Taylor Fenner's Blog, page 177

Busy Week

From my weekly blog at http://www.taylorfenner.com:

Hey everyone! I hope you've had a good week. My week has been busy but good for the most part. I'm seriously disappointed that there is currently snow on the ground outside my window. It sucks!

I received the paperback copies of The Haunting Love on Tuesday night. I have to admit, I'm one of those people that when I'm expecting something to be shipped to me I track it relentlessly. I always wonder if there's someone at UPS keeping track of how many times I log on to see where my packages are. It's a bit obsessive, I know. Anyway, I woke up really early on Tuesday, figuring that if I slept in the UPS guy would be ringing my buzzer and waking me up. Alas, I waited all day and the books didn't show up until after 5.

Wednesday was especially busy for me, as I've had quite a few inquiries from people wanting a copy of my book (Thank you very much by the way! I truly appreciate it!) and I also started working on setting up a book signing. I've pretty much chosen the location for the book signing in Clintonville, WI. I'm just working with the chosen venue at this point to finalize the exact date and then I will post all the information on Facebook, here on Goodreads, as well as my website. So far we're working on an early May date for the book signing if that works out for them. I hope everyone is excited as I am!

Thursday was pretty much the same, working out the details for the book signing, and working on things to go with that as well as getting a couple books out to people. Now that it's Friday I'm mostly looking forward to resting for the weekend and maybe getting a little writing done in my current work-in-progress. It's been a busy week and I'm looking forward to some down time to visit with friends and just hang out.

I can't believe next weekend is Easter already, but either way my usual Friday blog will still be posted as schedule next Friday! I hope everyone has a relaxing weekend whatever you plan to do!

I Dream of Travel and Paperback Books

Happy First Day of Spring! If you're like me then this is the day you've been waiting for since the first day of winter. Hopefully this means that there won't be any more snow/ice/slush until at least November. Anyway, I hope everyone had a safe St. Patrick's Day, and that you've recovered by now.

Celebrating St. Patrick's Day had me thinking about traveling and how much I would love to go to Ireland someday. About how much I would love to travel in general. There are so many places I'd love to go that I haven't been able to get to yet. I know what you're thinking, "you're 22, and you have years and years ahead of you to get to all of those places". Sure, I could get to anywhere in the U.S. or Canada that I wanted to go to; but I'm terrified of flying so vacations to Ireland, London, Paris, or Italy might have to remain a dream for now.

Regardless I can't help thinking about the beautiful lush green landscape of Ireland and the travel bug begins to bite at me. Maybe I'll be able to take some sort of trip this spring or summer; even if it's just to northern Michigan where I usually go to unwind.

This week has been pretty productive for me overall. I'm going through a first round of edits with my upcoming novel, Finding Elizabeth, and that's going pretty well at this point. I'm about 1/3 of the way through with my first round of corrections. At this point I'm aiming for a mid-to-late September release for Finding Elizabeth.

When I haven't been working on correcting edits in Finding Elizabeth, I've been working on getting the word out about The Haunting Love. You might have noticed that my cover images on Twitter and Facebook got new banners this week. I'm happy with the way they turned out if I do say so myself. My paperback copies of The Haunting Love have been shipped out to me this week and I should be getting them either Monday or Tuesday. Once I get the books I'll get on task of setting up a book signing. There's one location I want to check with, and I'll post more info once I get things set up. Can't wait until the book signing? You can now buy paperback copies of The Haunting Love on Amazon: http://amzn.com/1633557839

Another change you might have noticed is the new theme for my website http://www.taylorfenner.com. I've changed it so it looks a bit more springy (I hope). Be sure to take a look to see what else is new around the site.

Other than that it's been a pretty good week for me. I hope everyone is having a great first day of spring! Have a great weekend, get out and enjoy the sunshine tomorrow if you get the chance!

Ghosts and The Paranormal

Happy Friday the 13th! Is it supposed to mean something that we've had a Friday the 13th two months in a row? To keep with the eerie mood the topic of this week's blog is: Ghosts and the Paranormal; and why I write about them!

I can’t honestly say I’ve always been into ghosts or the paranormal. When I was a child I was afraid of everything. There used to be a show on HGTV called “If Walls Could Talk” where people would talk about things they had found in their old houses that once belonged to previous occupants. Part of me thought that was cool while the other part of me thought that with an old house came ghosts of its previous occupants; and that terrified me. I can also remember watching shows like “The Most Haunted Places on Earth” with my great-uncle around Halloween when I was little. When I say I was afraid of everything I mean it; I couldn’t watch 48 Hours or Dateline, the movie Psycho terrified me to no end (along with most other horror movies), and anything that mentioned ghosts scared me.


It wasn’t until I was in middle school that I finally got over my fear and really got into everything paranormal. I credit that to a couple of books I read as well as the movies An American Haunting and The Fog (the remake). I mean who wouldn’t love a movie where vengeful ghosts return from their watery graves to seek revenge against the descendants of the four men that killed them? Throw in a girl with vivid nightmares and a secret connection to said vengeful ghosts? Even better! After that everything was fine, and by fine I mean I developed an obsession with the paranormal and a love of horror movies.


When I started writing The Haunting Love it was more of a way for me to move past and keep myself sane from a few deaths in my family; the paranormal element was just an added bonus. Regardless, I did do a lot of research on ghosts during the course of my writing. Not to the level of Iza’s brother Quinn of course, but I did learn a lot about peoples’ different beliefs when it comes to ghosts as well as the different forms of ghosts that people believe exist.


That was before I even started watching Ghost Adventures. I used to love that show; watching it religiously every Friday and/or Saturday night. Though I didn’t quite believe the “paranormal experiences” the hosts kept claiming to be experiencing I fell in love with the backstories of why people throughout history have believed certain locations were haunted. I stopped watching the show last year after it began giving me nightmares (not because it scared me but because after a while it got kind of morbid) but I still try catching it every now and then when there isn’t anything else on television on a Saturday night but the show has lost something for me after one of the 3 main investigators left. The three of them kind of had a certain way they meshed together and it wasn’t the same after one of the guys left.


I still maintain a strong interest in all aspects of the paranormal. My next novel Finding Elizabeth, a stand-alone novel, will touch upon ghosts, reincarnation, and Wicca (a Pagan nature-based religion). My other upcoming novel Out of Darkness, the first in what I’m aiming to be a duology or a trilogy will include all sorts of paranormal creatures, some of them well heard of before (ghosts, witches, werewolves, zombies to name a few) as well as a few that aren’t as well known.


I hope this shines a better light on why I choose to write about the paranormal. Whether you’re a paranormal fan, or just giving a new author a chance, I thank you for reading The Haunting Love, and I hope you’ll look forward to reading my two upcoming novels!


Have a great weekend and a safe St. Patrick’s Day on Tuesday! Don’t forget to wear green and eat some corned beef!

Why I Chose Green Bay for The Haunting Love's Setting

Hello my loyal blog readers. I hope everyone had a nice first week of March and that the weather is treating you decent. (which seems unlikely if you're in certain parts of the country that seem to keep getting either ice or snow storms.) My week has been pretty productive and I've gotten a lot done on the project I'm currently working on.

Since The Haunting Love has been out for a little over three weeks now I'm sure most of you know that the story is set in the Green Bay area here in Wisconsin. I'm sure some of you are wondering what made me decide to set my novel in Green Bay, as opposed to some of the usual novel locations like New York or L.A.; or even why I didn't make up a fictitious city to set The Haunting Love in.

The answer is simple. The first scene of The Haunting Love that came to me was the car accident scene. Truth be told, that scene occurs in my mind in neither Green Bay or De Pere; but in Allouez, Wisconsin which is in between the two. To paint a better picture I will tell you my envisioned location for the car accident scene. Driving along Riverside Drive from Green Bay to De Pere with the Fox River Trail and the Fox River on one side and the guard wall (or whatever it's called) below Minahan's Tomb on the other is where Iza truly gets into her car wreck.


To those who are not familiar with Minahan's Tomb, or those that are not from Wisconsin and have no idea who Dr. William Minahan was I will briefly explain. Dr. William Minahan was a Wisconsin native who parished on the ill-fated Titanic in 1912. His body was recovered and is now interred on a hill in Woodlawn Cemetary in Allouez, Wisconsin overlooking the Fox River Trail and the Fox River. Why is this interesting and why did it strike a nerve with me? Well his back story didn't really, but I remember a story my great-uncle told me once when I was young. In 1987 some vandals broke into Dr. Minahan's Tomb (or Crypt ) and stole his skull. That single sentence is what has stuck with me. As you can imagine, I was horrified as a kid. Who would steal some guy's skull from his tomb? That's sick! What would they even want with his head? Luckily the vandals were quickly apprehended and the tomb is now under heavy lock and key. I can only assume the head was recovered and returned to his final resting place. Talk about giving a spirit a reason to haunt somewhere and not be able to rest in peace! Regardless, to this day everytime I travel along that road I glance up at the crypt and remember the story my great-uncle told me.

Thus you see, my setting was chosen. I wrote my entire novel around one location. Some places in The Haunting Love are real, while others are things made up from my imagination. Here are a few examples:

The Bay Beach Wildlife Sanctuary: Yes, this is a real location. Here's a little information from their website www.baybeachwildlife.com:
The Bay Beach Wildlife Sanctuary is a beautiful 700 acre urban wildlife refuge featuring live animal exhibits, educational displays, miles of hiking/skiing trails and various wildlife viewing opportunities. It is the largest park in the Green Bay Park system and home to the second largest wildlife rehabilitation program in Wisconsin, caring for more than 4,500 orphaned and injured animals annually.

The Sanctuary attracts hundreds of thousands of bird watchers, families and other visitors from across the USA and many foreign countries each year. They come to explore and discover nature while learning the importance of preserving natural landscapes.

First established in 1936 as a site for waterfowl rehabilitation, the Sanctuary has grown to offer environmental education programs to over 10,000 students, nature walks, urban fishing, summer camps, cross country skiing and much more.
I've been to the wildlife sanctuary many times throughout my life, both on school trips and random day outings with my family. It's one of my favorite places in Green Bay. It's relaxing to sit and watch the geese and other birds argue over cracked corn thrown out by people. They're such greedy little critters, but I happen to think they're adorable.

Custard's Last Stand: I'm sorry to say this place is completely fictional. I was looking for a place for the Johnny character to work at and after playing around with a couple different ideas this is what I decided to name his workplace. It's a play on words of "Custer's Last Stand" and custard (which is like ice cream). And since Johnn'y workplace is meant to be seen as a burger / ice cream joint comparable to Dairy Queen or Culver's, Custard's Last Stand was born. I can just envision Johnny's work uniform to look like General Custer's uniform covered with an apron of some sort. Can you picture it?

De Pere, Wisconsin and De Pere High School: Yes, De Pere is an actual city. I wouldn't call it a suburb of Green Bay, but they're both in the same general area. Most notably De Pere is known to be the main location of Seroogy's Chocolates. There is also obviously a De Pere High School but what I didn't know until later is that there is also a West De Pere High School. Either way, De Pere is the main setting of The Haunting Love.

I hope this helps give you a bigger picture of some of the setting of The Haunting Love. I'm a Wisconsin native, and I've lived about 30 miles from Green Bay my entire life so it made sense for me to set my first novel in a city that I'm well familiar with. I hope that if you've already read / are reading The Haunting Love that you enjoyed / are enjoying it or if you haven't had a chance to delve into it yet I hope you give it a chance!

I hope everyone has a great weekend. Until next Friday!

One Week Later, Print Books, and More

Hey everyone! The Haunting Love has now been available for a week and three days. I'm thankful to all that have been reading and enjoying it so far. Be sure to tell your friends and family about it if you wish.

Last Friday I put in an order with my publisher for print (paperback) copies of The Haunting Love. On Tuesday I received a formatting proof from Start (the parent company of Whiskey Creek Press) which I approved. Now the books should be entering into the printing process and I should be receiving the print copies sometime in mid-to-late March is my guess.

Once I have the print copies in my possession I will be setting up a book signing somewhere locally. At this time I do not have a date or location but stay tuned for updates on that.

This week has been somewhat quiet for me. I've been doing some promoting of The Haunting Love as well as trying to fit in some writing time. I'm currently working on "Into the Light", the sequel to my third novel "Out of Darkness".

In the next month or two I'm going to begin setting up a timeline for self-publishing my second novel, Finding Elizabeth. I'd like to release it sometime later this year. Be sure to be on the lookout for updates on that front.

I hope everyone has a nice weekend. I'll be splitting my time between reading, writing, and relaxing. We'll have to wait and see whether March comes in like a lion or a lamb. Either way, I can't wait until the day I can stop living in sweatshirts!

The Haunting Love Release Week

Happy Friday everyone! I hope wherever you are you're staying out of the cold and/or snow. The other day I was in Walmart and the cashier was rambling about how cool it would be if you lived over on the east coast where people have had so much snow they had to tunnel out of their houses... because tunneling out would be so cool. I didn't share her opinion because she was clearly out of her mind. How many months are there until summer again?

Moving on to more important things; The Haunting Love came out on Tuesday! I was so excited the night before I could barely sleep. I seemed to wake up every few hours to check the time. Finally morning arrived and I saw clear as day The Haunting Love was now available for purchase and download in ebook format.

To everyone who has already purchased The Haunting Love, I thank you and I hope that everyone is enjoying it! If you like it, it would be awesome if you write a quick review on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Goodreads because it would give me more exposure.

If you haven't picked up your digital copy yet, what are you waiting for? The Haunting Love is a young adult paranormal romance novel set in Green Bay and De Pere, WI.

Buy it on Amazon: http://amzn.com/B00SW1B940
or Barnes and Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-h...

This week, since Tuesday at least, I've been busy promoting The Haunting Love. On Tuesday I dropped off a few postcards at the Appleton Public Library (in Appleton, WI) in the young adult / teen section. I was in celebration mode on Tuesday so I picked up lunch from Red Lobster as a special treat. I've spent most of the rest of the week posting and promoting online, so I apologize for the onslaught of promotional posts on Facebook and Twitter. I'm just trying to get the word out about The Haunting Love.

I hope everyone had as much of a great week as I did. Have a great weekend! And remember, when the weather sucks it's very relaxing to curl up with a good book!

Three Days, Ten Hours, and Counting Down

Happy Friday the 13th! I hope nobody is experiencing any mishaps because of Friday the 13th. I always love when these days come around, it makes me want to watch the movie. I've had a pretty great week, and I hope everyone else has too.


Tomorrow is Valentine's Day so I hope everyone has plans to do something fun. I'm personally going to switch things up and celebrate Mardi Gras on Valentine's Day. Yes, I celebrate Mardi Gras, even though I don't live anywhere near New Orleans. I think I'll start with some beignets for breakfast and finish with some jambalaya for dinner as I watch The Skeleton Key... or maybe The Fog... I'm really in the mood to watch The Fog lately. Anyway, the reason I'm celebrating Mardi Gras on Valentine's Day instead of when it actually falls on Tuesday is that I'm planning to be out celebrating my book release.



The countdown to The Haunting Love's release date continues and we are now about Three Days and Ten Hours away from February 17th! I'm excited and nervous at the same time.



I honestly hope that everyone loves my first novel, because I really enjoyed writing it! If you haven't checked out the cover art or the book trailer yet you can scoot on over to The Haunting Love page in the "Books" tab of my website to take a look: http://www.taylorfenner.com/the-haunt...



I hope everyone has a great weekend and a pleasant Valentine's Day! Don't forget to pick up The Haunting Love on Tuesday! It will be available in the Barnes and Noble Nook Store and the Amazon Kindle Store and you can still pre-order it here:



Amazon: http://amzn.com/B00SW1B940

Barnes and Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-h...

How Did I Get Here?

With about a week and a half until The Haunting Love's release I've decided to devote this week's blog to telling you a little about how I got to this point.

I've always wanted to be a writer one way or another. When I was in the third grade I was watching the movie Moulin Rouge and when Ewan McGregor sat down and began typing out his story on that ancient typewriter I decided to type out a story of my own on our very own typewriter. No, I didn't have one of those awesome old fashioned typewriters with the round keys you push down; although come to think of it I think we had one of those in the basement at our old house, but the keys didn't work anymore. My typewriter, which technically belonged to my grandmother, was a newer computerized model with spell check. We still have that typewriter to this day but it sits in the closet collecting dust thanks to us transitioning to computers years ago.

That same year in school we had to write a letter to someone we admired or someone who had a job we aspired to have someday. I can't remember who everyone wrote to anymore but I remember that a lot of my classmates wrote to President Bush, who was president at the time. I chose to write to Meg Cabot, who to this day remains one of my favorite authors. My teacher was taken aback, since she had never heard of her and had to scramble to find an address to send the letter to. (Remind yourself, this was roughly 2001, long before Facebook or Twitter existed.) To my surprise Meg Cabot wrote back. In her letter she told me if I really wanted to be an author to just keep writing and never give up. I'm not sure if I still have that letter or not; it's probably packed away somewhere, but that letter meant so much to me.

As the next few years passed, roughly grades 4-6 my favorite part of school was creative writing time. I'm sure I've mentioned that before. I'd write cute little stories I was so proud to show my teachers. When I was in the fifth grade I went through a major Laura Ingalls Wilder phase. We had read Little House on the Prairie the year before in school and I fell in love with it. My grandmother and my great-uncle even took me on a vacation to some of the places Laura Ingalls Wilder had lived here in Wisconsin as well as in Minnesota and De Smet, SD. I fell in love with South Dakota during that trip so naturally most of the stories I wrote that following year revolved around South Dakota. The one I remember the most was one about a blizzard hitting the Sioux Falls area.

The next few years, with the end of middle school and beginning of high school didn't yield much class time to devote to writing short stories until I started homeschooling as a sophomore. As you know I started and finished writing The Haunting Love in high school.

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The Haunting Love's release date is fast approaching, only a week from Tuesday! Did you know that you can preorder The Haunting Love on Amazon and Barnes and Noble and it will be delivered to your Kindle or Nook on February 17th?

The link to the Amazon page: http://amzn.com/B00SW1B940

The link to the Barnes and Noble page: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-h...

It's so amazing to see my name on Barnes and Noble. I never thought this day would come.

Did you also know that you can become a fan of mine on Goodreads? Goodreads is a great website to discover new authors and books as well as keep track of what you're reading, recommend a book to friends, and join book clubs!

My page on there is: http://www.goodreads.com/taylorfenner. You can become my fan, see what I'm reading, mark The Haunting Love in your books to be read, and write a review / recommend it to your friends after you read it!

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I hope everyone has a great Friday and an amazing weekend!

What Being A Writer Means To Me

Author – (aw-ther) noun:
A person who writes a novel, poem, essay, etc.; the composer of a literary work.

Writer – (rahy-ter) noun:
1. A person engaged in writing books, articles, stories, etc.; especially as an occupation or profession; an author or journalist.
2. A person who commits his or her thoughts, ideas, etc., to writing.
3. A person who writes or is able to write.

You may well be wondering why I began this week’s blog with the definitions of the words author and writer. Many years ago I read a short story in an anthology of young adult paranormal romance stories. I was very interested in reading more by the author of that specific story so I paid a visit to the author’s website.

On her website she had a section about “how to be a professional author”. Being the aspiring author I was I was eager for any advice this author could give. Some of the advice was common sense: read a lot, write a lot, be patient, etc. Then I saw a bullet point that read “if you self-publish your book you’re not a ‘real author’”.

That line has always stuck with me, even six years later; so I’d like to explain what I think being a ‘real author’ means.

To me an author is any person who sets a pen to paper or their fingers to a keyboard (or any other method of writing) to tell a story. To me there is no such thing as a ‘real author’ or a ‘fake author’. If you have a story bouncing around in your head begging to be told then by all means let it out!

Writing can be a lot of things for a lot of different people. It can be therapeutic to write down your thoughts in a journal; I do every day at the end of the day. It can also be a way of remembering your observations; like the day I saw a woman walking a ferret down the street on a leash or the day we had to call the “squirrel whisperer” when a baby squirrel latched itself onto our screen door and wouldn’t let go. The things you wouldn’t believe if you didn’t know they were true.

It doesn’t matter what you write, whether it is a poem, a short story, a play, an essay, a novella, or a novel; that still makes you a writer (or a poet or a playwright).

You might just write for your own amusement or you might proudly show it off to all your friends and family. Hell, you might even post it online or yikes! send it in to a publisher to try to get it published. It’s all up to you.

For someone to say that a person isn’t a ‘real author’ because they do things differently is just someone being a jerk. We now live in a time in which self-publishing is much more accepted than it was five or ten years ago. With websites like Smashwords or Createspace and the ease of self-publishing eBooks on the Amazon Kindle or the Barnes and Noble Nook self-publishing has come a long way.

My first novel, The Haunting Love, was contracted by a small e-book publisher Whiskey Creek Press and is about to come out on February 17th. Does that make me less of an author than someone who was published by a big box publisher? No it doesn’t. I may not get as much exposure but this is an excellent starting point.

I’m still planning on self-publishing my second novel, Finding Elizabeth, hopefully by the end of 2015. It is my belief that the popularity of the ‘indie writer’ is rising.

As for me, my journey to becoming an author began in childhood. I’ve always been an avid storyteller. My favorite part of school used to be when we got to write short stories for creative writing or as a means to learn and understand our spelling words.

I started writing The Haunting Love when I was in high school. I was homeschooled for most of high school so I had more freedom with my English classes. I finished writing The Haunting Love during the end of my senior year, when I was seventeen-years-old. Now here we are, eighteen days until it’s release date. I couldn’t be happier.

My advice to anyone out there aspiring to be a published author is to never give up. I know everyone says that but do not get discouraged. If it’s meant to be it will be! I won’t lie to you and say rejection letters don’t sting, because they do, but if you want it bad enough you have to keep trying!

That’s all I’ve got for right now. Have a great weekend everyone! And try not to party too much at any of those Super Bowl parties!