Category: Books (Page 17 of 81)

PIRATE ISLAND Story Time at Milford Pirate’s Day

May 29, 2019 / Katie L. Carroll

Super busy here with the end of school year stuff for the kiddos, revising ELIXIR SAVED (my read-through revision turned into a full on revise-all-the-things revision), and gearing up for…Milford Pirate’s Day!

The event begins at 9:00 a.m. on Sunday, June 9 at Lisman Landing (37 Helwig Street, Milford, CT 06460) and moves to the green in downtown Milford in the afternoon until 3:00 p.m. There will be pancakes with pirates in the morning, the pirates arriving by ship at noon, and activities and a scavenger hunt on the green in the afternoon. Plus there will be food trucks, music, face painting, and lots of other fun stuff!

I’ll be at Lisman Landing in the morning and on the green in the afternoon. At each location I’ll be giving a family-friendly talk about local pirate history and legends, plus a short reading from PIRATE ISLAND. On the green, I’ll also have a fishing game with sticker prizes (while supplies last) and a pirate ship backdrop for a photo op.

A pirate display, including signed copies of PIRATE ISLAND, at The Canvas Patch in downtown Milford.

Pirate’s Day has already been getting some local news coverage (see the Milford Patch article “Milford Pirate’s Day Returns” and the Milford-Orange Times articles “Milford Gearing Up For Pirate’s Day”)! If you aren’t local and can’t make it to the event, I’ve done a bunch of posts about Captain Kidd history and PIRATE ISLAND (make sure to check out both pages of material). Arggh!

Release Blitz SOMEONE ELSE’S SOUL by Meradeth Houston

May 7, 2019 / Katie L. Carroll

Title: Someone Else’s Soul

Author: Meradeth Houston

Genre: SciFi/Suspense

Publisher: Bleeding Ink Publishing

Publication Date: May 7^th, 2019

Hosted by: Lady Amber’s PR

Blurb:

There are 14 strangers who share her face, and one company is determined to erase them all.

Everyone has secrets, and it’s Diana Kane’s job to know them. It’s a talent–being able to see into someone’s life from the scuffs on their shoes to the way they hold their hands–a talent that sets her apart from everyone. When a mysterious stranger drops into her life dangling the possibility of something she’s longed for, a real connection with someone who might actually understand her, she’s too intrigued to refuse.

But when David Addington shows up to their date knowing too much about her, and the top secret agency she works for, Diana realizes their meeting was anything but coincidence. David has more than his share of surprises, including an impossible claim about Diana’s past and photos of an inexplicable woman who shares her face.

When her life begins to unravel around her, Diana has no choice but to put her faith in the mysterious David and the man he claims is his father. As she struggles to piece together the truth about where she came from, she’s forced to face the reality that her entire life has been manufactured, along with fourteen other women who share her exact same DNA. Confronted with the troubling reality that she’s nothing more than a research experiment that’s pushed the boundaries of science and ethics, Diana must rescue the others like her before the company can erase them as mistakes, putting all her skills to the test in the ultimate game of survival…

Get your copy today!

Meradeth Houston lives in Montana where she’s an anthropology professor and scientist. If you let her, she’ll tell you more than you ever wanted to know about getting DNA out of dead bodies and old poop. She specializes in degraded DNA (translation: really old DNA that’s decayed), and runs two laboratories filled with students, interns, and maybe a few shenanigans. Her research seeks to better understand the dynamic of past migration on human populations. Her goal is to someday clone herself because that’s probably the only way she’ll ever get through her to-do list. Though, who knows, maybe that’ll mean she’s donating to someone else’s soul?

Other than teaching, research, and writing, Meradeth enjoys the lakes and ski slopes of Western Montana. It’s not uncommon to find her haunting the cafes of Missoula. She is also a proud dog mom and represented by Cristi Marchetti.

Author Links:

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5321667.Meradeth_Houston

Amazon: https://amzn.to/2PNa7HV

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

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MeradethHouston

Bookbub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/meradeth-houston

Website: http://meradethhouston.com/

Get your copy today!

New Release HOUSE OF EARTH, HOUSE OF STONE by Joshua David Bellin

May 3, 2019 / Katie L. Carroll

Joshua David Bellin is stopping by today to celebrate the release of the third book in his Ecosystem trilogy HOUSE OF EARTH, HOUSE OF STONE. Let’s give Joshua a big welcome as he shares a bit of info about each of the books!

About the Ecosystem series:

In a far distant future, Earth’s environment has mutated into the Ecosystem, a collective sentience that has pushed human beings to the brink of extinction. Only those individuals who are born with the psychic power known as the Sense can negotiate the Ecosystem’s deadly maze in search of the food, water, and fuel their people need to survive. When Sarah, a seventeen-year-old Sensor with a grudge against the Ecosystem, sets out to avenge her mother’s death, she learns more about the Ecosystem–and about herself–than she ever bargained for.

Book One: ECOSYSTEM

Miriam, an apprentice Sensor, is lost in the Ecosystem, and Sarah sets out to rescue her. Joining Sarah is Isaac, a boy who claims to possess knowledge of the Ecosystem that will help their people survive. The harrowing journey to find the missing apprentice takes Sarah and Isaac into the Ecosystem’s deadliest places. And it takes Sarah into the unexplored territory of her own heart, where she discovers feelings that threaten to tear her–and her society–apart.

Book Two: THE DEVOURING LAND

When Sarah’s village is overrun by monstrous creatures from the Ecosystem, she shepherds the survivors into the forest surrounding the village. Her own Sense badly damaged in an earlier attack, she must fight through a host of new threats in hopes of discovering the place where her mother was born, rumored to be home to a community of healers. But the City of the Queens is haunted by a dark secret of its own, and Sarah will have to learn the truth of her lineage in order to save the people she loves and protect the world she knows.

Book Three: HOUSE OF EARTH, HOUSE OF STONE

The City of the Queens is under attack. Sarah is forced to flee into the treacherous mountains to the far north, where she hopes to gain allies to contest the power that assails the city. But to wage this final battle, Sarah will have to overcome an ancient curse that threatens not only the survival of her people but the existence of the Ecosystem itself. And she will have to decide whether to save Isaac, the boy she loves, at the cost of losing everything else she holds dear.

Check out the Ecosytem trilogy on Amazon and learn more about Joshua on his website.

ELIXIR SAVED Update & Author Events 2019

April 29, 2019 / Katie L. Carroll

It’s been all ELIXIR SAVED and author events on the blog lately and today’s no exception. I’ve been compiling the mess of a draft that is ELIXIR SAVED and it’s been slightly terrifying. It’s been 8ish-year process to write this thing, it’s got three point-of-view characters, and it turns out that the manuscript is currently over 117,000 words!!! Yikes!

It’s been a journey to say the least. I haven’t quite written THE END yet, which I was hoping to do before I started the first round of revisions. But I realized I needed to read through what I already have in order to write the ending, which is weird because I’ve known the major events of the end pretty much since I started writing the story. Some things you can’t force, I guess. As I’ve been organizing the draft, the pieces of the end are already starting to come together in my mind.

I’ve also been busy scheduling and planning events for the spring and summer. This Saturday, I’ll be at the Author Expo and Book Fair at the public library in Torrington, CT from 12-4 p.m. That means I’ll be missing the New England SCBWI conference this year. 🙁 Hopefully I’ll get there next year.

Then in June I’ll be part of Pirate Day in downtown Milford, CT. It looks like I’ll be doing two presentations about the local pirate lore, one in morning before the pirates arrive by boat and one in the afternoon on the town green. There are a ton of fun activities throughout the day for the whole family. I’ll have PIRATE ISLAND for sale, games to play, and picture opportunities when I’m not speaking. It’s going to be a really fun (and busy!) day.

I’m also part of the CT Authors Trail this summer. I’ll be at the Voluntown Public Library in August for that. You can check out my Events page for all the updated details on where to find me. And I’m always happy to have people reach out to me for events and school or library visit; check out my Author Visits page for details on that.

As for the boys, we had a fun spring break a couple of weeks ago. We’ve started making our plans for the summer. I’ll have to do a picture post soon, so you can see what we’ve been up to. What have you all been up to lately?

Writing The Story Keeping Me Awake At Night

April 1, 2019 / Katie L. Carroll

I wrote something new recently and very different from anything I’ve written before. It came to me in a rush of excitement and creativity in a way I’ve never experienced before.

I’ve had ideas come crashing in, images or characters or some spark that leads to a story. But this was different. In the past, the ideas have been pieces of something bigger that needed a lot more thought to turn into a full idea.

This time, it was like I was possessed by the muse. It was literally keeping me awake at night. The idea, and moreover the emotion of the story, was a wave that kept churning inside me and wouldn’t let me focus on anything else until I let it out. And it came to me in such a fully formed way.

Not to say that it was easy to write. It required a good amount of research, but the research was just as exciting as the writing. Writing it felt like putting two parts of myself together that I hadn’t found a way to fit in the same context, even though the story is nothing about me in any way. It melded two of my passions that I’ve been trying to figure out how to intersect but had never been able to do so before.

I know this all sounds kind of vague, and I’m purposely avoiding specifics here on the blog for certain reasons that I’m being quiet about right now.

But I wanted to share the enthusiasm I’m feeling right now. Much of the writing and submitting process can be a slog. You face plot points you don’t know how to solve, characters that aren’t fleshed out enough, a voice that doesn’t stand out enough. Then there are the rejections…don’t even get me started.

This, right now, how I’m feeling. It makes all those things worth it. So I just wanted to let you all know that. Thanks for listening!