Jaden and Gabriel by Kat Gavin
Greetings readers, authors, and aspiring writers. I wanted to share with you some more fabulous art from the amazing Kat Gavin, and to list a few of the many reasons I love writing (and reading) young adult fiction. Also, scroll down for an awesome Transcender Trilogy countdown sale!
- YA IS NOT JUST FOR TEENS! Okay, we didn’t need studies to tell us that adults, young and old alike, read YA, but I was surprised to find that over half of YA readers are over the age of 18. It makes sense, though—some of the most courageous, edgy, and freshest stories today are being written under the YA mantle. I just read an article entitled Against YA that made me want to scream. It suggests adults should eschew the “satisfying endings” delivered by most YA novels in favor of the “complexity of great adult literature.” http://goo.gl/dl8fIW. Seriously? I write (and read) YA precisely to escape the complexities of life. I want to be entertained—to laugh and cry and fall in love with fictional characters, and to have a break from the stresses of everyday life. Bring on the satisfying ending—it’s why I persevere to the last page!
- YA CAN BE WHATEVER YOU WANT IT TO BE. Do you love sci-fi, fantasy, dystopia, adventure, and romance? So do I. That’s why I toss them all into my books. In YA, it’s no-holds-barred—from light comedy to dark techno-punk and more. There’s no set formula. Typically, the protagonist is a young adult. That’s it. No steadfast rules. I spent a lot of years practicing law and always thought I’d eventually write a legal thriller. In fact I have several half-written, cheesy legal thrillers tucked inside my desk, but I lost interest because they were boring. Good YA is rarely boring. It takes its own course, and if you give it free rein, you may be surprised where it will lead you.
- YA DOESN’T PRETEND TO BE SOMETHING IT’S NOT. Have you ever read a book and felt the author was more worried about impressing the audience (or the critics) with how erudite (read: pretentious and snobby) she is rather than telling a good story? Ugh! A big DNF. YA doesn’t pretend to be high literature. It’s designed to engage the emotions, introduce relatable characters, and speak in a distinctive, youthful voice. We’re all familiar with what it’s like to be young and struggling with first love, difficult friends, parental love/hate relationships, and all the other messy challenges of entering adulthood. These incredibly powerful, unadulterated emotions are what inspire me most. YA gives us a vehicle for understanding how others deal with these universal issues, and after all, isn’t that what story is all about? Seeing how other people clean up the everyday messes of life.
- THE YA STYLE IS FUN TO READ AND WRITE. Despite the fact that there are no hard and fast rules for writing YA, I admit that most YA novels seem to have a style of writing that is unique to the category. In general, YA is character driven and plot-heavy (as opposed to stream-of-consciousness or descriptive narration), and it’s faster-paced with large chunks of dialog. The crotchety old curmudgeons out there will say that’s the problem with literature today—it caters to the fast food, instant gratification junkies in our society. Actually, I believe it’s a more modern, engaging way of writing. If the author constructs scenes and shapes characters in an easy-to-visualize manner, snappy dialog can propel the story along like a well-made movie, sweeping up the reader as it goes.
- YA CREATES READERS OUT OF OTHERWISE DISINTERESTED YOUNG ADULTS. Have you seen high school summer reading lists lately? Okay, they’re still overloaded with dry, fossilized, dreary tomes from another era, but they seem to be getting a little better. The more enlightened librarians and teachers of today are sprinkling some YA selections in with the timeworn classics of yesteryear, and the results are not surprising—students are discovering the joy of reading! Kudos to those farsighted souls who realize that present day teens do not relate to Lord of the Flies (believe me, I had to listen to my son’s daily complaints).
What do you like most about YA literature?
TRANSCENDER TRILOGY BOX SET: BOOKS 1 AND 2 ONLY $0.99 for a limited time!
It’s been an exciting few weeks! First, the Transcender Blog Tour and Giveaway was Awesome (with a capital A). Coordinated by my phenomenal friend, Christina Hickey at Ensconced in Lit, I had tons of fun and met some amazing bloggers. If you’re looking for great blogs like I always am, check out the blogs below for insightful reviews, thought-provoking posts, and lots of other fun and noteworthy content. I’m serious people—some of these sites are like works of art. What I’d give for the technical skills! And the Trilogy received some incredible reviews. Also, if you missed any of the tour—like the Dream Cast for the Transcender Movie or the interview with Ryder Blackthorn, you can find it all below! Congratulations to the winners of the Giveaway: Christine, Courtney, Kelly, and Lindsay, and a big Thanks to all who entered.
Gorgeous Transcender Charms from Julia at YA Book Nerd Reviews!
Ensconced in Lit – Review of entire Trilogy plus Character interview with Jaden and some awesome fan art
Crystal in Bookland– Transcender Character Quiz (which character are you most like?)
Pandora’s Books– Transcender Movie Dream Cast w/ photos
YA Book Nerd Reviews – Review of Transcender: First-Timer
Wonderland of Reading – Review of Transcender: First-Timer
The Whimsical Mama – Guest Post
Fly to Fiction – Review of Transcender: First-Timer
Tea and Fangirling – Review
A Reading Nurse – Guest Post
I Heart YA Fiction – Review of entire Trilogy
Mary Had a Little Book Blog – Review of Transcender and Interview with Ryder Blackthorn
Second, the ILLUMINOSITY book cover, designed by another extraordinary friend, Carrie Drazek, was chosen as a finalist in Sci-Fi for the Bookgoodies cover contest. I hope you will all take a few seconds to stop by the site and vote for the cover by leaving a comment, tweeting, and otherwise sharing the site. Each comment and share counts as a vote for the cover! Carrie did an outstanding job designing all three of the Transcender Trilogy covers and she deserves this honor! Vote for ILLUMINOSITY!
Finally, we have a number of fun things coming up in the near future, including a special $.99 promotion of the Transcender Trilogy Two Book Box Set featuring books one and two. The sale will run for no more than a week, after which this box set will be retired. I’m thrilled to announce that a Box Set featuring all three books will be released on Amazon sometime in the fall! More info on that to come.
Enjoy your last few weeks of summer, and check back often for more news and updates!
Thanks to everyone who entered the Goodreads giveaway of ten signed copies of ILLUMINOSITY, and congratulations to all those who won! You’ll be receiving your books soon.
If you missed out this time, never fear, on Monday, July 21, I am beginning a week-long, whirlwind Blog Tour and Giveaway—two posts a day with some amazing bloggers! The grand prize is a $50 Amazon gift card and a set of signed Transcender Trilogy books. Second and third place prizes will be awarded also, with a chance to win a Transcender T-shirt.
I hope you’ll follow along and join in the fun! Take the Transcender Character Quiz to see which character you are most like, and don’t miss my Dream Cast for the Transcender Movie. Should be a great time with plenty of opportunities to win!
Transcender Blog Tour Schedule:
July 21 Ensconced in Lit – review and Crystal in Bookland – guest post
July 22 Pandora’s Books – guest post and Ensconced in Lit – character interview
July 23 YA Book Nerd Reviews -review and Wonderland of Reading – review
July 24 The Whimsical Mama – guest post and Fly to Fiction – Review
July 25 Tea and Fangirling – Review and A Reading Nurse – guest post
July 26 I Heart YA Fiction – Author Interview and Mary Had a Little Book Blog – guest post
Also, please sign up for my Newsletter, if you haven’t already. I only send them out occasionally when there is something special to announce!
Thanks for stopping by, and good luck in the Giveaway!
Hi Everyone and Happy Father’s Day! Thought you would enjoy another amazing sketch from talented artist Kat Gavin. This melted my heart. So gorgeous!
Jaden and Gabriel
I’m excited to announce a Giveaway on Goodreads of ten signed copies of ILLUMINOSITY, Transcender Trilogy Book 3. The giveaway runs from today, June 15 to July 15. Please enter to win here: https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/96384-illuminosity-transcender-trilogy-book-3.
I’m adding a link to an Excerpt of the first three chapters of ILLLUMINOSITY just to whet your appetite. Hope you enjoy! https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/94935558/ILLUMINOSITY%20EXCERPT.docx.
Also, if you’ve read Books 1 and 2 of Trilogy, I would greatly appreciate it if you would stop by the Amazon page for my two-book Box Set and leave a short review. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00K8CTRTK . By the way, the Box Set makes a great Father’s Day Gift!
This week I received this awesome piece of fan art, which had me smiling all day long. It inspired me to compile a list of Ways to Make an Indie Author smile.
Jaden Beckett by Kat Gavin
- Write a nice review on Amazon.com. Roughly 80-90% of Indie Author book sales come from Amazon.com. Good reviews help sell books. A ton of good reviews on Amazon is like a pocket full of gold!
- Drop a line to an Indie Author. Most authors have Facebook fan pages or blogs where you can send a short message letting them know you enjoyed the book. I’m always thrilled to get one of these messages, and I make an effort to respond to each one.
- Recommend the book to friends. Help the Indie Author get the word out by recommending the book on Goodreads, sharing it with your book club, or just telling someone who likes to read about it.
- Tweet about the book. Post the book link on Twitter and say why you loved it.
- Post the book link on your Facebook page. Don’t forget to add your recommendation.
- Do a piece of Fan Art. Okay, I realize not everyone has the talent to do a piece of fan art, but I was blown away to receive the sketch featured on my blog today. It’s of my main character Jaden Beckett, by talented artist (and Transcender Trilogy fan) Kat Gavin. What a fabulous tribute to the trilogy!
- Put together a short Book Trailer. Again, not everyone is talented enough to do this (myself included), but if you are, and a story has really touched you, put your skills to good use helping more people to discover the wonderful work.
- “Gift” the book to family and friends. I have a lot of friends who read, and I’m always using the Amazon.com gifting option to send my favorite Indie books to family and friends for birthdays, holidays, or just because I know they’ll love the story. It’s an inexpensive way to make a friend (and an author) happy.
- Follow the Indie Author on social media. “Like” the author’s fan page or the book fan page, or both. Follow the author on Twitter. Subscribe to the author’s blog. All authors, Indies especially, need a good social media platform. Facebook, Twitter, and a blog are important planks in the platform.
- Buy the next book! Sorry, I had to get in a little plug for my new book. If you liked the first two books of the Transcender Trilogy, I hope you’ll consider buying ILLUMINOSITY, Book 3. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KC7IVPW Thanks!
I’m thrilled to announce that the final installment of the Transcender Trilogy has been released and is now available on Amazon.com, http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KC7IVPW. It’s been a long and eventful year for me, and I admit there were times when I wondered if this day would ever come. Thanks to all the loyal readers who stuck by me through the ups and downs to get to the end of the series.
Although I’m thrilled to be moving on to bigger and better projects, it’s with a heavy heart and a few tears that I bid farewell to my characters: Jaden, Ryder, Ralston, Asher, and the rest. I hope you loved them as much as I did! Thanks everyone!
In anticipation of the May 15th release of ILLUMINIOSITY, Book 3 of the Transcender Trilogy, a new box set of Books 1 and 2 has just been released on Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00K8CTRTK.
This Box Set contains TRANSCENDER: First-Timer (Book 1) and STREAMING STARS (Book 2) plus a Special Excerpt from ILLUMINOSITY (Book 3)
A fast paced series full of action, adventure, romance in parallel worlds. Beloved by fans of science fiction, fantasy and paranormal romance.
After the untimely death of her mother, Jaden Beckett, believes her life can’t possibly become more complicated … until she suddenly finds herself in the midst of an alternate universe fraught with danger, intrigue and forbidden love. The destiny police want her out. Jaden has other plans.
It’s a great way to catch up on the series. Plus it makes an awesome gift!
So thrilled to unveil the cover for my latest book, ILLUMINOSITY, the exciting third and final installment in the Transcender Trilogy. Once again the talented Carrie Drazek has outdone herself with this gorgeous design.
Enter the Giveaway for $50Amazon Gift Card and signed copies of the first two book in the trilogy at ENSCONCED IN LIT http://goo.gl/SdJxfq
Announcing the Upcoming Release of
ILLUMINOSITY
by Vicky Savage
May 15, 2014
Mystery, romance, and high adventure in parallel dimensions.
In this highly anticipated conclusion to the Transcender Trilogy, Jaden Beckett faces her greatest challenges to date. Her choice is clear: leave the love of her life or face certain death.
With Warrington Palace under siege, Jaden and Ryder are wrenched away from each other, as the powerful Inter-Universal Guidance Agency seeks Jaden’s ultimate demise.
Heartsick and alone, she begins a new chapter of life as a Transcender, only to discover that her fiercest battle has yet to come.
Is Jaden safe anywhere in the galaxy? Or should IUGA ask itself that question, having underestimated her before?
With her usual wit and tenacity, Jaden fights to discover her place in the multiverse, the true meaning of destiny, and the keys to the mystery of eternal love.
As part of the Raising Chaos Blog Tour, I’m so pleased to welcome my friend, author Elizabeth Corrigan, to my blog. Elizabeth is the author of Oracle of Philadelphia, and the newly released Raising Chaos, both in the Earthbound Angels series. I loved Oracle and looking forward to reading Raising Chaos!
I believe you’ll find Elizabeth’s post on Naming Characters highly entertaining, and I strongly recommend you check out her books. Just click on the covers:
Enter the Giveaway: http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/0510ed30/
NAMING CHARACTERS:
I don’t know about Vicky, but many authors I know agonize over what to name their characters. I have one friend who reads lists of names searching for the perfect one and another who surveys everyone she knows, often to settle on something completely different. I’m not going to say I’ve never done this—I had a recent facebook survey to see whether I should name a character in my new adult fantasy Ysabel or Isadora—but for the most part, I find names easy. I just pick the first thing that pops into my head. Sometimes this leads to things I’m not sure I’m 100% on board with. One of the main guys in my current work in progress is named Baurus, much to my eternal disappointment, and I have a future Earthbound Angels character named Devlyn. Nonetheless, I am overall grateful for the facility of my naming process.
As I was relating this post to the Earthbound Angels series, I realized I didn’t follow my usual pattern in naming the angels and their associates. Most of the names in Oracle of Philadelphia and Raising Chaos were chosen with care and have some meaning behind them.
I had to choose several names for the main character of Oracle, who we’ll call Carrie, since that is what she goes by when the story begins. I picked her first moniker because it was an everyday name that started with a hard “C” sound. I did something similar for all her historic titles—looked up a list of first names common to the period and picked one I liked that began with a hard “C.” Consequently at different times and to different people, she is Khet, Cassia, Callidora, and Caela.
Everyone comments on how perfect Bedlam’s name is—even my editor, who had some concerns about the anachronism of having a character with that name before a Bethlehem Hospital existed in London. But the funny thing is, when I started writing the book, his name was Bael. Or Baal. I hadn’t 100% decided on the spelling. I picked the name as a typical demon name, based on my repeated playings of Diablo II and my vague knowledge that Baal was a false idol worshipped in the Old Testament. My plan was to have Baal give a different meaning of his name to everyone who asked. But then I looked it up and realized that “Ba’al” was also a name for a lord or spiritual leader or god, and it fit in less well with my plans. Plus, Baal was the root of Beelzebub, and I already had one of those. Around the same time, I came up with the idea of calling him Bedlam, and it stuck. And I’m not sorry for it.
The angels and demons ended up being the easiest characters to name, because most of them already existed. I based my archangels on preconceived notions I had in my head and populated the rest of Heaven and Hell using the very useful Wikipedia entry on Theophory, or putting the word of God into a name, which explained to me at long last why angels have names ending in “el.” I actually discovered that my name—Elizabeth—has the same word in it, and I flipped it around to fit my pattern—Zabethiel—and gave it to Siren (whose name is a nod to the idea that all the angels are also mythological figures). For my own amusement, I started to give my angels all kind of names ending in “el,” regardless of their actual root. Rachel is not truly theophory, and I have characters showing up in later books named Raquel, which means “ewe,” and Asphodel, a part of the ancient Greek Underworld. The only name I have that means absolutely nothing is Keziel, which I picked simply because I liked the way the syllables sounded.
So it turns out I put a lot of effort into what I called my angels. But if you ever read anything else I wrote? Those names I probably just made up.
Contact Elizabeth:
Blog: www.elizabethrcorrigan.com (There’s an r in the middle of that.)
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Elizabeth-Corrigan-Author/136090576538450
Twitter: @ercorrigan
Bedlam’s Twitter: @BedlamFTW
Follow the tour: http://redadeptpublishing.com/raising-chaos/
Lots of fun things coming up in April. On April 3rd, I’ll have a special guest post on Naming Characters by Elizabeth Corrigan, author of the wonder Oracle of Philadelphia, as part of her Raising Chaos tour. Don’t miss it.
Also, I’m Thrilled to announce that the cover for ILLUMINOSITY, Book 3 of the Transcender Trilogy, will be revealed right here, and on Goodreads and a few other sites, on April 15, 2014. Once again, Carrie Drazek has done a superb job on the design.
The ILLUMINOSITY release date is set for May 15, 2014. Those of you who have requested to be first readers will receive it prior to that date. Stay tuned for more Transcender news!
Thanks to all of you for your kind thoughts and good wishes! I’m feeling great and so grateful that the Transcender Trilogy will soon be complete and I can move on to the other exciting projects I have waiting in the wings.
Much love,
I’m a writer and author of novels, short stories and poetry. My TRANSCENDER TRILOGY blends science-fiction, fantasy, and romance in an exciting cross-dimensional adventure. My latest, The Weight of Air, is a short work of contemporary fiction presenting a tantalizing "Would I?/Wouldn't I?” dilemma.
