Words Escape Me

Cover reveal: Infiltrator (Contributor trilogy, book 2)

2013-12-17T14:16:00.000-05:00

First, I owe some of you an apology. Several amazing people have read and reviewed Contributor and reached out to me to tell me how much they liked it. You've been waiting anxiously for the second book, and I took my sweet time getting it out. Truth is, I was scared to write it, but I made myself conquer that fear, and I'm excited about this book. I hope you will be too. I'm also making you this solemn promise: you will not have to wait nearly as long for book three. The first book I publish in 2014 will be a new adult romance, and after that I will publish the last Contributor book, so plan on a release in the first half of 2014.

Without further ado, here is the cover and description for Infiltrator. (Warning: If you haven't read Contributor, the description of Infiltrator is a little spoilery. Sorry, but it was unavoidable!)

Infiltrator will be available for Kindle on December 20, 2013.

YA post-apocalyptic/dystopian

Surviving her apprenticeship was just the first step. Now that Dara has joined the Free Thinkers, her life is about to become much more dangerous.

Frustrated by her seemingly pointless efforts to prove her worth to the Free Thinkers, she wonders if she made the right choice. Yet she can’t go back to her old life, can’t forgive Magnum for what it did to her mother. Then she discovers a crucial piece of intelligence: Andersen has been hard at work on a clandestine project that’s caught the attention of the Creators.

At last Dara is made a Free Thinker operative, trained and taught the truth about the Great Famine and its aftermath, but she must conceal her knowledge at all cost. Andersen must believe she’s no more than the sacrificial lamb he thinks she is.

But as the Creators’ interest in the project deepens, Dara is placed under surveillance and cut off from her Free Thinker lifeline. When she makes one last, desperate attempt at exposing his secret project, the repercussions are enormous.

Click here to add Infiltrator to your to-read shelf on Goodreads!

Haven't read book one, Contributor, yet? Get yourself a Kindle copy here! And click here to add it to your to-read shelf on Goodreads.

YA post-apocalyptic/dystopian

When the Great Famine threatened the existence of mankind, the Creators saved humanity. Humanity has been their loyal subject ever since.

This history has been ingrained in seventeen-year-old Dara Morrow since her first day of Creator-sponsored school. Grateful for the life-giving necessities her Creator provides, Dara is thrilled to be one of three students chosen for an elite, year-long apprenticeship program. Now is her chance to prove herself a devoted Contributor.

But Dara’s competition is ruthless and will stop at nothing to win the competition. Worse yet, her exacting master has little patience for her.

Then Dara’s mother is seriously injured, and Dara realizes the price of being a Contributor: once you’ve outlived your usefulness, you’re discarded. Can Dara learn to manipulate the system to save not only herself, but everyone she loves?

Read it already? What do you think of the new cover and revamped blurb?

Book Release Announcements: Land of Masks and Moonlight by S.K. Falls

2013-12-09T10:15:00.001-05:00

The sequel to the Amazon Top 20 science fiction bestseller is here!

Three weeks on a ship to China as a stowaway. Backbreaking labor in paddy fields. A one-room shack for a house.

Vika Cannon will endure anything if it means giving her unborn child and her sister Ceres a chance to grow up. The Great Land may be fraught with dangers of its own, but it’s still safer than the grim Asylums and stinging acid rains of their poisoned home. The brutal conditions seem a small price to pay…especially with Shale Underwood to come home to.

But when a local cell of New Amanian Radicals is captured, Vika knows it’s only a matter of time before her true identity is revealed. In order to survive, she must immerse herself in an underground society where masked strangers revel in the spoils of illicit power.

A mistake now could result in her unmasking—and the obliteration of everything Vika holds dear. As the net around her cinches tighter, she begins to understand that nothing in life is free.

What will Vika trade for her family’s safety?

Amazon | Goodreads

To celebrate the release of Land of Masks and Moonlight, it is being offered for $2.99 for one day only, until December 10 at 11:59 Eastern! After that, the price will go up to $3.99.

Haven’t started the series yet? Book 1, World of Shell and Bone, is only $0.99 until December 12^th!

About S.K. Falls

A huge fan of spooky stuff and shoes, S.K. Falls enjoys alternately hitting up the outlet malls and historic graveyards in Charleston, SC where she lives and imbibes coffee. Her husband and two small children seem not to mind when she hastily scribbles novel lines on stray limbs in the absence of notepads.

Since no writer’s biography is complete without mention of her menagerie of animals, you should know she has one dog that doubles as a footstool, a second that functions as a vacuum cleaner, and a cat that ensures she never forgets that her hands are, first and foremost, for pouring cat food.

S.K. Falls is represented by Thao Le of the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency.

Visit her on her website, Facebook, or Twitter.

Book Release Announcements: The Believers (Breeders, book 2) by Katie French

2013-11-27T09:00:00.000-05:00

Looking for that perfect read over the Thanksgiving holiday? It's a big thrill for me to announce that fellow Michigan author Katie French is releasing her new book on Friday, November 29, 2013. The Believers is the second book in the dystopian YA Breeders series. Katie has a bunch of promo events going on to celebrate the release, including giveaways on her blog, so be sure to check her out!

They’ve escaped the Breeders, yet their journey has just begun.

Riley and Clay are once again on the run from the Breeders. The group may have escaped the deranged breeding experiments at the hospital, but as one of the world's last free women, Riley can never be safe. On the road back home, Riley and her crew are captured by a band of savage men. Their destination: the Citadel, run by a bizarre religious prophet named the Messiah. Somehow he knows their secrets. He wants them to join his group of Believers, but only if they’ll drink the baptismal water and swear allegiance.

The problem is there’s something wrong with the water. Something wrong with the people. And there’s human moaning coming from the bottom of a dark crevasse that no one wants to talk about. If they can’t figure out what’s going on, Riley and everyone she loves could become a Believer forever.

Katie French imagined herself an author when her poem caught the eye of her second grade teacher. In middle school she spent her free time locked in her room, writing her first young adult novel. Though her social life suffered, her love for literature thrived. She studied English at Eastern Michigan University, where she veered from writing and earned an education degree. She spent nine years teaching high school English. Currently she is a school counselor, doing a job that is both one of the hardest things she's ever done and the most rewarding. In her free time she writes, reads great books and takes care of her two beautiful and crazy children. She is a contributor and co-creator of Underground Book Reviews, a website dedicated to erasing the boundaries between traditional and non-traditional publishing. She lives in Michigan with her husband and two children. She is represented by Amanda Luedeke of MacGregor Literary. You can find her at www.katiefrenchbooks.com, at www.undergroundbookreviews.com or on Facebook.

NaNoWriMo: Are you ready for the craziness?

2013-10-29T12:02:00.004-04:00

For those of you who don't already know, I am a HUGE NaNoWriMo cheerleader. I ~~badger~~ encourage everyone I know to participate in NaNoWriMo each year. So many of us have a novel inside, but we're positive we can never write it. I used to feel that way too. What's great about NaNoWriMo is you can't make any excuses--you just have to sit down and write that novel. And guess what, you will write it. Honestly, you will. I don't claim to have a vast pool of writely wisdom to bestow on others, but I do have some NaNo tips that have helped push me past the hump, and that have made me a more productive writer overall.

1. Just write. This is the most important one and, on the surface, it's the easiest one. However, it's more complex than most people think. I know the drill. Been there, done that. I can't write because I'm not inspired. I can't write because I don't have any good ideas. I can't write because I don't have time. Those are just three of the excuses I've used in the past, and I'm here to tell you they're nonsense. Really, they are. If you want to write, you have to put yourself in front of your keyboard or your pad and pen and you have to write words. Just write them. Don't worry about whether you're making mistakes or if your plot makes sense, just write.

The first year I did NaNoWriMo, way back in 2010, the novel I wrote was a hot mess. It's seriously unworkable, but that didn't make it any less valuable in the end, because it was the year I proved to myself that I could sit in front of my keyboard and bang out words, no matter how little I wanted to do so.

I think people underestimate how important it is to prove to yourself that you can do something. Even if you do it poorly, there's still a huge sense of accomplishment that goes along with completing a task you'd convinced yourself you couldn't complete.

2. Challenge yourself. When NaNo 2011 rolled around, I decided to mix things up a bit. Each year, I would pick a new genre and write a novel for it. My choice for that year was young adult dystopian, a genre I was pretty much 100% positive I couldn't pull off. The end result was Contributor, which is still one of my personal favorites. For NaNo 2012, I wrote a fantasy novel: Asleep. This year I'll be tackling new adult romance. The title is Starstruck, and I've sneakily included the cover for the book on my NaNo profile. Next year? I'm toying with trying out my hand at writing a mystery/suspense novel.

3. Have a routine. This isn't strictly necessary, but I find that establishing a routine gets me in the right frame of mind for writing. One year I drank pumpkin spice coffee every day during NaNoWriMo. I'm obsessive about the pumpkin spice, and that little treat gave me the incentive I needed to get working. I still associate pumpkin spice coffee with NaNo.

4. Reward yourself. I do a lot of bargaining with myself: If I write X number of words, I can play The Sims in the afternoon, or I can watch that movie I've been dying to see. Choose whatever works for you. Giving yourself rewards makes it easier to get motivated to get it done, and it feels good. Rather than drowning in guilt because you're fooling around when you should be writing, you can revel in the enjoyment of your reward while also feeling the warm glow of satisfaction at having met your goals for the day.

5. Prepare. Sometimes my prep is pretty extensive and at others it isn't. This will depend on your topic and how you write--I tend to be a pantser. This year I haven't done as much prep as in the past because my book will be contemporary. I have some basics down about my characters, and I have a rough sketch in my head of the setting. The previous two years, though, I did a lot more prep because I wrote dystopian and fantasy respectively. I did the world building ahead of time, outlined how the societies would work, wrote up character descriptions, etc. Getting this stuff done in advance means you can't come up with excuses not to write when you're in the swing of NaNo. You've done the groundwork, so all that's left is to put the words on the page.

6. Have fun and take risks. Throw in that outrageous plot element. Make your characters do something insane. Push yourself outside of your comfort zone. It'll keep you on your toes, make writing more interesting for you, and ultimately make your book better. Plus, imagine how great you'll feel when you pull off that crazy idea you want to try.

7. Do NOT give up. You'll reach a point where you feel like you've hit the wall. You're frazzled from caffeine overdose on top of a lack of sleep. You hate the plot twist you introduced ten pages ago, or your characters are giving you no end of grief, or you feel like you've completely lost the threads of your narrative. Yep, I've been there too. This is the hardest part about writing. The best thing you can do is push past it and fix it later. Giving up isn't going to make you feel good. As painful as forging ahead may be, you'll feel all that much larger a sense of accomplishment when you cross that finish line.

I'll be talking a lot about NaNo in the coming weeks, cheering on my fellow participants and describing my own trials and tribulations. One of the things I love most about NaNo is the community spirit. Writing can be a lonely endeavor, and I love that each November is when everyone is an author and I realize how alone I'm not.

If you'd like, add me as your NaNo writing buddy. I can never have too many of them. Best wishes and, most of all, happy writing!

Book Release Day: Derailed is now available!

2013-10-09T10:18:00.001-04:00

Happy book birthday to Derailed, my latest book under my Anne Wentworth pen name! I'm not going to lie, I have a tendency of falling in love with my male characters, and Yves is one of my favorites. This book is also a love letter to France, one of my favorite places in the world, and every time I read it I close my eyes and imagine all the beautiful things I saw there and all the fabulous food I ate. My hope is that when readers delve into the pages of this book they'll experience their own corner of France, wherever they are.

In honor of the release, I thought I'd share one last chapter of Derailed with you. If you like what you read, you can pick up a copy on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Kobo, and you can add it to your shelves on Goodreads. Want to see some of the sights that inspired the book? Check out my Pinterest Derailed Inspiration Board, where you can see photos taken by yours truly and by my awesome hubby during our Normandy adventure.

Missed the previous installments? You can find them here: cover reveal and book description, Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9.

Chapter 10

“It was a beautiful party, wasn’t it?” Julia asked the next morning, a dreamy smile on her face. There was a faraway look in her pale blue eyes that made her seem even more like a forest sprite than she normally did. She ran her hands over her stomach, her expression making it plain that she was lost in her own imagination.

“It was,” Lou agreed, glancing at Blaine to see him goggling at his wife like a lovestruck teenager. He seemed only half-conscious, and his messy hair was a wonder. Lou hid her smile behind her coffee cup. The two of them were so adorable together it was a bit nauseating, but she kept that petty thought to herself.

Covering her mouth, Lou let out a jaw-cracking yawn. She had thought American receptions were wild parties, but they couldn’t hold a candle to the rollicking celebration she’d attended the previous night. It hadn’t begun to die down until almost three o’clock in the morning, and Lou had been tempted to sleep right through breakfast, but she didn’t want to waste a moment of her trip. Even so, she was beginning to question the wisdom of her decision. Keeping her eyes open was proving an almost insurmountable challenge, and she suspected she looked like a twitchy creep due to all the blinking she had to do to keep the bleariness at bay.

She thought of how Melinda had looked as she and Benoit had hopped into their car, waving to everyone before driving away. Melinda’s face had glowed with love and pure joy, the light of the outdoor torches catching the fire in her auburn hair and making her eyes luminous. She’d worn a cream-colored, lacy A-line gown that was gorgeous on her, accentuating her soft curves. Benoit had been absolutely smitten with his bride, his dark eyes warm and shining as he took her hand and led her to their car.

Over the past three years, Lou had watched her best friend change in heartening ways. Melinda was still the same person she had always been, but she was becoming comfortable in her own skin. Where she’d once hidden behind baggy clothing and derided her own appearance at every opportunity, she had grown to accept her figure, and it made her all the lovelier. It hadn’t escaped Lou’s notice that Melinda had long believed herself physically inferior to Lou, and she was glad to know this was no longer the case. Lou knew she had been lucky to hit the cosmic genetic lottery, but in her eyes Melinda had always been just as beautiful, and Melinda’s new confidence in herself made her more eye-catching than ever.

“She’s happy,” Blaine said, jolting Lou out of her reverie. She let out a muffled gasp, wondering if she’d actually dozed off over her breakfast. “It’s good to see her so happy.” He sounded as satisfied as Lou felt. When he and Melinda had worked together he’d often been her sounding board, and he was every bit as aware of just how miserable Melinda used to be as Lou was.

“She deserves every happiness she gets,” Lou said, stifling another yawn.

“So do you,” Blaine said, turning his gaze to Lou and raising an eyebrow that told her he wasn’t at all unaware of how mixed up she’d been since she’d arrived in France.

“Thanks, Blaine. I think I understand now why Melinda has put up with you for all these years.”

“Put up with me,” he scoffed. “It’s been her privilege to be in my presence. We’re talking about me here. I am irresistible.”

“Julia, how did he ever convince you to marry him?” Lou asked in mock exasperation.

“Well, he does make me laugh.”

“Yeah, he’s good for that, isn’t he?”

Blaine sniffed, turning his nose up at them. “If you’re not careful, I’ll leave the two of you here and head off to Paris with that handsome French friend of Ben’s. We’d be two single men on the prowl in Paris. You can’t begin to fathom the damage we could do.” He yelped as Julia whacked his arm.

“Yves is single?” Lou asked, the words slipping out before she could think about them.

“Yes indeed.” Blaine gave her a sly look.

“No. Stop right there. It just surprises me, that’s all. Before you go all off on a tangent, let’s not forget that he’s French and lives in London while I’m American and live in Michigan.”

“That’s so like you, to fixate on his flaws.”

Lou rolled her eyes and blew out an impatient breath. “Keep this up, I’ll ship you off to Paris on your own. You’re skinny enough for me to stuff into a moderately-sized box if I fold you up. The postage wouldn’t cost more than a few euros, I’m sure.”

“How dare you insult my manly physique.” Lifting his arm, Blaine attempted to flex his tiny bicep, and all three of them laughed.

“It’s a very manly physique,” Julia said, petting his arm, her lips twitching.

“See what she does? It’s called humoring me, and she’s excellent at it,” Blaine said happily.

“We all are, Blaine. We all are,” Lou told him. “Don’t you have a rental car to return before we catch our train? I’d suggest we get moving.”

“Yeah, we’d better,” Julia said. She made a move to get up from her chair and Blaine hurried to help her, making her smile. “I’m fine, Blaine.”

“You sure? We were up so late last night, I’m worried you didn’t get enough sleep. You need to let me know if you get tired,” he said, his forehead creased in concern.

“Relax, sweetie. We’ll be sitting on a train for hours. I think I can handle it. I’ll sleep if I need to.” Her voice was full of affection.

“I’ll go grab my suitcase and meet you guys by the check-in desk,” Lou said.

Eschewing the tiny elevator, she took the stairs up to her room. Her bags were packed and waiting. All she needed to do was grab them and head back down, but she lingered in her room for a minute, throwing the windows wide open and leaning on the sill as she gazed out over the small town. She would miss this place, she thought. She hadn’t felt any real urge to go to Europe before, and she found she was glad that Melinda’s reception had provided her with the impetus. Here it seemed like anything was possible. She felt like she could breathe, think.

Closing her eyes, she drew air deep into her lungs, taking in the scent of the lavender, which she knew would be impossible to describe. She had bought some sachets and handmade soaps so that she could bring something of the scent home with her, but she knew that it wouldn’t be long before the memory was all she had left. The thought made her a little sad, but it also made her realize how lucky she was to have this moment, this chance to experience something outside of herself, to get out of her own head a little. She didn’t know if it was her job or her nature, but she’d spent so much of her life fixated on the microscopic that she was starting to think she’d missed the fact that there was a big world outside her door.

How much have I given up?

It surprised her to realize how little desire she had to return home. It wasn’t that she wanted to stay in France, it was more that she was loath to lose what the trip represented.

Stasis. It’s like I’m in stasis.

It might not have been wise for her to flee from her problems rather than face them, and they’d still be there for her to deal with when she returned, but the trip had provided her with a welcome reprieve. Far from home she could stop thinking about Louisa Carmichael’s responsibilities, at least for a little while. In a way it was like Louisa Carmichael didn’t even exist. In France there was no Wayne State University, no failed career in the biomedical research department. No one knew her; hell, they didn’t even speak the same language she spoke. They didn’t know that her career was a spectacular failure, didn’t know that she’d lost her head and poured gasoline all over her bridges before burning them. She was just a blank to the people here, just another ordinary American, looked at and then dismissed. The thought was comforting.

With a great deal of reluctance she closed the shutters and hefted her bags, heading to the lobby. As her feet carried her down the stairs she felt like the magnetic pull of the earth was tugging her back toward home, back toward all the things she didn’t want to face. The trip wasn’t over yet, she reminded herself. She still had a few days left to spend in Paris, and she intended to make the most of them.