Sheila's Guests and Reviews

Today is your chance to meet Jeffe Kennedy, one of the authors included in the Thunder on the Battlefield anthologies, right here on my blog. A two-volume anthology, Thunder on the Battlefield offers great Sword and Sorcery tales, just waiting to take me back to the Dungeons and Dragons of my student days. I almost want to get on my bike and visit a friend again, shove the furniture aside, sit cross-legged on the floor, and roll my dice with nervously trembling wrist as the tale is spun... But instead I'll sit at Jeffe Kennedy's feet and learn how a call for stories in an anthology can come at just the right time to help an author explore her characters. Over to you Jeffe... When I saw Tuck’s call for stories for his Sword & Sorcery anthology, I’d recently completed The Mark of the Tala – and sold the trilogy, The Twelve Kingdoms – to Kensington Press. Mark of the Tala wouldn’t come out until the following June (2014), but I’d sketched out the arc of the tri...

If variety really is the spice of life, I should be hot and spicy by now. But maybe it's the balm of a Sunday afternoon's reading. In between writing more Nazareth Neighbors stories, and getting my blog tour for Bethlehem's Baby going... Click here to see where the tour has already stopped, and please join the train! ... and writing blogposts, and making new friends as I trail around the internet... ... and falling asleep over cups of coffee and tea... I'm still reading and reviewing books in their curiously enticing and strange variety, so here are eight--yes eight--more for your reading pleasure. Pull up a chair. Grab a mug for your coffee, and see which brew takes your fancy. Saving the best till... first... I'll start with the wonderful Harper Lee and Peppermint Candy, by Paula Hennessy . Classic, humorous, down-to-earth, honest... what else can I say? A literary novel that pairs Harper Lee with Twilight during a teen book club run in a psych war...

Wandering warily to my computer, checking over my shoulder, checking inside the screen... is someone watching me? Today I'm listening in as author John F. Allen interviews Ivory Blaque from The God Killers. So make sure your artwork's firmly fastened to the wall, get Grandpa's ancient pistols out from under the bed (yes, my Granddad really did have a WWI gun hidden away--I found it when I was playing hide 'n seek one day), and make sure you don't have any scarily incriminating documents lying around... Sitting down warily at the computer, may I welcome John and Ivory: John: Hello everyone! Today is day four of the John F. Allen book tour. I’d like to thank my publisher, Seventh Star Press for this fantastic opportunity and also Sheila Deeth for hosting today’s stop on the tour. This entry is an interview with the protagonist of The God Killers, Ivory Blaque. John: What is your real, birth name? What name do you use and why? Ivory: My birth name is D...

Today I'm welcoming Eric Garrison, author of Four 'Til Late, on his Tomorrow Comes Media tour. He's telling us about the joys of planning, pantsing, and generally telling stories. So... do you like to know the end of a story before you read the beginning? Are you one of those readers who always has to check out the last page first? Or would that seem like cheating? Even heresy? What about when the author knows the end before the beginning? We trust our authors to have an end in sight when we start to read. But do authors have to know where they're going before the story begins, or might directing it be part of the craft? Over to you Eric, and thank you for visiting my blog: Making Stuff Up: Planning, Pantsing, and Me by Eric Garrison In any writing circle, writers, especially novelists, self-identify as planners or pantsers. It seems to be as fundamental a division as eye color, handedness or Star Trek vs Star Wars fandom. Planners want to kno...

Today I'm delighted to welcome Andrea Buginsky to my blog, author of The Chosen middle-grade series, and the new Destiny series. Andrea's offering a free mobi copy of her novel--scroll down to enter your details in the rafflecopter. And today she's going to tell us about what Destiny means to her. Over to you Andrea, and welcome to my blog: What Destiny Means to Me by Andrea Buginsky Destiny is a book I’ve been working on off-and-on for several years. It started out as a project for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), an annual event that takes place in November in which you are supposed to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote…and I burned out. I couldn’t complete the competition. But the good news was that I had a great, no, an awesome start, on a brand new book. And it was a book I really enjoyed writing. But because of the burnout, it was a book that I put away and hid from for a long time. Every so often, I w...