Welcome to Gratitude Giveaways!!!

Kathy over at I Am a Reader, Not a Writer Blog organized this amazing Giveaway.  There are 175+ bloggers participating in this event.  For my followers, I will be having 2 different giveaways which means 2 winners.

Giveaway #1 - Middle Grade Book Giveaway


A hardcover copy of Ellen Potter's The Kneebone Boy

Description from GoodReads:
Life in a small town can be pretty boring when everyone avoids you like the plague. But after their father unwittingly sends them to stay with an aunt who’s away on holiday, the Hardscrabble children take off on an adventure that begins in the seedy streets of London and ends in a peculiar sea village where legend has it a monstrous creature lives who is half boy and half animal. . . .

In this wickedly dark, unusual, and compelling novel, Ellen Potter masterfully tells the tale of one deliciously strange family and a secret that changes everything.
 

Giveaway #2 -YA Book Giveaway

A signed copy of Fallout by Ellen Hopkins

Description from GoodReads:
Hunter, Autumn, and Summer—three of Kristina Snow’s five children—live in different homes, with different guardians and different last names. They share only a predisposition for addiction and a host of troubled feelings toward the mother who barely knows them, a mother who has been riding with the monster, crank, for twenty years.
 

Hunter is nineteen, angry, getting by in college with a job at a radio station, a girlfriend he loves in the only way he knows how, and the occasional party. He's struggling to understand why his mother left him, when he unexpectedly meets his rapist father, and things get even more complicated. Autumn lives with her single aunt and alcoholic grandfather. When her aunt gets married, and the only family she’s ever known crumbles, Autumn’s compulsive habits lead her to drink. And the consequences of her decisions suggest that there’s more of Kristina in her than she’d like to believe. Summer doesn’t know about Hunter, Autumn, or their two youngest brothers, Donald and David. To her, family is only abuse at the hands of her father’s girlfriends and a slew of foster parents. Doubt and loneliness overwhelm her, and she, too, teeters on the edge of her mother’s notorious legacy. As each searches for real love and true family, they find themselves pulled toward the one person who links them together—Kristina, Bree, mother, addict. But it is in each other, and in themselves, that they find the trust, the courage, the hope to break the cycle.
 

Told in three voices and punctuated by news articles chronicling the family’s story, FALLOUT is the stunning conclusion to the trilogy begun by CRANK and GLASS, and a testament to the harsh reality that addiction is never just one person’s problem.


Here are the rules:
1. You must complete the form below.  (Comments are appreciated by will not enter you into the contest.)
2. You must be 13 years or older.
3. You must be a follower of this blog.
4. All entries must be submitted by November 28, 2010 at 11:50 PST.
4. International participants are welcome.



Gratitude Giveaways is hosted by Kathy @ I Am A Reader, Not A Writer. This is a giveaway hop that runs from Wednesday, November 17th to Sunday, November 28th. Stop by each blog during those days to enter all the fantastic giveaways.

Here are all the participating blogs:

Guest Post: Lisa Rowe Fraustino

November seems to be the "official month of writing" with so many people participating in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month).  Today's Guest Blogger is Lisa Rowe Fraustino.  Her newest book - The Hole In The Wall - was recently released earlier this month.  Lisa has been on a blog tour sharing about her new book, answering questions, and doing guest posts.  Today, she shares with us how to get in touch with our inner canine as we write.

Writing Like Cats and Dogs

Way back in 1992 a book came out that helped me learn to write like a dog, Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. It comes down to this: Healthy women share certain characteristics with healthy canines.

As Estes points out, she-wolves are “relational by nature, inquiring, possessed of great endurance and strength. They are deeply intuitive, intensely concerned with their young, their mates and their pack. They are experienced in adapting to constantly changing circumstances; they are fiercely stalwart and very brave.”

If I didn’t write like a dog, The Hole in the Wall would never have received the Milkweed Prize for Children’s Literature. In fact, none of my eight books would be published. I’d have quit after the first few rejections of my “quirky” characters and “weird” storylines. If by some miracle I made it past early rejections to publication, the first nasty review I got would have caused me to quit writing and take up something safer, like skydiving.

Embracing your inner…hm…let’s call it “female dog” allows you to unleash your creativity and have the confidence to express your idiosyncracies, your uniqueness, your truest self—even though the rest of the world may look upon your creations with the scorn of a cat who has been fed the store brand, dry.

Your inner canine is the part of you that says, “I don’t care what anyone else says. I have something to say and I’m going to say it.” Like the dog who keeps standing at the window barking even though people keep telling her to lie down and be quiet, you keep on writing joyfully despite rejections slips and bad reviews.

Writers who nurture their inner canines don’t get blocked for long. Why? Because blocks derive from fears—fears of being laughed at, of being criticized, of being wrong. No offense to cat lovers—I enjoy cats too. Have four of them, in fact. But there’s a big difference between doggy and catty when it comes to self-expression and interpersonal dynamics.

The dog instinctively protects her territory and is incapable of spite. The cat…well. You know. She likes to play head games. Especially with her food.

Dogs aren’t self-conscious. They don’t worry about whether they’re doing something right or whether they will be loved. They go about their business cheerfully sniffing butts and marking bushes and licking themselves no matter how many times prissy humans scold them. And they chase off cats who nip at their confidence.

By all means love your cat— but write like a dog.

Exercises to Develop Your Inner Canine

1.Think of a time when others told you to stop singing, dancing, or otherwise expressing yourself because you were embarrassing them. Write the experience into your next story or chapter.

2. Do something you’ve always wanted to do but never dared because of the reactions of other people—like, cut your hair really short, or paint your front door purple.

3. You know that incredible family story that you’ve been waiting to work on someday…after a lot of funerals? Sit down and write it: now. Heavily fictionalize it if you’re still too timid to go for the memoir.

4. Think of something you’ve done of which you carry a deep sense of secret shame. Let it out of your body. Write it down. Burn the pages in your spaghetti pot, then rewrite the story as fiction.

5. Go out and howl at the next full moon.

For more tips on writing, visit “Dr. Lisa’s Class” at her web page.
Today’s topic: “The Golden Rule of Criticism”
http://lisarowefraustino.com/?page_id=304

Crossroad Tour Winners

It is always fun to announce winners and there are three winners to announce. 

Winner of the signed copy of VAMPED by Lucienne Diver is:
Cindy (Blog- Cindy's Love of Books)

Winner of the 1st Crossroads SWAG pack is:
Heather (Blog - Buried in Books)

Winner of the 2nd Crossroads SWAG pack is:
Kristen (Blog - My Bloody Valentine)

It is sad to see the Crossroads Tour end, but glad everyone had so much fun.

And once again, congratulations to all the winners.

- Aly

The Crossroads Tour: Day 16 Amy Brecount White


Each day of The Crossroads Tour, a new question will be revealed on The Crossroad Blog Tour main page and each day the answer to that question will be found within one of the 16 different blog posts by Crossroads Tour authors. Your job is to get the question, read the blog posts, and collect all 16 answers by the end of the tour, on Halloween. Go HERE to get today's question and links.

Today is the last day for The Crossroads Tour and Amy Brecount White is stopping by to celebrate Halloween with some of her own Halloween memories.  Amy is a 2010 Debut author.  Her book, Forget-Her-Nots was released earlier this year.  You can read a couple of chapter here on her site.



What is your most embarrassing/funny/scary Halloween experience or costume?

In college, my friend Suz and I were really into philosophy and had read this cool book called, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. We smeared mascara on our faces and hands, dressed grunge, and went to the party as motorcycle mechanics. One of my best Halloweens ever.

Do you have any Halloween family stories that you can share with readers?

I’m allergic to nuts and peanuts, and so are two of my three children. Halloween can be scary for us in a strange way. But it was pretty funny when one of my kids looked at the usual candy selection someone offered -- Snickers, Baby Ruth, Reeses -- and says, “Excuse me, do you have anything without nuts?”
LOL. We have to weed through everything when they get home.

White bellflowers and orange crocuses for hosting me, Aly!! - And thanks Amy for stopping by - here's to a peanut and nut free Halloween!!!!!

For more information on Amy Brecount White, check out her website: www.amybrecountwhite.com
To find her on Twitter, folllow: @amybrecountwhit





Since this is the last day of The Crossroads Tour, there is a SWAG Pack giveaway.  The picture below is what will be included in the pack.


The rules to entering:

1.  Please fill out the entry form below.
2. You must be 13 or older.
3. You must have left a comment on at least one blog post from Tour Days 9 to 16 (today would count).  (Additional points for additional comments.)
4. Tweet the contest (optional)
5. Only one entry per participant.
6. Open Internationally.
7. All entries must be in by Tuesday, November 2, 2010 at 11:59 PDT 



The Crossroads Tour: Day 15 Angie Frazier


Each day of The Crossroads Tour, a new question will be revealed on The Crossroad Blog Tour main page and each day the answer to that question will be found within one of the 16 different blog posts by Crossroads Tour authors. Your job is to get the question, read the blog posts, and collect all 16 answers by the end of the tour, on Halloween. Go HERE to get today's question and links.

Today's guest for the Crossroads Tour is author Angie Frazier.  Her debut YA novel Everlasting was released in June of 2010.  A little piece of trivia....Angie and I attended the same college (though not at the same time) in New Hampshire (Keene State).  I am so excited to be able to support a fellow alumni. 
 


Did you have a book that you read either in Middle School or High School that scared you the most? What was it and what about it scared you?

Oh man, all of Stephen King’s books scared the living bleep out of me. Probably the one that scared me the most was Pet Sematery—the book managed to scare me more than the movie.

Did you have a paranormal experience that prompted you in writing the story that you did? 

As a kid, I lived in a house in Louisiana that was supposedly built over an old burial ground. I was five or six and I had awful nightmares all of the time--even now they give me goosebumps when I think of them. And yes, there were ghosts. My parents even saw them. So, you could say I’ve been curious about the paranormal ever since.

Where did you get the idea for your story? Did you use a real life situation and put a twist on it? 

No, honestly I have just always been a little obsessed with death and resurrection and eternal life. This
was my way to explore it a little further in my own way.

Did you have a favorite paranormal/horror story writer as a child/teen that you wanted to emulate? If so, who and why?

I wasn’t trying to emulate anyone really. I respect and admire a lot of writers. When it comes to horror, Stephen King takes the cake in my opinion. But he also captures a human element that makes the story he’s telling that much richer.

What kind of research did you do for your story and did you run into anything weird while you were doing research? 

Most of my research revolved around historical details of the time period and place. The best research was the superstitions of the sailors at that time. I especially love the eerie folklore of Fiddler’s Green, the afterlife for sailors where there is endless mirth, a fiddle always playing, dancers—and all of it happening nine miles from the gates of Hell.

What helps you to create characters that people will feel passionate about either in liking them or disliking them? 

I think crafting a character with depth is the most difficult task for me. I’m very plot driven as a
writer. For characters worth caring about, I like giving them flaws, wants, dreams, regrets, and secrets they want to keep hidden.  It’s hard, because a character someone loves will be a character someone else couldn’t understand or “get.”

If you could have a supernatural power or gift what would it be?  

I would love to be able to “see” into the past…like if I was in an old house or near an ancient object and touched it, I’d love to be able to see the history of the place or object as if I was right there.

For more information about Angie Frazier, check out her website: http://angiefrazier.com

To follow her on Twitter:  @angie_frazier

The talented Vania of VLC Productions created the book trailer for Everlasting.  So lovely.