Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Slumber Blog Tour, Guest Post, & Giveaway


Synopsis:


Once upon a time, Ruby believed in magic…

When Ruby volunteers to take her mother's housecleaning shift at the gothic Cottingley Heights mansion, she thinks it's going to be business as usual. Clean out the fridge, scrub toilets, nothing too unusual. But nothing could prepare her for the decadent squalor she finds within. Rich people with more money than sense trashing their beautiful clothes and home just because they can. After the handsome Tam discovers her cleaning up after him and his rich friends, Ruby has never felt more like a character from her sister’s book of fairy tales.

Tam sees beyond Ruby’s job and ratty clothes, and sweeps her off her feet, treating her like a real princess, but Ruby is sure this beautiful boy is too good to be true. And as one tragedy after another befalls Ruby and her family, Ruby painfully learns that magic is all too real, and it always comes with a price.




Kathleen Bolton is a professional writer and editor. Currently, she is a contracted writer to Working Partners, Ltd. Her projects include Confessions of a First Daughter, a YA series about the misadventures of the U.S. President’s teen-aged daughter, and Secrets of a First Daughter, both published by HarperCollins Teen, under the pen name Cassidy Calloway. Her current project, Slumber, under the pen name Tamara Blake, released July of 2013 and is a dark suspense fantasy novel for teens. She is the co-founder of Writer Unboxed, one of the foremost online communities for writers of fiction.

Kathleen lives with her husband and daughter in upstate New York.

Visit her AuthorTracker webpage at HarperCollins Publishing, or Goodreads for more.

ABOUT SLUMBER

Once upon a time, Ruby believed in magic…

When Ruby volunteers to take her mother's housecleaning shift at the gothic Cottingley Heights mansion, she thinks it's going to be business as usual. Clean out the fridge, scrub toilets, nothing too unusual. But nothing could prepare her for the decadent squalor she finds within. Rich people with more money than sense trashing their beautiful clothes and home just because they can. After the handsome Tam discovers her cleaning up after him and his rich friends, Ruby has never felt more like a character from her sister’s book of fairy tales.

Tam sees beyond Ruby’s job and ratty clothes, and sweeps her off her feet, treating her like a real princess, but Ruby is sure this beautiful boy is too good to be true. And as one tragedy after another befalls Ruby and her family, Ruby painfully learns that magic is all too real, and it always comes with a price. 


Guest Post
The Shapeshifter Hero
By Kathleen Bolton, author of SLUMBER under the pen name Tamara Blake
Thank you for inviting me to guest with you today. My latest book, SLUMBER, written in collaboration with the phenomenal editorial team at Working Partners Ltd., is a dark twist on fairy tales, and I had a blast taking familiar tropes and mixing them up. One of those tropes in paranormal fiction is the shapeshifter character. Mysterious, magical, and downright inhuman at times, the shapeshifter hero holds a special fascination for me. As a reader, I love stories where shapeshifters glide on the edge of magic and reality, especially when stories are in a contemporary setting. As a writer, anything is possible with a character who can go anywhere, be anything, yet who has to struggle to adapt when emotions such as love complicates his life. In Slumber, Tam, the hero, is a good example of a shapeshifter who struggles with a magic nature that longs to love a human.
Tam is literally a shapeshifter, a magic creature in the guise of a human. For the first half of the novel, he appears to the heroine Ruby (and the reader) as a rich, glamorous, handsome young man set on sweeping Ruby off her feet, a prince driving a Mercedes roadster wearing hipster clothes. He seems to be too good to be true. He is.
Midway through the book he reveals himself to be a supernatural creature – a fey – immortal, beautiful, and untrustworthy. Ruby is shocked by his decadent lifestyle. But at the same time she is also attracted to the luxury and ease he offers her. She (and we) are repelled and fascinated with life at mysterious Cottingley mansion. Ruby is confused by the fact that Tam seems to be so into her, when he could have anyone.
Despite his capricious nature, Tam seems to have fallen hard for Ruby. Ruby’s strong moral compass and steadfast resolve to save her family both attracts and frustrates him. He cannot understand why Ruby wouldn’t abandon her loved ones to come and live the carefree, luxurious life at Cottingley – after all, he’s never had that problem persuading other human girls who came before her. In true shapeshifter fashion, Tam tries all his tricks to tempt Ruby into succumbing to his charms. But Ruby’s no pushover – and Tam is baffled by her resistance. Little by little, it is Tam who is changed by Ruby, setting them both on a collision course with disaster.
As a writer, it was fun to plumb the depths of Tam’s internal conflict, and infuse his actions with different implications, depending upon which lens we are viewing him. Was Tam being helpful to Ruby? Or a trickster? Who is he really tricking? Ruby – or himself?
Shapeshifter heroes offer writers limitless possibilities, which is why the paranormal genre is going full steam ahead. Vampires, werewolves, fey, androids or other types of shapeshifter characters devised by creative writers have kept the genre exciting and evolving. Shapeshifter fiction shows no signs of slowing down, which is fantastic news for readers and writers of these types of stories.
Kathleen Bolton is a professional writer and editor. Currently, she is a contracted writer to Working Partners, Ltd. Her current project, Slumber, under the pen name Tamara Blake, is a dark suspense fantasy novel for teens. Her projects also include Confessions of a First Daughter, a YA series about the misadventures of the U.S. President’s teen-aged daughter, and Secrets of a First Daughter, both published by HarperCollins Teen, under the pen name Cassidy Calloway. She is the co-founder of Writer Unboxed, one of the foremost online communities for writers of fiction.
Kathleen lives with her husband and daughter in upstate New York.
Visit her AuthorTracker webpage at HarperCollins Publishing, or Goodreads for more.

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