SPLINTERS Blog Tour and Giveaway

Please welcome Fiona and Matt, as they celebrate the new release of their co-written YA horror novel: Splinters! We've seen Fiona here before as she released Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know Of) earlier this year, and both Matt and Fiona are agent and publisher mates of mine.

As Fiona hosted me for my Dependent blog tour, asking me about my fears...I thought turnaround was fair play and stuck her with the following questions:

What frightens each of you and why? And where do you feel safe?

Here's Fiona's response:

The flashiest and most obvious answer to what frightens me is G-force. I have severe barophobia, the fear of changes in gravity. I have issues with things like amusement park rides, elevators, airplanes, anything that makes it feel like gravity isn’t working the way it should.

Why? Am I afraid of death or injury by falling? Am I afraid of being literally crushed to death by gravity? No, nothing so pseudo-rational. I’m afraid of the fall, not the landing.

F.J.R. Titchenell

So… what? So I have an irrational phobia that’s a pain when I go to Disneyland. I got a pretty cool horror short story out of it once, if I do say so myself, but that’s about all the material a fear of gravity has to offer, a short story. On its own it doesn’t seem all that meaningful.

It wasn’t until my early twenties that I started to figure out that, hand in hand with my less dramatic fears of failure, wasted time, anesthesia, riptides, and excess calories, my barophobia was a symptom of my fundamental fear of losing control.

So, having figured out the root of the problem, I’m all better now? Um… no. I can’t switch off being a control freak any more than I could stop loving books. It’s who and what I am, and I accept the problems with the advantages (hey, I do have killer willpower). I’ve been able to work on some things, learned to stress a bit less, and I’d dare say I’ve kicked my tendencies toward disordered eating, but the barophobia remains, too irrationally ingrained to be removed by rational thought.

What awareness of my issues does allow me to do (other than share them honestly with blog readers), is understand a large part of what frightens people. There are many more people with fears like mine, if to different degrees and with different manifestations. As a horror author, I’ve found that a large part of frightening people is figuring out exactly how much of the illusion of control to give them (or their surrogate main characters), and when to take it away.

Like giving the rebel teens of Prospero homemade flamethrowers and Tasers to fend off the superpowered monsters who run their town.

Where do I feel safe? Other than with my amazingly patient, compassionate and understanding husband at my side, my coziest safezone is with my fingers on the keyboard. As well as making me a better horror writer, my fears are part of what make me a writer in the first place. As every control freak hates to hear, the one thing we can hope to control is ourselves, our own thoughts and reactions to the world. What better way to stave off the fear of powerlessness than by getting to purge, organize, analyze and understand my own thoughts, and then reshape and use them to make something positive and new, into the best story I can tell?

Thanks Fiona! And here's what Matt had to say about his fears:

I could go into a full list of rational, adult fears and why each of them gets to me (failure, loss of a loved one, etc.), but we all know that’s not what you want to hear. We all have those rational fears, and they’re not much more fun to read about than they are to actually have. No, if you’re reading this,

Matt Carter

you want to hear about our crazy, irrational fears that make us seem more like little kids than responsible adult authors.

So, let’s bring the crazy.

The biggest one for me has always been Chucky. Yeah, the killer doll. The fictional one (though truth be told I don’t know of any real killer dolls, which is probably a really good thing). When I was three I caught a good chunk of the original Child’s Play on TV, and, well, in my impressionable young mind that was afraid of pretty much everything, I got a little warped. Flash forward two decades, me in my mid-20’s, a huge fan of horror and all things creepy, and still Chucky gave me the willies. I could stand the most hardcore horror, and the briefest image of him still gave me the sweats and a faster heartbeat.

I’m better now. One day I made myself sit down and watch the movie and now it’s one of my favorites, but damn if I still don’t get that kneejerk reaction sometimes when I see him.

You see, I’ve always had an active imagination that’s always gone past the realm of rational, understanding thought. Even when I know something is fake, that it’s all just smoke and mirrors, I have a hard time not letting it get to me if it just manages to tickle my scary bone. Perfect example? The first time I saw Cabin Fever, I didn’t drink tap water for three days. I knew it was safe, that it wasn’t infected with some strain of flesh eating bacteria that would rot my flesh off the bones, but damn it if it didn’t make me pause anyway.

I was 18 at the time, for what it’s worth.

I’m a lot better, and a lot more cynical right now, so these sorts of things haven’t been an issue for a while, but I gotta say, sometimes it feels good to let these irrational fears in, since they do have their own way of helping the rational fears feel just a little bit smaller.

Thanks Fiona and Matt! Matt, I'm glad you got over the tap water thing...not easy surviving without, well...water. It's rather essential. Hope to have you back again!

You can find more about this quirky pair on their respective websites...

You can find F.J.R. Titchenell online here:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FjrTitchenell
Twitter: https://twitter.com/FJR_Titchenell
Website: http://fjrtitchenell.weebly.com/

You can find Matt Carter online here:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattcarterauthor
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor
Website: http://mattcarterauthor.weebly.com/

And more about Splinters here: 

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Splinters-Prospero-Chronicles-Matt-Carter/dp/1939967392

B&N: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/splinters-matt-carter/1118877645?ean=9781939967398

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20860637-splinters

And now, if you'd like to win a copy of Splinters, click on the giveaway below. Good luck!

Brenda

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Guest Post: F.J.R. Titchenell

Greetings from House-Sale Land! No news on that front. There's no life like it!

On a totally non-posting-related note, today I have the privilege of welcoming agent and publisher-mate F.J.R. Titchenell to the blog as she celebrates the release of her debut novel Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know of)! One of the wonderful perks of being an author is having the occasional ARC come my way, and I have to say, I loved reading Fiona's book! CotVFZS(TIKo) is fun and fast-paced, and the characters are strong and quirky. If you like YA and you like Zombie books, you HAVE to check it out. 

I featured the cover on the blog as it was revealed in November of 2013...and you can read more about the book HERE.

So the question I posed to Fiona was this: What was the process of writing your first book like? How did it feel to hold the ARC?

Here's her response:

Like many authors, I'd been writing a long time before I finished the manuscript that would be my debut novel. I'd been writing fiction my whole life, and with serious intent to publish for about five years before I started Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know of).

I had some short stories published, and I had some earlier novels that I either decided weren't publication-worthy or couldn't get picked up at the level I was aiming for, so Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know of) wasn't my first experience with completing a novel-length manuscript. It was the first time I was able to create something I was proud of without an insane number of drafts, though, the first time I started thinking, "I might actually be getting the hang of this," and, of course, that first amazing time I caught the interest of someone in the industry, the awesome Jennifer Mishler.

The process of writing the book itself was a whirlwind. I went from idea to query letter in seven months, and I wrote the first draft in an almost entirely linear fashion, which is rare for me. I usually can't resist jumping forward to my favorite parts, but Zombie Slayer kept dragging me straight ahead with it.

I had a lot of fun writing Cassie. It was great being in her irreverent but optimistic head, and I spent many a slow hour at my then day job vicariously indulging my wanderlust by tracking her progress on Google maps.

The path to publication from finishing the book was a lot longer. There was lots of celebration, the agent contract, the publishing contract, and lots of waiting (I finished the book back in July 2012, nearly two years ago), and in the meantime, learning the ropes of promotion.

Also like many authors who decide to go the traditional route with agents and traditional publishing houses, I had this fantasy for a long time that all that pesky marketing stuff would be taken care of for me once I had a legitimate contact, and I could carry on with writing my next book, perhaps occasionally sticking my head out to sign something.

This is where all the published authors reading this burst into laughter. I've had to come out of my shell a lot in the past couple years, get used to starting and encouraging conversation, doing interviews, writing about writing, and generally being an author in all the ways that aren't the book writing part I got into this for.

With a year and a half-ish of reality check and experience with the whole authorhood package under my belt, feeling curiously like a "real" author (and having already held short story anthologies I contributed to), I didn't expect a little thing like actually seeing the Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know of) review copies in person to have too much of an effect on me anymore.

Wrong. It really is that amazing, finally seeing the thing you put that much work into in physical form. It's everything you'd think it should be.

Thanks Fiona!

Curious? Want to read more? Here's Fiona's coordinates:

Website: www.fjrtitchenell.weebly.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FjrTitchenell

Twitter: https://twitter.com/FJR_Titchenell

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4384865.F_J_R_Titchenell

Amazon listing: http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Very-First-Zombie-Slayer/dp/1939967309/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1383006679&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=confessions+of+the+very+first+zombie+slayer

Brenda

Cover Reveal: SPLINTERS

More Jolly Fish Press cover art...Matt Carter and F.J.R. Titchenell (agent and publisher-mates...)are revealing the cover to the first book of the YA/Horror/Sci Fi series, The Prospero Chronicles! I've read Ms. Titchenell's first novel, Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know of), due out May 6th...and it is amazing, so I'm looking forward to Splinters due out this fall.

Giveaway:

Everyone who adds Splinters to their Goodreads to-read list on or before March 7^th will be entered to win a $25 Amazon giftcard. A winner will be selected at random and contacted by Goodreads direct message. Go here: www.goodreads.com/book/show/20860637-splinters and add it to your to-read list for a chance to win!

About the book:

Under ordinary circumstances, Ben and Mina would never have had reason to speak to each other; he's an easy-going people person with a healthy skepticism about the paranormal, and she's a dangerously obsessive monster-hunter with a crippling fear of betrayal. But the small town of Prospero, California, has no ordinary circumstances to offer. In order to uncover a plot set by the seemingly innocent but definitely shapeshifting monsters-that-look-like-friends-family-and-neighbors, the two stark opposites must both find ways to put aside their differences and learn to trust each other.

About the Authors:

F.J.R. Titchenell and Matt Carter met and fell in love in a musical theatre class at Pasadena City College and have been inseparable ever since. Though they have both dreamed of being writers since a very young age, they both truly hit their stride after they met, bouncing ideas off of one another, forcing each other to strive to be better writers, and mingling Matt's lifelong love of monsters with Fiona's equally disturbing inability to forget the tumult of high school. They were married in 2011 in a ceremony that involved kilts, Star Wars music, and a cake topped by figurines of them fighting a zombified wedding party.

Author links:

F.J.R. Titchenell’s blog: http://fjrtitchenell.weebly.com/

Matt Carter’s blog: http://mattcarterauthor.weebly.com/

F.J.R. Titchenell’s Facebook: www.facebook.com/FjrTitchenell

Matt Carter’s Facebook: www.facebook.com/mattcarterauthor

F.J.R. Titchenell’s Twitter: www.twitter.com/FJR_Titchenell

Matt Carter’s Twitter: www.twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

Splinters Goodreads page (again): www.goodreads.com/book/show/20860637-splinters

And now for the REVEAL...

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Creepy...love the green light behind him.  What are your thoughts?

Don't forget to sign up for the giveaway above!


Brenda