFirm, the biotech company that cured cancer, is working on a cure for the flu epidemic that is sweeping across the country, but there is evidence they are not telling the truth. One of the senior researchers may have cancer…even though cancer has been cured. The firm is in lock-down, people are trapped inside…what is really going on?

There is plenty of suspense here and I think there’s a enough drama to make a pretty good movie. There are plenty of plotlines to keep you interested. There are the Logans – researchers at GeneFirm who may be at the center of something that will change the world. You’ve got MacDonald and Marnoy, our Homeland Health cops. Their job is to round up the unhealthy, but one of them may not be what he appears to be. They drag Pat and Modest to the health retreat, and they may end up on an adventure of their own. And on all sides, there is the virus, burning through the population. How is GeneFirm involved?

The problem for me with Virus Thirteen was that there is a plot hole here that was so obvious that it jolted me right out of the story. As soon as it came up (and I won’t share my thoughts, as it might not be as apparent to others), I had an immediate, incredulous reaction, and that made it hard to sink back into the story. I can suspend my disbelief with the best of them, but sometimes you just shake your head and think, you could have done better. However, even with the plot problems, this is a good, quick read with lots of potential. The health cops infuriated me, but I could almost see it, the militant attitudes that some people have, passing laws about soda pop and trans fats – maybe they aren’t that far down the road.

My copy of Virus Thirteen was an Advance Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

Here’s what’s coming up on the site this week:

Monday: My weekly preview, plus a delayed review of Virus Thirteen

Tuesday: Teaser Tuesday – a great teaser from a book I just finished: NOS4A2

Wednesday: Hopefully, I’ll have some new words for you by Wednesday.

Thursday: Check in on Thursday for my review of The Best of Punk Magazine. I would call it a coffee table book, but I’m not sure punk rockers have coffee tables.

Friday: This week, I’ve got a great guest post from author Julie Ann Walker. Giveaway Alert! Julie Ann will be talking about her new book, Rev It Up, and about how her travels have influenced her writing. In addition, I’ve got a copy of Rev It Up to give away to some lucky reader.

Saturday: Saturday Snapshot — I’m still going through old photos, so maybe I’ll have more family pictures to share.

Sunday: Another Quotable — interesting, funny, thought-provoking statements about books and reading.

Considering I just finished reading NOS4A2 at about 2:00 this morning, this is a perfect quote for today:

“By now, it is probably very late at night, and you have stayed up to read this book when you should have gone to sleep. If this is the case, then I commend you for falling into my trap. It is a writer’s greatest pleasure to hear that someone was kept up until the unholy hours of the morning reading one of his books. It goes back to authors being terrible people who delight in the suffering of others. Plus, we get a kickback from the caffeine industry…”

- Brandon Sanderson, Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians

One of the most interesting things about sci-fi and fantasy novels is the idea of world building – creating a whole new universe for your characters. You need names and places and rules, rules for your characters to live by and you have to be able to stick to them. So much power! And so much responsibility.

Today, I’ve got a guest post from Adi, author of Tantra, talking about world building. Now, you know I like to take it easy on Fridays and let the authors do the talking, so here we go…

The Art of World Building

By Adi

When I decided to create a brand new world (or in the case of Tantra, a slightly modified version of the existing one), at first it seemed rather exciting. I was the de facto God. Sure, vampires could exist, and maybe pigs could fly, and people could transport themselves across continents with a single click.

But at some point I realized every single world, no matter how mundane or fantastic, needs to have its own laws of physics and rules. For fantasy authors, this involves extensive plotting and mapping, much of which never even shows up in the final book. Readers these days are quick to point out inconsistencies, and those inconsistencies can break down the entire illusion an author like me is trying to create.

To allow the reader to believe in a world, you must explain how it works, its limitations, and how your characters will interact with it. This is especially true of the hero. In classic superhero stories, the powers of the superhero are well defined. The antagonist only becomes truly interesting when he or she is able to circumvent those powers, or mitigate them. The reader believes the hero is in trouble only if he or she knows the hero’s limitations, and the resulting difficult choices.

When writing Tantra, a critical challenge was not only how to create a new world, but how to connect it seamlessly to a philosophy and religion that are several thousand years old. I had to answer questions like do vampires have souls? How are human beings connected by the threads of maya, karma and dharma? How would one summon an ancient weapon? How does sound integrate with action in a world of illusion?

As plot grew more complex, more questions came up. Tantra’s main character, the vampire hunter Anu, studies an ability called “the shift,” which can be learned by anyone. But then how old is the ability? How does it medically work? Why can’t someone learn it on their own? Some of these questions get answered in this book, while I intentionally left others for sequels or off-the-page author questions. This is another lesson for writers: you need to manage the information flow to the reader properly, thinking more about engagement, action, and plot, rather than giving a social studies lecture on your brave new world.

Another troublesome factor for writers comes in when thinking of tangential books and sequels. You often make choices about your world which work very well for the first book, but start to limit or even foil your vision for the follow-up novels. Television soap operas made this into a comical art: sure, we said twenty episodes ago that Jane’s sister is dead, but she’s not now. It was a conspiracy! She looks nothing like she used to? Oh, she had plastic surgery. And Greg? He touched some space alien stone, and now he can fly and move things with his mind.

Authors do not seem to have the same leeway. Even in the realm of fantasy, while we revel in freedom, the art of building a new world is in many ways a discipline.

How do you do it? Documentation, documentation, documentation.

Good authors maintain extensive notes. Literary giants like Tolkien even created their own maps to keep everything tracked and in good order. For Tantra, I started with in-depth character descriptions: what do they eat? What do they wear? How do they feel about the rules of the world around them? How much do they even know about it? What misconceptions do they have? Then I moved on to connecting my world’s underpinnings, sketching it all out on a giant glass pane with red markers to track concept movement. A particularly challenge was tracking memories and the resulting karma through multiple rebirths, vampire risings, and childhood trauma.

It was hard and, after a while, even a bit boring. I got into this gig wanting to express words, not make flow-charts, diagrams, and family trees. But now that the book is out and the readers are responding to it, I know the time investment was well worth it. Because sometimes all it takes is a well-placed question by a fan to bring your wonderfully constructed world crashing down, not only for you and the fan, but for everyone.

Click through for more about Tantra and Adi.

Read the remainder of this entry »

Saturday Snapshot is hosted by Alyce at At Home with Books. To participate, post a photo that you (or a friend or family member) have taken then leave a direct link to your post in the Mister Linky. Photos can be old or new, and be of any subject as long as they are clean and appropriate for all eyes to see. How much detail you give in the caption is entirely up to you. Please don’t post random photos that you find online.

This week, I am going through some old photos and I found this tiny snapshot – a picture of my mom and dad on their wedding day! We’re currently preparing for their Golden Anniversary party, so it makes sense that they look like kids in this picture, but oh my! They look so young!

If it’s Friday, there must be a guest post! Today, I’ve got Elizabeth Corrigan, author of Oracle of Philadelphia:

Carrie works at a diner in South Philadelphia, dispensing advice to humans and angels wise enough to seek her counsel. But there are some problems that even the best advice can’t solve. Her latest supplicant, Sebastian, is unique among those who have sought her aid. He sold his soul to a demon in exchange for his sister’s life, but his heart remains pure.

Carrie has lived for millennia with the knowledge that her immortality is due to the suffering of others, and she cannot bear to see another good man damned when it is within her power to prevent it.

In order to renegotiate his contract, Carrie must travel into the depths of hell and parley with the demons that control its pathways. As the cost of her journey rises, Carrie must determine how much she is willing to sacrifice to save one good soul.

Now, how about a little bit from the author? Elizabeth shares with us the most important decision of her writing day…

Important Decisions

Elizabeth Corrigan

When I sit down to write each day, I must make a very serious choice: Do I stay home or go to Starbucks?

Obviously the ideal would be to go to a small indie coffee shop where I could support a local business and fair trade coffee, but sadly there is no such locale within easy walking distance of my apartment. Perhaps if I had my urbanite sister’s concept of what constitutes “within walking distance,” I could make my way up to the library coffee shop. Unfortunately, the one time I ventured in there, the cupcake I ordered made last year’s Tastykakes look fresh, and my not-particularly-large mocha options were “dark” or “cinnamon.” Since my preferred flavor is “white,” I was unimpressed by their exotic selections. So you can see how Starbucks is my preferred option.

There are a number of distinct advantages to going to Starbucks over staying home. First, I at least get some nominal exercise, which cannot be underestimated, considering that I am prodigiously lazy and often “forget” to order my mocha with skim milk. And of course, I cannot underestimate the bonus to writing I get by achieving the pretentious writer stereotype. I look around at all the other people in the coffee shop and think how impressed they would be that they’re sitting next to a novelist. Granted, I never actually talk to any of these people, and mostly they would rather I not be sitting there at all so that they could use my chair to keep their bags on. But I can at least imagine that when I make a million dollars, the local Starbucks can advertise that I wrote there when.

There are, of course, down sides to Starbucks, not the least of which is the very people I go there to impress. There are only six tables and a few stools, most of which are usually occupied by others who are trying, like me, to achieve the coffee shop aesthetic. Meanwhile, I am subjected to a variety of eclectic musical selections that Starbucks feels will be of interest to savvy coffee drinkers like myself, which can range anywhere from “Huh, I’ll have to see who sings this” to “Oh, dear caffeine gods, make it stop.”

If I work at home, on the other hand, I get to pick the soundtrack. I have a special playlist for each book that features my theme songs for each character—“Hero” by Chad Kroeger for Carrie in Oracle of Philadelphia, “Flagpole Sitta” by Harvey Danger for Bedlam—and assorted other songs, many of which are actually mentioned in the book, that remind me of scenes. At home I can also save myself the cost of frou-frou latte drinks and instead imbibe Diet Coke in quantities likely not encouraged by the FDA. My apartment also has the advantage and disadvantage of cats, who act intermittently as lap-warmers and random keystroke operators.

But of course the real question is where do I write better? The jury on that is not yet out. I shall continue to experiment until a conclusion is drawn. So long as no one expects me to write without caffeine.

I was caught up in the book from the very first chapter. Terrier Rand comes from a family of thieves – burglars, second-story men, con artists and grifters. (All named after breeds of dog, for reasons that are never fully explained.) His brother, Collie, is on death row after a killing spree that included an elderly couple and a nine-year-old girl. Terry hadn’t planned to come home for the execution, but his brother has a last request.

The Last Kind Words by Tom Piccirilli is the story of that last request and the story of Terry coming to terms with his family. After his brother’s conviction, in the midst of his own personal crisis, he left town, ran away from his problems. Coming home, he can’t make things right; it’s just too late to be there for the one person who really needed him. He has to face the fact that other people suffered for his cowardice. His brother can still push all his buttons — he knows just what to say to get Terry to do what he wants. It’s really not all that difficult: Terry wants to understand what Collie did, wants some sort of explanation. First, though, there’s a question of the one murder that Collie swears he did not commit.

You can’t help but root for Terry and love his family just a little. The names — Terrier; Collie; their father, Pinscher; their uncles, Malamute and Greyhound; his grandfather, Shepher — are enough to draw you in. The open and honest way they approach their completely dishonest living is kind of charming and everyone in town knows who and what they are. Terry makes some terrible decisions, but there is enormous pressure on him, with the upcoming execution, concerns about his sister, his ailing grandfather and an uncle in trouble with the mob. He’s clearly trying to do the right thing, even without a clear idea of what the right thing might be, but he’s torn and fighting his instincts to run, like he did before. This time, he has to see things through to the end.

I really enjoyed the novel, over all. I was really engrossed in Terry’s family struggles, particularly his dealings with his teenage sister. It’s got to be tough growing up in such a notorious family, and a 16 year old does not want her runaway older brother coming home, trying to save the day. The failing health of his grandfather and uncles  is disturbing, as it is for all of us who are watching family members grow old. For men like these, what do you do when you can’t do the thing you’ve done all your life? Most of all, Terry’s final words to his brother surprised me. It was one of those scenes where you don’t know what you were expecting, but this wasn’t it. Overall, a very good read.

The title puzzled me until the end of the novel.

When the priest turned to go, I reached out and grabbed him by the wrist.

“The last kind words ever spoken to Jesus were spoken by a thief.”

“Excuse me?” He tried to pull away, but I held on. “You’re — you’re –”

“We were the first let into heaven. Thieves are pardoned.”

For Terry’s sake, you hope that it’s true.

My copy of The Last Kind Words was provided free of charge through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program..

Two new books this week to talk about. First is one I am very excited about – the next Christopher Meeks novel, Blood Drama, coming out in June. I have reviewed a couple of Meeks’ novels before – months and seasons and Love at Absolute Zero – so I am looking forward to reading this one:

Everyone has a bad day. Graduate student Ian Nash has lost his girlfriend in addition to being dropped from a Ph.D. program in theatre at a Southern California university. When he stops at a local coffee shop in the lobby of a bank to apply for a job, the proverbial organic matter hits the fan. A gang of four robs the bank, and things get bloody. Ian is taken hostage by the robbers when the police show up. Now he has to save his life.

FBI Special Agent Aleece Medina’s analysis of the bloody bank heist drives her into the pursuit of a robbery gang headed by two women. She doesn’t anticipate how this robbery will pit her against both the bandits and the male higher-ups in the FBI while the media heats up during a giant manhunt.

The robbers are about to kill Ian, and all he has at hand is his knowledge of the stage.

My second new book is from the folks at Tor/Forge. It’s another novel from the husband and wife team, Aimee and David Thurlo, called a Time of Change. It’s part of their Ellie Clah crime series – not one that I’ve read, but I do love a good crime story:

A Time of Change introduces readers to Josephine Buck and other employees at a New Mexico trading post. When The Outpost’s owner dies, Josephine, a young Navajo woman, is shocked to discover that Tom Stuart, whom she thought of as a surrogate father, has left her the business.

Ben Stuart and his dad had had problems, but military service changed Ben for the better and put the two men back in each other’s lives. His father’s sudden death ends any possibility of a true reconciliation and leaves Ben fuming at being disinherited.

Suspecting that Jo had an affair with his father, Ben is determined to get control of the trading post. Jo’s hataalii training shows her that Ben is wounded in both body and soul, and she becomes determined to help him.

As Jo and Ben move toward a deeper understanding of each other, they learn that Tom Stuart was murdered and that the trading post at the center of their lives holds many secrets.