Week 25: THE NEXT BIG THING BLOG HOP

There are the books everyone has heard about: Twilight, The Hunger Games, Fifty Shades of Gray. But what about all those other wonderful books out there? Some of them are treasures, just waiting to be found, and that’s what this blog hop is all about: the books you might not have heard about, but that you might end up loving.

This blog hop is like a game of tag. One author posts and tags five other authors who link back to their website the next week and tag five new authors. If you follow the blog hop long enough, you’re bound to find some books you’ll love! Maybe you’ll even discover a book that ends up being the next big thing.

I was tagged by Gennita Low. You can learn more about her book Tempting Trouble on her blog, www.rooferauthor.blogspot.com

This blog hop includes ten questions to help you learn more about an author’s current work in progress, so here’s a little info about my current project:

1: What is the working title of your book?

I’m not quite ready to talk about my WIP, because it’s darker than what I’ve done before, and I’m still feeling my way through it.  I can say that it will be young adult, mainstream and suspenseful, with no paranormal elements at all, which is quite a departure from my Vamped and Latter-Day Olympians series!

2: Where did the idea come from for the book?

I’m going to shift over to the Vamped series here, since the latest of those books, Fangtabulous, is coming out in just a few weeks!  I love the Vamped series (think Clueless meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer), because nothing is really sacred.  My heroine is a teen fashionista, who thinks of herself as trying to beautify, not belittle the world one person at a time.  Her world gets a whole lot darker when she doesn’t survive her senior prom and wakes to discover that she’s now tanning-impaired and lacking a reflection with which to fix her hair and makeup.  Then there’s the fact that she’s legally dead.  Oh, and the vile vampiress making a play for power and willing to use Gina and her other “accident” prone classmates to fight her war.  The theme of the series, really, is change.  Not only is nothing safe from snark, but nothing is really safe from change, whether it be from life to death or…well, you’d have to read it to find out!

But to answer the question, when my publisher (Flux) contracted me for the fourth book in the series, I knew that I wanted to take my characters someplace they’d never been and throw them into a situation they’d never encountered before.  I wanted them to face the question of how to fight a body-swapping spirit.  Where better to do that than in Salem, Massachusetts, the most haunted city in America.  Of course, I’d never been there either, so I had to take a visit.  Luckily, I had a native guide, a friend I’d known since I did my first local theatre show when I was 14.  The town itself and its history with the witch trials provided all the inspiration I could possibly want, and all the plot and setting details came out of that visit.

3: What genre does your book fall under?

My Vamped series is young adult paranormal/urban fantasy.  My Latter-Day Olympians series is urban fantasy aimed toward adults.

4: Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Vamped: My heroine Gina Covello, fashionista of the fanged, I see looking like Selena Gomez but with green contact lenses (Gina’s eyes are jade).  My hero, Bobby, looks like a young Zac Efron. Yum!

Latter-Day Olympians: I’d love maybe Melina Kanakaredes for Tori Karacis (my heroine with just enough gorgon blood to stop men in their tracks).  I’d love John Stamos, maybe, for Detective Nick Armani, and Daniel Craig or Jeremy Renner for Apollo, who’s described as having torquiose eyes and blonde waves of hair.

5: What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

For the latest book, Fangtabulous: When vampires on the run from the black ops unit to which they’d formerly belonged look to Salem, Mass. as the perfect hiding place, they discover that they’re not the only things that go bump in the night…and they’re far from the deadliest.

6: Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I’m hoping to find a great publishing house for my new, darker WIP as well, but I’m going to wait until I have it finished and polished to a high gloss before I even think of shopping it, and then it will be through an agent.  My current series are out through Flux Books and Samhain.

7: How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

Fangtabulous took me approximately six months.  The WIP…that’s going to take me considerably longer.  It’s the most ambitious and emotionally draining concept I’ve ever tackled.  I just hope I’m up to the challenge.

8: What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

For the Vamped series…maybe Stacey Kade’s The Ghost and the Goth or Christopher Moore’s You Suck: A Love Story if he were a bit more YA oriented.  Vamped, Revamped, Fangtastic and Fangtabulous are very tongue-in-cheek.  Long and Short Reviews described the first Latter-Day Olympians novel as “a delightful urban fantasy, a clever mix of Janet Evanovich and Rick Riordan.”  I sure can’t do any better than that!  From these descriptions, you can see why a dark and highly emotional WIP is a little scary for me.

9: Who or What inspired you to write this book?

Yup, definitely back to the WIP here.  What inspired me…let’s just say childhood trauma and leave it at that…for now.  I’m sure that when my WIP sees the light of day I’ll feel compelled to say more on the subject.  Maybe I’ll even be ready for it.

10: What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
On the new novel Fangtabulous: vampires, witches, objects of power, ghosts with the power not only to affect the physical world, but to kill.  How do you catch a killer with no form and no forwarding address?  Read it to find out!

Here is a list of authors who will be joining the hop for week 26 on December 19th. I hope you’ll visit their blogs next week and learn more about their books. Maybe one of them will become your new favorite author!

Rosemary Clement-Moore

Janice Hardy

Megan Kelley Hall

Kira Sinclair

Ramez Naam