If you have the notion, please head over there and cast a vote. (You are required to sign up for the Catholic Reads Newsletter in order to cast an eligible vote, so if that’s not your jam, I get it.)

If you haven’t read 680 Miles Away yet, you’re in luck: The Kindle and paperback versions are both steeply discounted on Amazon right now.

And for those of you wondering about the status of my work-in-progress fantasy series: It’s a work in progress. I am close to completing a major revision on the first book and have the next couple books pretty well outlined (but you all know my characters—they like to throw curveballs at me, which shakes things up sometimes). November should be a good month of progress because I’m participating in a WORDS ARE WORDS challenge with the Inkwells & Anvils community on Discord (come join us if you’re a storyteller!), which is always good motivation.

But now that I’m in revision mode on the first book of my debut fantasy series, I feel like I owe you all an update.

So here it is—I’m revealing the title of the first book in the series.

Drumroll, please…

The Healer of Fóthraka

Oooh. Exciting, huh? And before you ask, no, I don’t have a title for the series yet. Just the first book for now. And maybe an idea for the second book (how does “The Keeper of Túr” sound to you?).

Writing fantasy is a whole different beast than the other novels I’ve written so far. It’s stretching me as a writer, but in good and fun ways. I’ve written almost as many trash practice chapters as real chapters at this point, but I learn something useful about the story and my characters with each one. I’m also spending a lot of time writing lore and backstories and scenes that readers will never see (sorry!), but the more I can make sense of the world and characters in my own mind, the more capably I can guide you through their stories.

My amazing cover designer, Abi, is already brainstorming the look for the series. When I have a cover to reveal, you’ll be the first to know!

Last thing, unrelated to the fantasy series: 680 Miles Away placed in five(!) different categories in the 2024 Incipere Awards from Entrada Publishing. It won First Place in the YA Christian, YA Literary Fiction (Clean), and YA Romance (Clean) categories, and Second Place in the Literary Fiction (Clean) and Women’s Fiction (Clean) categories. Woohoo! 🎉

680 MILES AWAY WON GOLD!!

I learned a couple of weeks ago that 680 Miles Away is a finalist in the Religious/Spiritual Fiction category for the Colorado Independent Publishers Associations 2024 Book Awards. The award winners will be announced on September 19—you can be sure that if 680 Miles Away wins, I will let you know!

More exciting news!

680 Miles Away DID win an award in the Young Adult - Coming of Age category from Readers’ Favorite, an international book contest. Now I can officially call myself an award-winning novelist, which feels pretty cool.

Other writing fun

I polled you all a while ago about a potential pen name if I decided to work on a fantasy series. I’m still mulling whether a pen name is the right way to go, but I have indeed begun building the world for a fantasy series.

A writer in a writing community I recently joined (Inkwells & Anvils—check us out if you are a Catholic writer!) mentioned that J.R.R. Tolkien always started with a map, not with the story or characters. So I decided to try it out for myself. I found a great online tool called Inkarnate for making maps, and I have been having too much fun with it!

Anyway, I thought you might enjoy a little sneak peek of a couple of the maps I made.

Self-publishing is a huge risk. To do it well costs money. And it’s not easy to make that money back, let alone make a profit. It turns out that writing a great book is less than half the battle. Marketing and promoting the book cost even more time and money than writing and publishing the book. Looking back, I can see that my expectations of self-publishing success in 2020 were completely unrealistic.

But that’s okay. I learned a ton in that process, even if the lessons were costly and painful.

A couple of years after my foray into self-publishing, when I was still feeling discouraged by my lack of success and bouncing from one awful job to another, my brother-in-law asked me a critical question:

My first response was annoyance. I couldn’t afford an expensive hobby. I had blown through my savings self-publishing, and the only jobs I had been able to find at that point didn’t pay enough to support an expensive hobby. I needed to make a decent ROI to keep writing and publishing.

But you know what? He was right.

Thinking about self-publishing as an expensive hobby motivated me to not settle for an awful job. It motivated me to keep looking until I found a full-time position that would provide enough disposable income to support an expensive hobby. Writing more novels became the carrot instead of the stick.

Happily, I found that position in 2023.

Even more than the motivation it gave me, thinking about self-publishing as an expensive hobby has been incredibly freeing.

I no longer feel unjustified spending time writing when it’s not making me any money—it’s just a hobby, not a business investment. The only excuse I need for making time to write is that I love doing it—it’s a hobby, not a job that has to get done. I don’t feel so much pressure to make every cent of ad spend count, which has given me a lot more flexibility to experiment with marketing tactics. I can focus on getting my books into readers’ hands instead of getting their money into my pocket. I can share my stories with the world without worrying about my bottom line.

And the upshot is that this simple change in mindset has made my self-publishing astronomically more successful. I sold 10x more copies of 680 Miles Away on its first day of release than I did of all my other published works in 3+ years… combined.

I guess I owe my brother-in-law a "Thank You” card or something. Thanks, Andrew.

With your help, 680 Miles Away reached a #1 sales rank in three categories on Amazon and stayed there for several days in a row (it peaked with a #42 sales rank overall on Saturday!). The book has received numerous 4- and 5-star reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, including a 5-star editorial review from Reader Views.

Plus, Reader Views featured 680 Miles Away in their weekly Author Showcase and yours truly in a lovely Meet the Author interview. Stay tuned—I’m also doing a podcast interview with them!

I want to give a special shout-out to those of you who read 680 Miles Away through Kindle Unlimited. As much as I hate shilling for Amazon, having a book available through Kindle Unlimited is pretty darn awesome because I can see the number of pages KU readers have read. There is something especially satisfying about watching that number increase.

Orders and sales are wonderful, of course, and I appreciate that income. But it’s way more important to me to know that readers are actually reading and enjoying the book. As an author, I have no way of knowing whether someone who bought my book will ever actually read it—it may stay in their TBR pile forever.

So, yay Kindle Unlimited for letting me see that readers have read thousands of my pages!

If you haven’t had a chance to get your copy of 680 Miles Away, the Kindle version will be available for $0.99 for a little longer before it goes back up to its normal price of $5.99.

For anyone who wants the paperback, you can get it from Amazon or Barnes & Noble or pretty much any other retailer, but I highly recommend buying it directly from my print-on-demand service, IngramSpark, to avoid the hidden retailer fees.

Thank you again for reading 680 Miles Away and making its release my most successful book launch so far!

If you’re a paperback sort of person, you can buy direct from IngramSpark (my POD service). You can buy the paperback from your favorite retailer too, but it’s cheaper here:

After you read it, please, please, please remember to rate and review it.

We humans don’t like spending time and money on something untested by others. It’s just our nature. But when we see a book with a good number of honest reviews, we feel a lot better about risking our money to buy it and our energy to read it.

Here are some good places to post a rating and review if you are so inclined (please be inclined!):

Any other book retailers or book tracking apps you use that allow ratings/reviews are also helpful. Thank you for your support and happy reading!

Read the entire 5-star review on the Reader Views Book Review Blog.

I recall in some of my college film classes—and probably literature classes, too—talking about locations or cities that are so central to the plot and themes that they become, in a sense, characters in their own right. Well, in my case, it’s music. Music seems to become a character in many of my stories. And that’s never been truer than it is in 680 Miles Away.

The protagonist, Evie, is a musician. A prodigy, in fact. A violinist with perfect pitch. Because music plays such a huge role in her life, she and other characters mention many real songs and artists throughout the novel, so I decided to make an official playlist that includes every single mention.

So, without further ado:

But wait! There’s more!

Music not only plays a role in the stories I write, it plays a role in my writing. I mean the actual writing process. I can’t write without music, and it has to be the right music.

For Bergman Manor, for example, I would turn on music from the 1920s (it takes place in 1925) or the score from an Alfred Hitchcock movie (for the suspenseful scenes).

When I started writing 6 Blocks Home, it became more about understanding the characters than the mood of the story. I wanted to get inside Sam’s head, so I started listening to what she would listen to. That meant listening to a lot of classical music, especially this playlist of requiems.

With 680 Miles Away, I started making my own character playlists. I made one for Evie first, of course, since she’s the protagonist. But then, her clarinet-playing coworker, Finn, wanted his own playlist, too. And in the end, Sam—yes, the same Sam who made me listen to all those requiems during 6 Blocks Home—finally got her own playlist (including some of those requiems, of course).

Here they are:

(At least, I hope it works that way. Goodreads says it will deliver copies to the winners as soon as the giveaway ends, and my giveaway end date is a full two-and-a-half weeks before the on-sale date. Goodreads, don’t do me wrong!)

I would kindly ask that if you enter and if you win, please leave a review on Amazon and/or Goodreads. Y’all are readers. You know how much reviews impact your decision to read or ignore a book. Your review matters. Immensely.

Okay, here’s the link to enter. Good luck!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

680 Miles Away

by Tara J. Stone

Giveaway ends March 16, 2024.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

And the back cover:

Here’s the front cover:

What do you think? Any details that especially pique your curiosity? Are you as excited to read Evie’s story as I am to share it with you? I sure hope so!

You can pre-order the Kindle version now. The paperback version will be available to pre-order soon.

The title is 680 Miles Away. Here’s a little blurb for you:

Evie has a habit of running away when things get hard. Or messy. Or just plain awkward. Like the time she ran away from home when she discovered the truth about her adoption. Now, six years later, Evie’s budding feelings for her best friend Finn threaten to make life awkward and messy again. Even worse, a chance encounter with a stranger puts Evie on a crash course with the little sister she’s never met—the daughter her birth parents chose to keep. After a lifetime of lies, betrayal, and serious trust issues, Evie would rather run than let anyone—friend, lover, or long-lost sister—get too close.

Sam has known for years that, somewhere out there, she has a big sister—the daughter her parents gave up for adoption before she was even born. The trouble is, Sam’s parents left her with no details about who or where her sister might be. When Sam’s fiancé Tobias tells her about a prodigy violinist who looks just like her, she resolves to find and meet the young woman—even if it means chasing her across the country.

Part sweet romance, part family drama, the follow-up to 6 Blocks Home is a book about sisters—one bent on running away from matters of the heart, the other determined to face them head-on.

If you’ve read 6 Blocks Home, you’ll notice that Sam and Tobias are returning (yay!).

If you haven’t read 6 Blocks Home, no need to fret—you’ll enjoy the story in 680 Miles Away just as much. (But really, why haven’t you read 6 Blocks Home yet?)

I’m aiming for a release date of April 2, but I’m still working out the final details for the cover and such. I will post pre-order links as soon as they are available.

The 1940s were clearly the best decade for Christmas movies. Only one movie outside that decade made my list. And no, White Christmas (1954) isn’t it. Don’t get me wrong — White Christmas is great. But it didn’t crack the Top 5. Here are the ones that did:

It's A Wonderful Life (1946)

This is a no-brainer. It’s not only my favorite Christmas movie. It’s one of my favorite movies of any kind. Even though I made fun of all you crazies who watch Christmas movies before Thanksgiving, I will make an exception for It’s A Wonderful Life. I could watch this movie year-round because it’s so much more than a Christmas movie.

Believe it or not, though, I’ve met people (that’s plural, as in more than one person) who don’t like this movie. I don’t understand. They must not have hearts.

Once upon a time, when I was a freshman at JPCatholic, my directing professor gave us an assignment to analyze a scene from any movie we wanted. I chose a scene from It’s A Wonderful Life — the scene where there’s a run on the bank and George Bailey gives away all but two dollars of his own money, money meant for his honeymoon with Mary, to keep the Building & Loan open. Frank Capra was already one of my favorite directors, but that assignment deepened my appreciation for Capra’s masterful storytelling.

Remember the Night (1940)

I only discovered this little gem a few Christmases ago, but it quickly climbed my chart of Christmas favorites. Like It’s A Wonderful Life, there’s much more going on here than a simple holiday romp. With a script written by Preston Sturges, you know there will be plenty of laughs and plenty of heart. And while the premise stretches imagination, Sturges convinces us — with the help of Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck’s performances — that a romance between a prosecutor and a petty shoplifter is not only possible, but worth rooting for.

In his book Save the Cat!, Blake Snyder talks about the Emotional Color Wheel — the concept that, whether you’re writing a comedy or a drama, the story should take the audience through all the emotions. For examples of the power of the Emotional Color Wheel, look no further than Remember the Night and It’s A Wonderful Life.

Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)

I really debated this film’s inclusion on this list. It is indeed one of my favorite movies, but growing up, I never considered it a Christmas movie. Yes, it gave us the classic Christmas song "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," but the majority of the film has nothing to do with Christmas. The story takes us through an entire year in the life of the Smith family. When I was a young child, I wanted to watch this movie every single day, regardless of the season. Apparently many people do consider it a Christmas movie, however, so I would feel guilty leaving it off the list.

Meet Me in St. Louis is the first memory I have of seeing myself in a character on the screen. The makeup of my immediate family is oddly similar to that of the Smith family. I am the youngest of five — four girls and one boy — and I connected deeply with the character of Tootie when I was a little girl. I wasn’t nearly as morbid, but I identified with her desire to prove herself to Agnes’ friends and her longing to be included and acknowledged.

Elf (2003)

It’s quite possible that my fondness for this film is a result of when it was released. Everyone thinks that the movies and music that were popular when they were teenagers are the best that ever were or will be. I wouldn’t go quite that far — obviously, I am a much bigger fan of movies made half a century before I was even born — but I do have a special place in my heart for the movies I saw in theaters with my friends at that age. This is one of them.

But come on. You have to admit that Elf is hilarious. What makes the comedy even better is that it doesn’t stoop to the kind of raunchy humor one expects from a Will Ferrell movie. It never made me afraid to watch it with my young nieces and nephews. In 2003, that was refreshing.

3 Godfathers (1948)

A Christmas Western, anyone? John Ford is happy to oblige. I have to confess, actually, that I didn’t care much for this film the first time I saw it. Of course, I didn’t generally care for Westerns the first time I saw it. The older I get, however, the more I enjoy Westerns and the more I appreciate this film in particular. It’s a remarkable story of redemption, and the religious themes are impossible to miss. John Wayne, Pedro Armendariz, and Harry Carey, Jr. turn in poignant performances as gritty outlaws with enough humanity left to keep their promise to a dying woman — to protect her newborn baby and bring him to safety, no matter the cost.

And let's be honest: does anyone shoot breathtaking Western vistas as beautifully as John Ford? No. It’s simply gorgeous.

**As an Amazon associate, I earn on qualifying purchases.

It started with a couple of screenplays collecting cyber dust.

When 2020 started, I had a full-time job writing scripts and managing projects at a successful video production company. I found time now and then to work on my own screenplays, and I regularly submitted them to writing gigs and screenplay competitions.

But I knew deep down that no one would be interested in producing expensive period features. The kind of stuff I write went out of cinema fashion decades ago. And I’m okay with that. The joy was in the writing.

And then March happened. I don’t even have to tell you what that meant. You lived through it too. And everything changed.

Suddenly, I was faced with gobs of free time and the possibility that my job would disappear (it did disappear eventually, but the company’s owner generously kept us on payroll as long as she could). Instead of seeing the end of something, I saw a beginning; instead of a curse, a blessing; instead of disaster, opportunity. I blew the cyber dust off those old scripts and decided to publish them as paperbacks and ebooks.

I wanted normal people to buy them and read them, of course, because they are stories I love and want to share. But I also concocted a mad scheme to market to film instructors, pitching Bergman Manor and The Detective’s Secretary as educational tools. I thought about how valuable reading finished, polished scripts had been in my own education. I thought about how students could use my scripts to practice everything from script coverage to scheduling and budgeting to directing and editing.

The first person I reached out to (in fact, the only person I reached out to) was Christopher Riley, the man who taught me everything I know about screenwriting. I asked if he would use my scripts in his classroom and write a review from the perspective of a film instructor that I could use to market to others. He said yes. And I was ecstatic. But then he suggested the possibility of taking it a step further.

What if we created an entire online screenwriting course for high schools and homeschool students?

We.

Chris wanted to be my partner in this crazy venture. My mentor, the man who taught me everything I know, a man I deeply respect and admire, wanted to take this risk with me.

And not just Chris. Another of my JPCatholic professors, Nathan Scoggins, wanted to join us and help us expand our offering to include directing and production courses as well.

Just like that, Story Masters Film Academy was born.

Of course, birth is just the beginning. Now we have to nourish this baby and make it grow!

We offer courses for both classes/groups and individual students (perfect for homeschoolers and others continuing to learn remotely), and our different packages include varying levels of interactivity with us, the Story Masters. So if you know of any high school students who might be interested in film or any teachers/administrators looking to add some fun electives in their school/district, send them our way!

She finally understood why most people looked forward to Thanksgiving dinner: the food was divine. Although her parents celebrated Thanksgiving, most of the food they ate they picked up from a restaurant the day before and reheated. Today, Sam had her first taste of a real, honest-to-goodness Thanksgiving meal. She overstuffed herself, but she couldn’t bring herself to regret it.

As Sam shoveled pecan pie into her mouth long after most of the kids had finished and left the table, she wondered if anything about her life before her parents’ accident had actually been normal.

This was normal — great, sprawling families eating a hearty, home-cooked feast together, toasting to the things that made them thankful, playing games and watching football and snickering at Grandpa snoozing in the recliner. As much as she missed her parents and wanted them to get well, the world into which the Howards had welcomed her filled her up in a way nothing else ever had.

Sam could practically hear herself gulp when she saw him. He looked so dashing as a pirate. The costume came with a tricorn hat, but Tobias had opted to simply wear a red bandana tied around his scalp. Sam thought the pirate boots and red waist sash belt really sold it.

They stared at each other for a moment.

“Nice costume,” Tobias said. “It’s cute.”

Cute? What did he mean? Cute, like a little kid? Or cute, like attractive?

“Thanks,” Sam said. “I like yours, too.” She hesitated, but decided Halloween was a good cover to make her next comment seem innocent enough: “You make a very handsome pirate.”

“Thanks.”

They were caught in a kind of spell then. Sam wished she could think of something more to say to keep him talking to her — Tobias wasn’t often so civil lately, and she didn’t want to waste the opportunity. But her big brains had evidently taken the night off. She could think of nothing. So they just stared at each other.

Tobias was the one to break the spell.

“I’m sorry I was a such a jerk about trick-or-treating,” he said.

She hadn’t expected an apology, and she didn’t know how she should respond. She shrugged. “I didn’t really want to go anyway.”

“You don’t like trick-or-treating?” Tobias asked.

“I’ve never had friends to go with.” Sam’s own answer surprised her. It sounded pitiful, and she didn’t want Tobias’s pity. To make it less pitiful, she continued, “And you know, we moved around so many times, and we didn’t always live in nice neighborhoods like this one.” It was getting worse, not better. “And my parents never really liked Halloween, so they never liked taking me trick-or-treating, even when we did live in nice neighborhoods.” Stop talking! She wished she had a piece of duct tape to put over her own mouth.

Tobias listened. She could see the pity in his eyes. But all he said was, “Well, you didn’t miss much. Trick-or-treating is totally overrated. Unless you like candy and fun, of course.”

Sam couldn’t help but smile. She didn’t often hear Tobias make jokes — he usually left it to the more boisterous people around him. And she was grateful that he’d spared her the pity party. Seeing her smile gave him permission to smile.

Sam clung to this moment, treasured it — the two of them standing by the front door in their ridiculous costumes and grinning at each other.

She took a snapshot of it in her mind and tucked it into a safe place in her brain so she could take it out later and remember that, once upon a time, a dashing pirate had called her cute and made her feel a little less pitiful.

Snowflakes started to fall when they had a block yet to go. They both halted and gazed up into the night sky. Sam stuck out her tongue, trying to catch a snowflake, and Tobias chuckled at her.

“Shut up,” she said, scrunching her nose and giving his arm a light shove. “We can’t all be as talented as Tobias Howard the basketball star.”

Tobias stuck out his tongue then and chased a snowflake. It floated away from him, and they both giggled as he lunged for it and missed.

They spent the final block of their walk chasing snowflakes and laughing.

She didn’t quite know how to begin, but they’d all called it a conversation, so she started with, “Hello, God. How are you doing today?”

There was no answer. But Bear had said she needed to be quiet and still and listen very closely. Maybe she just hadn’t heard God’s answer, so she pretended that she had.

“That’s nice. I’m having a pretty good day so far. I guess. Actually, that’s not true. I mean, today’s not so bad, but just in general. These last couple months have really sucked. Sorry. I’m probably not supposed to say sucked. But you know what I mean, right?”

She waited, trying to be as quiet and still as possible.

Sam played the piano, but it was a strange piece. Strange and beautiful. Tobias had never heard it before, and it had a different style than most of the other songs she played.

He stopped just outside the family room to listen, not wanting to disturb her…

There was a pause in Sam’s playing, and Tobias started forward, but then she started again from the beginning. He didn’t have a great ear, but he thought what she played this time differed slightly from what she’d just finished playing.

“I think she wrote it,” his mom whispered at his shoulder.

Tobias nearly jumped out of his skin. He hadn’t heard her approach, and he flushed with embarrassment that she’d caught him listening.

But his mom listened just as intently. They stood there together, mother and son, letting Sam’s mysterious music seep into their souls.