Welcome to day 3 of The Cross Roads Blog Tour, hosted by author Judith Graves. Since I somehow totally spaced on yesterday's post (I am so sorry about that) welcome to day 2's post as well. Be sure to stop by the tour blog page HERE to check out the awesome line up of authors who are apart of this year's tour, as well as the bloggers who will be hosting each author. Mark your calendars for Monday, October 29th, as MM's will be hosting the Cross Roads author chat on Twitter! Trust me, you won't want to miss it. More info that will be posted soon. I'm excited to be featuring author Amanda Ashby today on the blog.
You list cooking as one of your favourite hobbies - along with fighting evil - what's your most famous family dish?I’m less famous for one dish than I am for a series of dishes. We throw bacon parties at the Harris household, usually in conjunction with one of the Comedy Central celebrity roasts. There’s nothing like sitting down to a meal of bacon dip, bacon wrapped water chestnuts, bacon casserole, chocolate covered bacon, and bacon maple cupcakes and watching a bunch of comedians insult David Hasselhoff. And no, I’m not making any of this up. And yes, I’m hungry for bacon now.
It's Halloween - costume or no costume? And what's your best ever disguise?
Absolutely a costume! I always dress up. One year, I was driving to a Halloween party in my slasher film cheerleader costume, complete with slit throat and all kinds of gory yuck all over me, and I passed an elderly couple on the highway, and they took one look at me and actually drove off the road! This story is only funny because no one got hurt. Once I found out about that, I was pretty proud!
You have a great website! How important are websites today for authors?
I’m so glad you like it; my web designer is a psychic and pulled those pictures straight from my head. I won’t ever play poker with him, because he’ll WIN.
I think websites are really important because people have so many choices of what to read and watch and listen to, and a good website gives you an instant feel for what to expect from an author. The minute you go to my site, you know to expect monsters and NOT to expect seriousness. And that’s really a reflection of what my books are like. I think it’s a terrific tool, not just for me to market myself to readers, but also for me AS a reader to find awesome books and then apologize to my husband for buying them.
Can you please define a whack-a-ding-hoy.
Whack-a-ding-hoy means crazy. But not just plain old garden-variety crazy, more like the kind of nutballs that either gets you committed or gets you a show on Comedy Central. I’m hoping not to be committed. And I don’t think I’d like to be on TV, but if they need someone to write a sitcom about monsters, I AM SO THERE. And I’m rambling. Why am I rambling? I like popcorn. And bacon.
And that is an example of whack-a-ding-hoy in action. Sometimes it’s easier to understand these things when you see them yourself. I AM SO HELPFUL, AREN’T I?!?
Er…yeah. Thanks for having me and for not calling the men in white coats. I really appreciate that.
Thank you Carrie for stopping by Mundie Moms today. * Thank you to Judith for supplying today's tour questions.
About the Author:
Carrie Harris is the author of Bad Taste in Boys, and the upcoming releases Bad Hair Day, and Bad Yeti. Visit Carrie via her Website | Twitter | Facebook
Undertakers - what a great concept! Why are yours so special?
That’s a hard question to answer. Maybe it’s because I didn’t sit down intending to write a “zombie” novel. I started with the kids.
I’ve always loved the idea of a child army, fighting a war that the adult world doesn’t know about. The Undertakers actually grew out of a series of poorly drawn comic books I did as a kid about a group of child superheroes called “The Kid Kidets”. Yes, I spelled “cadets” wrong; I was ten. They all had superpowers and lived in a secret base deep in the Antarctic. And their leaders were a brother and sister team named Tom and Sharon Jefferson (I changed the spelling to “Sharyn” for the Undertakers).
Much later, when I decided to write a middle grade series, I remembered the Kid Kidets. The Undertakers, of course, have no superpowers – and the villains they face are much nastier than anything their predecessors had to deal with. But the concept is the same.
The point is, I started with Will, Helene, Tom, Sharyn and the rest and then I gave them the Corpses to fight. I think that’s what makes the story work as well as it does.
You suddenly can no longer write...now what?
Writing is breathing. Honestly, I don’t know how I’d survive if I had to give it up. Maybe I’d become some other sort of storyteller, though I have no idea what that might look like.
Next question! This one’s giving me the heebie-jeebies!!!
Does your day job as a business analyst provide any fodder for your fiction?
I sometimes take the names of coworkers and kill them off in my books! For the record, I always tell them ahead of time and we all have a lot of fun with it. James Dye is a project manager I’ve known for years – a truly great guy. For fun, I bump him off in the first chapter of Queen of the Dead. He gets his head ripped off by the title character!
Aside from that, I tend to keep both jobs pretty separate in my head. Very different skillsets!
What are you working on now?
I’m about halfway through the second draft of the third Undertakers book. The working title is “Capitol Corpses”, though I’m not in love with it. I’m kind of leaning more toward “The Corpse Eater”. There’s a monster in it with a taste for Corpse flesh! But that’s enough spoilers! : )
Thank you TY for stopping by Mundie Moms today. * Thank you to Judith for supplying today's tour questions.
About the Author:
Ty is the author of The Undertakers Series. You can visit Ty via his Website | Facebook.
************
SIRENS is a pair of love stories, a gangster and a ghost. We're in! Could you please give us the one-paragraph blurb to really reel us in.
“The “Roaring Twenties” was the age of flappers and bootleggers. Josephine Winter, seventeen, is sent to live with relatives in New York City after her bootlegging father receives a threat, but bookish Jo harbors her own secrets. While she finds friendship with lively Louise O’Keefe and romance with sweet jazz musician Charlie, she also comes to realize that the reason she’s sent into the city has everything to do with what she may know. Haunted by the spirit of her missing brother, Jo uncovers a nest of family lies that threaten everyone she loves, and Lou, in the thrall of the dangerous, seductive gangster Daniel Connor, is both Jo’s best friend and potential enemy. As Jo unlocks dark mysteries and Lou’s eyes are opened, the girls’ treacherous paths intertwine. In this “noire romance,” Jo and Lou together will have to stand up to Connor in order to find their hearts and hang onto their souls in the decade of decadence.”
What was the coolest thing you saw during your deep sea dive?
Oo – this is awesome. The submersible I rode in didn’t have great battery power, so we had to be kind of conservative with it, and that included using the lights outside our individual portholes. So the lights were out for a long time as we descended (which took about 3 hours). Somewhere close to the bottom I was given the okay to turn on my lights.
Well, you talk about aliens...we have them, right there in the oceans. Spirals and whirligigs, ladders and flagella – there were things floating outside that porthole that no one has ever seen before, nor is likely to see unless they go the way I did, because those delicate creatures would never make it up to the surface. How do they survive the great pressures at the ocean bottom? How do they cope without light? How do they create bioluminescence that makes them look like moving fireworks?
We have many mysteries yet to uncover right here on our own sweet planet.
What is the best writing advice you've ever received?
Never give up. Never surrender. (Ten extra points if you can identify where that came from!) Seriously – persistence is the key to creating something beautiful. Because with every new project your work gets better. So stick with it. Never give up.
You're a superhero fighting for truth, justice and the creative way. What writing "villains" would you banish with your mighty pen? (and what will your costume look like?)
Costume first (always dress for the occasion): spandex, green. Head to toe. Now, those villains? Wait...didn’t they fall into blithering idiots when I walked out in the costume? I mean, really!
Thank you Janet for stopping by Mundie Moms today. * Thank you to Judith for supplying today's tour questions.
About the Author:
Janet Fox is the author of Faithful, Forgiven and her upcoming release, Sirens. You can visit Janet via her Website | Blog | Twitter | Facebook.
The Tour:
Each day of The Crossroads Blog Tour, a new research question will be revealed on The Crossroad Blog Tour main page:http://judithgraves.com/events/the-crossroads-tour/crossroads-2012/ and each day the answer to that question will be found within one of the different blog posts by Crossroads Tour authors. Your job is to get the question, read the blog posts, and collect all answers by the end of the tour.
Answers are to be emailed to judithgraves @ ymail dot com by October 28th at MIDNIGHT. Winner of the grand prize will be announced on OCTOBER 31st – HALLOWEEN.
The Giveaway:
The GRAND PRIZE you’re vying for? A brand new KINDLE, preloaded with a title from each of the participating Crossroads Blog Tour Authors. That’s right folks, a free KINDLE and 13 free EBOOKS!
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment