AprilWhiteBooks

A picture says a thousand words (or in the case of Marking Time, a hundred fifty-five thousand).  A friend's daughter took this photo of her mum "doing nothing" on the beach the other day and it has inspired me to take a page from the Yukon magazine, North of Ordinary .  Readers send in photos of themselves in exotic locations, holding the magazine to show how far in the world it has reached, and their photos get published in the magazine.   So here's my Marking Time Around Town Challenge :   E-mail me  photos of someone reading the book - anyone, anywhere - and I'll post them here.  And then the reader in the most creative, fantastic, exotic, entertaining or remote location will win a character name (either your own or the name of your choice) in the next book of the Immortal Descendants series: Tempting Fate . The kindle book counts too; just hold it up so the words or cover are visible in the photo, and make sure I know who you are, where the photo was t

Days of Blood & Starlight By Laini Taylor Days of Blood & Starlight is one of those books you stay up very late to finish...okay, ridiculously late, and then you wander around the next day trying to remember what's real and what's the book. So, my complete hooked-ness having been said, I did feel a little like I had to wade through the middle.   It's a thing I have about second books in trilogies (at least I assume this will be a trilogy) that drag the characters down into the lowest of all possible lows.   I get it, I understand it, I even sympathize with it, it just makes me sad when characters I care about make the kind of decisions that dig the holes they're in deeper and deeper.   And yet, despite the pits of despair she crafted, Laini Taylor surprised me.   I didn't expect the direction she took and was very delightfully blindsided by some choices Karou and Akiva made. Laini Taylor is an extraordinary writer.   She has created main ch

The Name of the Wind By Patrick Rothfuss Patrick Rothfuss is a genius.   Okay, maybe a mad genius (I don't actually know the man personally, but I laugh out loud at his blogs), because anyone who can create such brilliant (as in glowing beacons of personality) characters in a world so well-drawn I didn't once raise an eyebrow and go "huh?" is a truly gifted storyteller of the most unexpected variety. Most of the high fantasy I've read was in college, usually during dead week and finals, and generally six-book series that sucked me in, wrung me out, and tossed me back to the real world to wander around on shaky legs until I remembered who I was.   But that was college where everything is surreal and in technicolor, and those were authors like Orson Scott Card, Stephen Donaldson, Frank Herbert and Piers Anthony. And then along comes Patrick Rothfuss.   And just like those friends you make when you think you've made all the best friends you'

Time travel has literary rules just like vampires and werewolves and fairies do.  Of course Dr. Who breaks them all on a regular basis, but we forgive him because the shows are so fun, with multiple doctors, love interests, and aliens that remind me vaguely of Sleestaks from Land of the Lost. In Marking Time, the rules Saira and the other Descendants of Time have to follow are the ones I've gathered from some of my favorite authors.  Simon Hawke wrote the 12-book Time Wars series  that set the standard about the Grandfather paradox (if someone goes back in time and accidentally kills their grandfather before he meets their grandmother, how can he exist to go back in time to kill his grandfather?).  And, of course, timestream splits have been the subject of many long discussions over wine (I'm a little strange that way).  The way Simon Hawke describes time in his first book, The Ivanhoe Gambit , is that it's like an actual stream or river.  Throw a pebble into the

I need your review and I will buy you a kindle copy of Marking Time to get it.  As anyone who has ever trolled amazon for books knows, the reviews are the difference between selling your book to friends and family, and finding an audience outside the circle of all the wonderful people who love and support you. To those wonderful people who have already bought  Marking Time , THANK YOU!  I need your review too.  Even if it's just stars and a couple of sentences, every review counts toward getting the notice of other readers, and just like voting, your reviews matter. Here's how the Marking Time Free Kindle Book giveaway will work.  Fill out your contact information on the immortaldescendant.com contact page , including the e-mail address you use for your amazon.com account, and write "Review Copy" in the comments section.  I will then send you a gift of Marking Time from amazon.  When you redeem your gift it counts as a purchase and will go toward my sales ra

I couldn't find photos of the actual Venice Beach rum runner tunnels, so this one, of a Pirate Cellar in Savannah, Georgia stood in for the entrance to Saira's tagging gallery under Venice.  The actual Venice tunnels were originally constructed to allow sunbathers to walk back to their hotels since swimsuits weren't allowed on the boardwalk in 1905.  During prohibition, those tunnels from the beach were used by rum runners to bring illegal booze in from the beach. When I was a private investigator, I worked in the loft above the market at Windward and Pacific where Saira and her artist Mom lived when her mother disappeared.  One of my bosses had inherited a massive oriental carpet, at least 25 feet long, from his wealthy grandmother who bought it from Macy's in New York before the Depression, and the front stairwell of the building was always full of the same shadows that Saira hates. The London Bridge Catacombs were another internet find and the wanna-be urban a

I've loved page design since I was the editor of my High School yearbook, and playing with cover images was a (mostly) fun game I played.  Until it wasn't anymore and I began to feel schizophrenic, darting from one idea to another, unsure of my taste, bombarding friends and family with choices, and hoping the cover image would leap out and embrace me.  Because the cover of a book is the first thing that grabs your potential reader.  At least you hope it grabs them, maybe shakes them a little, intrigues them, seduces them, but mostly doesn't put them off. And there's the rub.  Even though I wrote my book for a young adult audience, and even though my heroine is 17 years old, she, like most teenagers I know, has an internal voice that's funny, brave, intelligent, irreverant and fairly insightful.  And even though we watch the world unfold through that 17-year-old girl's eyes, the world is strange and wonderful and dangerous; full of friends and foes and myste

It arrived yesterday (the publisher proof for me to review for formatting mistakes).  The physical, hold it in my hands, proof that I didn't just make this all up.  Except I did.  And that's what's so crazy.  I just made up a girl with a missing mother and a father she never knew.  And I gave her a hereditary ability to travel in time, which let her go back to Victorian London to encounter Jack the Ripper.  And from there, she sort of just led the way.  Of course I could claim that I knew what was going to happen from the beginning.  And I did have a plan.  But these things have a way of turning out not at all as one expects.  And Saira surprised me a couple of times.  I surprised myself with plot twists and characters I fell in love with as they led the way on their own journeys through the crazy world I devised for them. So I made something up and now there's a very cool-looking paperback book sitting on my table waiting for me to sign off on it before it goe

THIS is the cover of my newly published book, Marking Time.  It's available today on Amazon for kindle apps, and the paperback will be available starting next week.  And I, like many debut indie authors, thought the hard work was writing the book.  As the four of you who actually followed this blog from its inception know, I started this journey on the traditional publishing path.  The boys and I were in the Yukon visiting Ed on the set of the show he spent the summer Story Producing (runs in the family?), and while the boys slept off the effects of midnight sun bedtimes, I researched agents and sent out query letters and sample pages, revising both daily.  If you were one of those first agents I queried, I apologize.  You got the benefit of no experience and a very awkward combination of too much and not enough confidence.  I got better at my queries later and did get some requests for partial manuscripts (my kids were very entertained by the happy dance), but as the form re