Sarah Ballance's Blog, page 75

Featured Author: Vincent Zandri on "Love At First Sight"

Find out what makes Vincent Zandri a worldwide sensation - click image!

Today is awesome. Why? Because not only do I have (*clears throat*) #1 international bestselling author Vincent Zandri here with me today, but I have you here as well! I know we're all excited, but everyone on their best behavior. Vincent writes a lot of crime drama and I'm pretty sure he knows exactly how to make us all disappear if it becomes, well, convenient. *grin*

Welcome, Vincent. Please ignore the nervous titters zig-zagging the room. They all know I have a thing for stealing bathwater and a slight propensity for stalking — all harmless, of course — and they're just waiting to see what kind of spectacle I make of myself today. But I digress! LOL. Now, where were we? Ah….

Thank you so much for being here today, and congratulations on the release of LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT. Featuring a young Army officer with impossible orders and a damaging fallout, this promises to be an intense—and for some, highly emotional—read. Can you tell readers a bit about the story?

When an approaching middle age veteran of two wars is ordered to bomb a small Tajik village, he ends up killing a little girl in the process and it causes him such severe PTSD that he begins to suffer temporary blindness. While he's recovering in Frankfort, the army brings over his fiancée whom he hasn't seen in a year. Together they head to Venice to rekindle their relationship. But it isn't easy. In the novel version of the story I'm now writing, his fiancée eventually goes missing.

What an incredibly poignant storyline. It must rip at the heart strings, which begs a question.  What brought you—an internationally best-selling author of crime fiction—to cross into what readers consider more of a romantic tale?

I'm not sure. Other people tell me it's "romantic." I hit  the number 1 spot in Romantic Thriller on Amazon with my novel The Remains. Totally unintentional. But it told me I could write a romantic story.

Making the best seller list will certainly inspire confidence. (My brush with it involved two digits to your one, but I was giddy nonetheless! LOL.)  You must have made quite an impact with this story, as there are rumblings of a sequel in the works for LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT. Any plans, or is this just wishful thinking on the part of readers? :c)

I'm writing a full-length novel based on it. It's called Precious.

I hear folks taking notes so they won't miss it. :c) Your success is something of which most authors can only dream. What, for you, was that pivotal moment when you realized you'd made it? Or are you still reaching for that moment?

Still reaching.  Always reaching.  If I've made it, the journey stops.

And with that drive, you've got a long, undoubtedly awesome ride ahead. *grin* You may be new to some of our romance enthusiasts around here. If a reader is unfamiliar with your work, which of your books would you suggest he or she read first?  Why?

The Innocent.

A top ten Amazon ebook, and #1 in ALL of the following categories: hard-boiled mystery, psychological suspense thriller, and mystery. Yes, that one! LOL. Which genre are you drawn to as a reader?  Do you prefer to read in the same genre as your WIP or do you mix it up?

I generally mix it up. Non-fiction, biography, fiction. If I'm writing something in a particular genre I sometimes watch movies in the same genre since I think cinematically when I write.

What a great way to get a feel for your work! And on that note, let's give it a closer look:

LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT | blurb & links

A young U.S. Army officer who's served in Afghanistan finds himself suffering from intermittent bouts of "hysterical" temporary blindness due to impossible and deadly orders he was forced to obey by high command in the field. When he's reunited with his fiancée in a military hospital in Germany after being separated for more than year, the couple are encouraged by doctors to travel to Venice, Italy together. There, amongst the canals and the cafes, they try to rekindle their love and fight off their personal demons while trying to comprehend the enormity of the heartbreaking role they now must play in love and war.

MORE INFO & BUY @  Amazon | Barnes & Noble

VINCENT ZANDI | bio & links

Vincent Zandri is the No. 1 International Bestselling author of THE INNOCENT, GODCHILD, THE REMAINS, MOONLIGHT FALLS, CONCRETE PEARL, MOONLIGHT RISES and SCREAM CATCHER. He is also the author of the bestselling digital shorts, PATHOLOGICAL and MOONLIGHT MAFIA. Harlan Coben has described his novels as "…gritty, fast-paced, lyrical and haunting," while the New York Post called THE INNOCENT, "Sensational…Masterful…Brilliant!" In March, April and May of 2011, he sold more than 100,000 Kindle E-Book editions of his novels. In September 2011, he signed a major deal with Thomas and Mercer of Amazon for the publication of his new novel, Murder by Moonlight, and the re-publication of many of his back-list titles, including The Innocent and The Remains. Zandri's list of publishers also include Delacorte, Dell, StoneHouse Ink and StoneGate Ink. An MFA in Writing graduate of Vermont College, Zandri's work is translated into many languages including the Dutch, Russian and Japanese. An adventurer, foreign correspondent, and freelance photo-journalist for RT, Globalspec, IBTimes and more, he lives in New York. For more go to WWW.VINCENTZANDRI.COM

VINCENT ZANDRI LINKAGE @ Website | Blog | Amazon Author Page | Facebook | Twitter

Vincent, it's been an honor to have you here today. I appreciate your time and hope you'll enjoy a whole lot of success at the top.  Special thanks to Belle Consulting for arranging this appearance and, as always, thank you all for joining us. Have a wonderful day, everyone!

Click logo for more information.

1.22.12 #SixSunday with Tide of Lies

Can't wait for this one? Check out FAMILIAR LIGHT (only $3!) to get the early scoop on the unsolved murders leading to the LIES! Here's today's snippet between Holden and Julia, ex-lovers who haven't seen one another since she disappeared years ago without a word of explanation.

"Don't," she said, her voice lost to the sound of her hammering heartbeat.

"Don't what?"

Ten years and two lies melted into oblivion. "Don't be sorry."

Holden reached for her, the move hesitant, this time his darkening eyes anything but businesslike. Threading his fingers through her hair, he cupped the back of her head with a touch so gentle she feared she might have imagined it.

TIDE OF LIES – romantic suspense coming soon (excerpt subject to the wrath of my editor)

Enjoy your Sunday six sentences at a time!  To see other participating authors, click here.

A Day in the Life (of a Full Time Author)

Originally posted on Moonlight, Lace, and Mayhem (1/20/11)

By most writerly-type accounts, I have a dream job. Or - more specifically - I don't have a job at all. Cue the tickertape parade, ya'll, because I'm a full time author. A full time author with a bill-paying spouse and absolutely zero income requirements.

Does it get any better than that?

Snort.

Now, before you go thinking I've got it made – or, even more laughable – that I've "made it," I'd like to invite you to be me for a day. Brace yourself for the glamour, my friends - this is one reality show yet to make prime time.

5:00 a.m. – Alarm goes off a full hour before necessary. It's the "writing alarm" – the one you set so you can get up and amass wordage before the kids invade the day. You are excited. TODAY is the day you'll get your characters off the floor where you left them and out of the first chapter. You can feel it! Today will be different!

5:01 a.m. – You're still listening to the alarm. The bed is warm, you're comfy, and you know the H will get annoyed and cut off the alarm so you have zero motivation to move. Your characters will be perfectly fine on the floor for another hour.

6:30 a.m. – The H is late for work - his fault for doing the whole alarm-cutty-offy thing. He's not amused when you mumble this from beneath a thick, fluffy pile of blankets while he pulls on layers after layer of long underwear to face a 20 degree morning.

8:00 a.m. – You awake to the distinct odor of a three-year-old wearing a wet pullup sitting on the bed somewhere in the vicinity of your head. If you're lucky, you only smell pee. He repeats "Good morning, Mommy" – louder each time - until he wakes up the baby.

8:10 a.m. – You're up, the baby is up, the offender has been banned from your bed for life. You need coffee or, rather, Sam's Club brand vanilla cappuccino. It's instant, so you put a cup of water in the microwave.

8:11 a.m. – There's not a whole lot you can get done in the two minutes it takes to heat water in the microwave, so you unload the dishwasher.

8:12 a.m. – Then you load it.

8:30 a.m. – Feeling accomplished with the dishwashing thing, you open the handy dandy netbook to add more brilliant words to your WIP. A mere two seconds after you vow not to go online until you've written at least a full page, you are so distracted by what you might be missing in your inbox that you decide it's more prudent to take a quick look than it is to lose writing time to incessant curiosity.

9:30 a.m. – Still online. 'Nuff said.

9:35 a.m. – Kids want pancakes or French toast. You feel guilty knowing you're going to try to make up that lost writing time later in the day, so as a pre-emptive strike on your conscious you agree to make pancakes or French toast. (Well, there's that and there's the idea of a steamy, buttery stack of stuff covered in syrup.)

11:00 a.m. – You're still flipping breakfast over a hot stove. You vow to use the griddle next time, because getting it out can't possibly be more trouble than making 30 whatevers one at a time for a herd of five ravenous children (plus a baby with only two teeth).

11:30 – You find the forgotten cappuccino water in the microwave. Reheat.

12:00 – Two of your six children are still asleep. You've yet to find time to eat your cold breakfast, and now the other kids want lunch "because it's noon." The pan is still hot from breakfast. You threaten them from the kitchen with it.

1:00 p.m. – The kids are working on their home school assignments, no one has questions, and there's peace on your two acres of Earth. Time to tackle your manuscript.

1:05 p.m. – A squabble erupts over a pencil (you don't know why because they each have a set of 24 personalized pencils that promised to put an end to this). You referee. The sound of the world ending wakes up the baby.

2:00 p.m. – After almost an hour of howling interrupted-nap-woes, the baby has returned to peaceful slumber. The other kids are (literally) in their corners, Pencil Gate resolved, accomplishing things. You experience a twinge of envy.

2:02 p.m. – The computer is open. You can't remember the file name of your manuscript. (Yes, I'm serious.)

2:10 p.m. – The mailman is at the door. It is at this point you realize you are still wearing pajama pants and have yet to corral the girls with a bra.

2:11 p.m. – Everyone went careening from their work stations to see what package came today, so you go ahead and do the group lessons. Ancient Assyria, here we come.

3:00 p.m. – Writing time. And this time you mean it. Right after you check your email.

3:45 p.m. – You've just finished telling every friend, message board, and social network you know about the stellar review or awesome reader e-mail you just found in the inbox you were not supposed to be anywhere near.

4:30 p.m. – … and now you've squealed in turn over their great news, fab reviews, and left comments at their blogs. You know you haven't made adequate rounds, but it's past time to start the bread dough for dinner.

7:00 p.m. – The meal rivaled anything Paula Deen might put on the table to acquiesce the guilt you're about to feel about shutting the bedroom door so you can work on your manuscript. After piles of homemade mashed potatoes, fresh baked bread, home-grown veggies, and a roast worthy of Sunday dinner, you realize you didn't exercise today.

7:10 p.m. – Your readers and peeps have left emails and messages in response to your emails and messages. You reply.

8:00 p.m. – You remember you have a blog / guest blog / interview to finish. Yesterday.

9:00 p.m. – One of your delightful offspring is asking for the 10th time in two hours if you'd like anything to drink. You give up on "no thanks" and ask for cappuccino, at which point you remember the cup of water in the microwave. You hope the kid is smart enough to reheat the water.

9:05 p.m. – Cappuccino comes, and with it word spreads that the barrier of the closed door has been successfully breached with no fatalities. Bringer-of-cappuccino demands a quarter for his services. You decide you like his business acumen and glare until he goes away, quarterless.

9:06 p.m. – Having seen a sibling return from your territory unharmed, ten-year-old boy comes in to discuss the garden. (The one that's a good three months from going into the ground.) You close the computer and give him your full attention because (a) your kid is beyond excited about gardening and doesn't care a lick about video games and (b) not only is he still speaking to you in these tween years, but he clearly values your opinion. This is way better than fiction.

9:34 p.m. – You really don't care this much about the garden.

11:00 p.m. – The other writing stuff is done. Rather than opening your manuscript at this late hour, you set the alarm for 5:00 a.m. and vow you'll get up early to write. You don't have to go to work, so you'll have all day to get those characters off the floor and out of chapter one. And you're almost too excited to sleep.

Tomorrow will be different.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Sarah stays at home with her six precious children, each of whom are adorable when they're asleep. Contrary to what you might expect after spending a day in her life, she only contemplates murder within the pages of a book. The cast of her first romantic suspense, RUN TO YOU, is getting killer reviews while the characters from her new novel are getting cramped up after a few weeks in the same position on the floor. But no worries. She'll work on that … tomorrow.

Real Life Romance and Murder: The Story Behind RUN TO YOU

(originally posted on Writers Gone Wild 12/14/10)


It was a dark and stormy night ….

Hey! Where are you going? It really WAS a dark and stormy night, but not the thunder-and-lightning kind you'd expect from such a well-worn cliché. Although lightning must have struck somewhere, as the husband and I actually managed to escape our sizable herd of five young children, not yet aware of the sixth one on the way. (For some of you, that will be the scariest part of this story. Please continue reading anyway.)

It was October of 2009. I'd just finished and submitted my first novel to Noble and really wanted to write a romantic suspense. But, story ideas? Not a one. Which brings us back to the dark and stormy night my loving husband suggested we take a walk on the beach.

Um, what?

Don't get me wrong. I LOVE the beach. I've lived within minutes of the coast my entire life, and even though I've traveled extensively there's little to compare to standing on the edge of the world, witnessing the power of the ocean and the vastness of the sky. It's where dreams are born … in the sunlight. On a black night? Don't think so!

Here's a little secret I don't keep very well. I can talk myself into worrying about almost anything.
Husband: "Do you want to go get ice cream?"
Kids: "YAAAAAAYYY!"
Me: "No. What if I say yes and we end up in some horrible accident? It will be my fault."
Husband: "Yes, you are the controller of the universe. Now get in the car." (Note the sarcasm. He's all mine, girls!).

Needless to say, I wasn't THRILLED with the idea of walking down the beach that night. Any night, I'm worried about what could happen. Stepping on seaweed (I know people pay for those treatments, but a cold, slimy seaweed surprise under a bare foot is screech-worthy), being attacked (as if a stranger could pose a greater threat than the hubster, who can merely look at me and knock me up … besides, he's packing more than super sperm), getting lost (it's really dark, everything looks the same … which dune is the car behind, exactly?), and an innumerable slew of similar worries. But THIS night … oh, my. I'd take the seaweed surprise over this any day, thank you.

A thick layer of clouds obscured the moon, but just enough light crept through to make the whole scene terrifying. We had some sort of nor'easter blow through, and the waves were hideous. They crashed and boiled mercilessly, tossing salt-spun foam to the skies. Said foam quite literally flew through the air and smacked into us. (If you've never opened your mouth to talk only to have the universe toss gobs of sea foam into it, well, you're either living right or not living at all.)

The scant bit of moonlight was just enough to highlight the white caps, flying wave regurgitation, and the occasional shadow of a sand crab careening past. Between the noise of the waves and the silence of the sand – the bits not pelting us without mercy, anyway – I had this creepy feeling gurgling in my throat that some lunatic meaning harm could be a step behind me and I'd never know it. And it was there, in that moment, RUN TO YOU was born. The beach. A bitter night. Murder. THE plot I'd been searching for.
So, yeah. My hubby takes me for a romantic walk on the beach, and I'm killing people in my head. After more than 13 years of marriage, it's romance enough.

Run to You

My House Smells Like My WIP

Last night my hubby brought me two brand-new-40-years-ago 8-track car radios. (You think that’s romantic? Shoulda seen the toilet seat I got for Valentine’s Day! But I confess, I begged for it – that thing is awesome.). Anyway, I opened the box and somehow expected that new electronics smell to hit me. Needless to say, it did not. But what did waft out of the box took me back almost three decades, flooding me with a memory I haven’t felt with such clarity in any one of those 30 years.

It’s 4am, cold outside, and I’m just a tot laying across the back seat of my grandfather’s car watching the stars stream over the back window. (Those were the days before seat belts were required, when getting tossed around because the driver slammed on the brakes was met with an unsympathetic “that’ll learn you.”) We’re on our way to the bus station to meet my grandma’s bus to or from her mama’s house, 20 hours and a handful of states away. Just out of the driveway, he’s taking off “like a bat out of you-know-where” (screeches my grandma, every time), and the radio is static. Maybe there were words in there somewhere, but all I remember is the static. That, and the smell, which for some odd reason was a perfect match for those “new” radios.

Scent is a powerful thing, especially if an old box can haul me back 30 years. But it can also offer mighty inspiration, as is the case with my house and my third novel, now my work-in-progress.

My WIP is modern, but deeply threaded with a piece of Colonial America. To steal my own words from a recent interview, it revisits a strand of American history known for a sordid, unsettled past with a way of leaching through to the present. To be honest, it’s bone-creepy at times.

But here’s the amazing thing. When fall rollicks across the landscape, every now and then a cool gust of air will coil down the chimney just so. It’ll breach the barrier of the woodstove – still locked up tight from the summer – and permeate the house with the scent of history. It’s the smell of an old fire, of 400-year-old timbers steeped in dust, of a war fought (and lost – I’m a southerner, ya’ll) on the very ground beneath my feet.

It’s always fleeting, this whisper of scent from the woodstove, but it carries with it the heart of my novel. Like the 8-track player and my grandfather’s car, this smell takes me back a few years, to the moment I stepped through the threshold of history responsible for inspiring my story.

You don’t have to be a writer to imagine the impact of having your story move in and plant its freeloading butt right there on the hardwood. The visits are unpredictable and consistent all at once – I know it’ll find me, but it strikes on its own time, carrying me into the world of my characters, begging me to bring them to life.

It’s real, and with it so are my characters. It’s a beautiful way to write.