Zara Hoffman's Blog: Zara Hoffman's Goodreads Author Blog, page 11

Release Day: Twisted Fate by Jessi Elliott

Today's the day! You can finally grab your copy of this amazing New Adult urban fantasy romance featuring college, fae, music, and magic.Title: Twisted Fate
Series: Twisted, 1
Author: Jessi Elliott
Genre: NA Urban Fantasy
Publication Date: February 13, 2018

Being kidnapped by the Leader of the Fae really puts a dent in your senior year.

Aurora Marshall is sharp, witty, and always has a plan. Ready to finish her business degree and graduate, her life is going smoothly—until the night she meets Tristan Westbrook.

Tristan, the overbearing, gorgeous fae leader, and an admired businessman in the human world, is all kinds of dangerous. While he finds Aurora intriguing, her refusal to bend to his will keeps them locked in a constant power struggle.

Entering into a deal is the only way to escape Tristan’s clutches, which only plunges Aurora deeper into the fae world. With her future at stake, she is forced to handle his arrogance and extraordinary fae abilities as she fights to stay grounded in her mundane life.

Not to mention her struggle to ignore the growing attraction she knows she shouldn’t feel for the man who kidnapped her.

When people said college would be the most exciting time of her life, Aurora never thought this is what they meant.

February: Personal Growth Comes First

I have something to confess: since my last blog post, I haven't revised any more of  Unmoored . I got a new schedule for my semester off which has been very draining while I've adapted to it. However, I'm hoping this week will be a lot more productive for me on the revising front.

Today also kicks off the first of 4 consecutive days I'll be blogging because today is Monday (so my normal check in), tomorrow is the release of my friend's book  Twisted Fate , Wednesday is the cover reveal for Unmoored, and Thursday I'm sharing the cover for one of my favorite author's new book:  Kiss Collector .

So, I'm going to leave it at that: short and sweet, and get to revising!

Guest Post: Writing Fifty-One by Chris Barnham

My time travel romance novel, Fifty-One, is published by Filles Vertes Publishing on 12th February. It’s a twisty tale, as time travel stories should be, with romance, excitement and tragedy. And a surprise ending you won’t see coming.

It’s also a story with strong roots in the part of London where I live. It was a terrible event in our local history that planted the seed of the story in my mind.

Half a mile from my home is Lewisham High Street. There’s nothing special about it – shabby, even by London standards: a street market, cheap restaurants, phone shops and chain stores. It’s seen better days.

One day that definitely was not better – indeed, it was probably the worst – was Friday July 28th, 1944.

On the wall outside Marks and Spencer, is a plaque. I stopped one day and read it. July 1944 was already five years into a ruinous war. London had suffered terribly in 1940-41, when the German air force bombed the city nearly every night for months. But, late in the war, when the Germans were clearly losing, London suffered a short but frightening reprise of the aerial bombardment, when Hitler unleashed his long-rumored new weapons, starting with the V1 – a jet-propelled, pilotless plane.

These flying bombs terrified Londoners. They came at any time, droning across the city’s sky until their engines cut out, and the V1 spiraled blindly down, to explode wherever it landed. There was no protection – they contained more high-explosive than any previous individual bomb, and they fell indiscriminately, meaning blackout precautions were no protection.
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After I read the inscription on that plaque, I looked around, seeing the street with new eyes. I counted the people I could see around me, losing count in the forties. I tried to imagine what it must have been like – 9:41 on a Friday morning, a busy shopping street, explosive death falling from a clear sky, killing in an instant everyone I could see, and wounding hundreds more. Lewisham High Street, after the July 1944 V1 It stuck in my mind, the horror of those seconds as the bomb came down. I knew I had to write a story about it, which I duly did.

It was a ghost story – a short piece called ‘Fifty One’ – in which a boy accidentally causes his girlfriend to run to the precise place the bomb fell, bringing about her death. He’s haunted by the thought of what was in her mind as she died – the belief that he had betrayed her, and she died before he could explain. The twist in the story is that the narrator was also killed by the bomb, and forever frozen in place, able to see his similarly ghostly lover, but unable to reach her. The story won a Dark Tales contest, and appeared in Dark Tales 16 a few years ago. You can find it here.
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But the V1 stuck with me, nagging away at the back of my mind. I knew there was more to write about that incident. I started writing the novel that would eventually also be called Fifty-One.

It often happens that a short story provides the seed for a longer work. Fifty-One was a little unusual in growing out of two short stories. The Dark Tales piece (Fifty One) provided the V1 disaster. But I took other important elements from another, very different short story, which appeared in the November 2016 inaugural issue of Phantaxis, a science fiction and fantasy magazine.

This story was called‘How Stanley Spencer Painted the Cookham Resurrection’, it was a light-hearted time travel romp, in which a team of timecops go back to the 1920s to prevent religious fanatics stopping England’s top 20th Century painter completing his masterpiece. Instead (spoiler alert!), they inadvertently provide the inspiration!

Mixing time travel with the stark power of that bomb falling on a London market street, gave me the germ of the novel that became ‘Fifty One’. In this story, the main character is Jacob Wesson, a timecop sent back 100 years from 2040 to wartime London to foil a plot to assassinate Winston Churchill.  The assignment plays out with apparent ease, but the jump home goes wrong, leaving Jake stranded in the war-ravaged city.
 
Stuck in the past, Jake must pull from his training and blend in. He clings to the one familiar face he can find, Amy Jenkins, a war widow whose life he saved during the assignment. Drawn to each other by their loneliness and thrown together amid the terror of war, Jake and Amy look to a future together.

But Jake’s future cannot let him go. And when his bosses finally find him in 1944, Jake faces a terrible choice: risk unraveling the modern world, or let Amy die…​About the BookTitle: Fifty-One
Author: Chris Barnham
Genre: Historical SciFi / Time Travel
Publisher: Filles Vertes Publishing, LLC
Publication Date: February 12, 2018

PreorderJacob Wesson is a timecop from 2040, sent back to WWII London to stop the assassination of Britain’s war leader. The assignment plays out with apparent ease, but the jump home goes wrong, stranding Jake in war-ravaged 1944. Jake’s team, including his long-time girlfriend, is desperate to trace him before something else goes wrong.

Stuck in the past, Jake must pull from his training and blend in. He clings to the one familiar face he can find, Amy Jenkins, a war widow whose life he saved during the assignment. Drawn to each other by their loneliness and thrown together amid the terror of war, Jake and Amy look to a future together.

But Jake’s future cannot let him go. And when his bosses finally find him in 1944, Jake faces a terrible choice: risk unraveling the modern world, or let Amy die.
About the AuthorChris Barnham used to work for the British government, advising Ministers on education and employment policies. Now he makes stuff up for himself. His short fiction has appeared in a range of magazines, including Compelling Science Fiction, Interzone, the UK’s premier science fiction magazine, Black Static, and the late-lamented Pan Books of Horror.

Chris lives in London, England, with three tall children and a scary wife. Whenever work allows, he spends as much time as possible out of town with mud on his boots. His latest walking challenge is the 630-mile South West Coast Path, around the Devon and Cornwall coasts. You can follow his (slow) progress on his blog.
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Blog Tour: Twisted Fate by Jessi Elliott

About the BookTitle: Twisted Fate
Series: Twisted, 1
Author: Jessi Elliott
Genre: NA Urban Fantasy
Publication Date: February 13, 2018

Being kidnapped by the Leader of the Fae really puts a dent in your senior year.

Aurora Marshall is sharp, witty, and always has a plan. Ready to finish her business degree and graduate, her life is going smoothly—until the night she meets Tristan Westbrook.

Tristan, the overbearing, gorgeous fae leader, and an admired businessman in the human world, is all kinds of dangerous. While he finds Aurora intriguing, her refusal to bend to his will keeps them locked in a constant power struggle.

Entering into a deal is the only way to escape Tristan’s clutches, which only plunges Aurora deeper into the fae world. With her future at stake, she is forced to handle his arrogance and extraordinary fae abilities as she fights to stay grounded in her mundane life.

Not to mention her struggle to ignore the growing attraction she knows she shouldn’t feel for the man who kidnapped her.

When people said college would be the most exciting time of her life, Aurora never thought this is what they meant.
My ReviewI remember reading this book way back in June of 2017 when I was a beta reader. Even further backs read the first chapter in December 2016, so I've been waiting for this book to come out for a long time so I could gush over how much I love this book. And the time has come for me to do that.
Let's start with the premise. That got me hooked immediately. It has everything I want in an urban fantasy story, paranormal romance, and a new adult romance rolled into one. I've been displeased with the general lack of genre new adult stories for a long time, but this is an amazing example of why there needs to be more.

I'm not going to really talk about Aurora's "normal" life much in this review. Before she meets Tristan, she's a regular college girl. She's smart, sassy, much more fearless than I am but makes me aspire to be more like her, and has a good heart. And while that part of her life, particularly her family stuff, is well-written and important, it's not the meat of the story.

But the fae world? Absolutely captivated me. Unlike the author, I haven't yet read A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas, making Twisted Fate my introduction to new adult fae who are sexy, dangerous, and nothing like Tinker Bell and her friends. Tristan is all of those things (making him an automatic candidate for my latest favorite book boyfriend) and while he can be high-handed, he's not malicious and clearly cares very deeply for Aurora. Zooming back out a little, the mythology and history of the fae in this story was really well thought-out. The war between light and dark fae was particularly interesting because it subverts almost every expectation I had when I first read about it (which is really tough to do since I often see things coming a mile away in books). My favorite part (besides Tristan and Aurora, obviously) was the fae magic. I'm a sucker for cool magic, and this book delivers the goods.

Now, onto the romance (I really buried the lead, didn't I?): Give me a handsome, brooding, (preferably supernatural) guy, a witty/sassy girl who isn't afraid of him like everyone else, and lots of snarky banter, and you can almost guarantee I'm a fan. Make each of them well-rounded with clear priorities, allegiances, and personality quirks? Now I'll really love them: individually and as a couple. That one-two punch is important. And, boy, do Tristan and Aurora have all of these and perhaps most importantly (in a romance book, maybe in real life, too): chemistry. I could have made this whole review about their chemistry, or even about one particular scene that has the author embarrassed to have her family read the book—it's that good. But all I'll say is that if you like romance novels, but are sick of either the guy, the girl, or both being too one-dimensional for their own good, you'll be pleased to know that Tristan and Aurora could pop out of the pages as real people (can't say "humans" for the obvious reason that Tristan isn't​).

In short: I love this book! Jessi's take on fae is so interesting, all the characters are complex and intriguing, and the plot pushes you through from cover to cover, dying to know what happens next. About the Author Jessi Elliott is a newly graduated law clerk and debut author of both young adult and new adult romantic fiction. Her love of writing was born after many years of reading and reviewing books on her blog Living Within Fiction.

She lives in Southwestern Ontario with her family and two adorable cats.

When she’s not plotting her next writing project, she likes to spend her time hanging with friends and family, getting lost in a steamy romance novel, watching Friends, and drinking coffee.
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You can find Jessi on her website, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to stay up to date on book news and upcoming releases.

January 2018 Wrap-Up: Progress is Beautiful

Since my last update post two weeks ago, I've experienced an unexpected (but much needed) spike in energy and efficiency. I can't say for sure, but maybe it's because I saw the cover for  Unmoored  (hint: it's beautiful). It definitely helped kick me into gear, though. It reemphasized that I need to get it out there to share with the world. The book, not the cover. The cover is being revealed February 14 (click that link to take part in it).

If you've been checking the progress bar in the sidebar as often as I have, you may notice that it now sits at 90% instead of languishing in the late 80's as it had since before the Winter Holidays. In the past few days, however, I've expanded 2—almost 3—whole chapters. And while I still have a lot more to do, I feel more confident than I have in days that I'll get it all done and make this story the best it can be.

​Comment below and tell me something you've accomplished this January. And do you have any goals for February?

Cover Reveal Call for Unmoored (The Belgrave Legacy, 2)

If you've been keeping tabs on my social media, you'll know that today I was shown the cover for Unmoored and LOVE it. My cover designer Jennifer Munswami is amazing and I'm so lucky to have found her.

​I'm so excited, I've even updated the cover in the info block below. Yes, I know I'm mean in only showing you the least-revealing corner, but how else am I supposed to make you sign up for the cover reveal? You can find the form right below the book info.Title: Unmoored
Series: The Belgrave Legacy, 2
Author: Zara Hoffman
Genre: Upper YA Paranormal Romance
Publisher: ZH Press

Add on GoodreadsA witch. A siren. Soulmates?

Alec Belgrave is overwhelmed. He's busy protecting his sister Fawn from the forces of Hell while also attending college in a different state. The last thing he expected was to learn their shared best friend was his soulmate.

As a siren, Ivy Moore knows a lot about attraction. But having Supernatural beauty is useless if her own soulmate doesn't see her as anything more than a sisterly best friend. Is it so unreasonable to want her soulmate to want her without fate pulling the strings?

They may be soulmates, but that doesn't mean love will come easily.

Unmoored is a young adult paranormal romance featuring magic and sirens. As a spin-off of The Belgrave Legacy, it can be read as a sequel or a stand-alone book.powered by Typeform

Cover Reveal: Fifty-One by Chris Barnham

About the BookTitle: Fifty-One
Author: Chris Barnham
Genre: Historical SciFi / Time Travel
Publisher: Filles Vertes Publishing, LLC
Cover Art: Kate Cowan, Broken Arrow Designs
Publication Date: February 12, 2018

PreorderJacob Wesson is a timecop from 2040, sent back to WWII London to stop the assassination of Britain’s war leader. The assignment plays out with apparent ease, but the jump home goes wrong, stranding Jake in war-ravaged 1944. Jake’s team, including his long-time girlfriend, is desperate to trace him before something else goes wrong.

Stuck in the past, Jake must pull from his training and blend in. He clings to the one familiar face he can find, Amy Jenkins, a war widow whose life he saved during the assignment. Drawn to each other by their loneliness and thrown together amid the terror of war, Jake and Amy look to a future together.

But Jake’s future cannot let him go. And when his bosses finally find him in 1944, Jake faces a terrible choice: risk unraveling the modern world, or let Amy die.
Excerpt“What is it?” asked Jake.

“There’s more detail in here.” Robinson tapped the file on the table. “Read this in a minute, but it can’t leave the room. I’ve downloaded the orders on your palmers so you can brief yourselves later. But here are the basics.” Robinson opened the folder and glanced at the first page. “The backroom boys picked up unauthorized temporal Jumps into late April and early May 1941.”

“London?” Lew leaned forward.

“Yes. A history scholar like yourself, Agent Brockley, won’t need me to tell you how crucial a time this was in the war with Nazi Germany, with Britain fighting alone and in danger of invasion.”

“So what’re they trying to do?”

“They’ve already done it, of course,” Robinson said. “We’ve checked it out, and the system says it’s at least 90 percent likely they’re behind the assassination of a politician, a guy called Winston Churchill.”

“Should I know him?” Jake didn’t share Lew’s interest in obscure periods of the past, but the thoughtful expression on Brockley’s face said he’d heard of Churchill.

“Well, he was prime minister for a year, as I’m sure Agent Brockley could’ve told you,” Robinson said. “I’ve had it checked out: if Churchill isn’t shot after a year in the job, he turns out to be an inspirational war leader.”
“How can anyone know that?”

“You know I can’t talk about that, Jake. But you can trust me on it. Churchill shouldn’t die, and your job is to save him.”

“Hold on.” Lew frowned. “What’re these guys trying to achieve by killing Churchill?”

“I assume they want Britain to lose the war.”

“But the Allies won without Churchill,” Lew said. “So they failed.”

“Maybe their computers aren’t as good as ours. But we still need to undo the damage,” Robinson said. “Look, the details are on file but a couple of things I need to say now. First, it’s very important you follow the schedule in your orders. I mean precisely—time, place, everything. You need to be where the orders tell you when they tell you. At all times.”
​
Jake nodded. Lew remained still. Neither spoke, and Robinson peered once more at the cigar in his fingers before putting it away in a desk drawer.Reviews for ​Fifty-One

If you want to stay up at night thinking about time travel, Chris Barnham is your man.
Joe Stech, Publisher/Editor-in-Chief of Compelling Science Fiction Magazine

When it comes to time travel, alternate history and the human heart, I would trust few writers more than Chris Barnham.
Nicholas Royle, Author of First Novel

About the Author ​Chris Barnham worked for two decades for the British government, advising Ministers on education and employment policies. In 2013, he decided it was time to make stuff up for himself. He now combines writing with running a small business, and active involvement in community politics in south London, where he has lived since the 1980s. His short fiction has appeared in a range of magazines, including Compelling Science Fiction, Black Static (the UK’s premier horror magazine), and the late-lamented Pan Books of Horror. His first novel, Among the Living, was published in 2012 (revised 2nd edition, 2017).

​Chris lives in London, England, with three tall children and a scary wife. Whenever work allows, he spends as much time as possible out of town with mud on his boots. His latest walking challenge is the 630-mile South West Coast Path, around the Devon and Cornwall coasts. You can follow his (slow) progress on his blog.Follow @barnham_chrisFollow Filles Vertes Publishing

Mid-January Check-In: It's Not Great

You know what they say about the best laid plans, but that didn't stop me from making a bunch at the end of December to make 2018 rock from start to finish. And I was doing well: I was working out 3x a week, took care of my dog and apartment like a boss while my mom had to be away for a week, made a rewriting list for Unmoored , printed out the manuscript, and was ready to go.

And then it all went down the drain because I got sick. I'm not even sure what it is (yes, present tense—I'm still sick as I'm writing this). It may be the flu, or a really bad virus. But I've had it for about a week now and I'm sick of being sick. And the 1 killer migraine I had didn't exactly help, either. But at least that was knocked out in 1 day of sleeping (which I was already doing a lot of).

But this isn't all to say that I've accomplished nothing. If you notice the new subscription box at the bottom of my blog posts, you can see that I am now offering my first book for free to newsletter subscribers. On the back-end, I actually completely switched from Mailchimp to Mailerlite and rewrote my welcome system. Feel free to sign up below!

Looking forward, I'm planning on tackling the Unmoored​ rewrites, revision, and edits. Stay tuned!

10 Writing Questions to Ask Yourself (from PaperFury)

These questions, like Beautiful Books, is courtesy of Paper Fury, who is coming out with her own book this year: A Thousand Perfect Notes .What genre do you write in? If you write in different genres, what's one you'd like to try that you haven't yet or one you'd never bother with? I plan to write YA and NA in multiple genres, although so far it's only been paranormal romance in The Belgrave Legacy trilogy. Some of the other ones I plan to dip into are YA dystopian romance ( The Matchmakers ),  YA contemporary ( Fearful Fairytales ), YA thriller, YA steampunk, NA contemporary romance, YA horror, NA historical romance, and NA scifi romance... just to name a few. And a lot of those genres are series, so I have a lot of work ahead of me.How do you pick your character names? Like Cait, I use  and similar sites to look up names and often pick it based on meaning. Although sometimes I just pick a name that sounds pretty.Tell me what you can about your current projects. Well, I'm currently working on finishing The Belgrave Legacy trilogy. Unmoored features a feminist siren and Taming the Alpha has a female alpha (hell, yeah!). My next project after those (which I will actually be returning to) is  The Matchmakers  and features a non-fighter as the main character in a dystopian world.What number book is this? I wrote 2 shameless Nancy Drew rip-offs, then I published The Belgrave Daughter as its own book with the intention of The Belgrave Legacy being a trilogy only about Fawn and Caleb, and wrote Tears of an Angel and The Witch's War as separate books. I turned out that I condensed all three of those stories into the published The Belgrave Legacy. So, that makes Unmoored my 7th book.What are your writing goals for the year? Like Cait (again), I want to write 4 books and edit (and publish) at least 2 of them. But unlike my "violent writing machine" of a friend, I don't quite have the time or the speed that she does so I may have gone slightly crazy when I set that goal. I guess we'll see.What are your writing strengths? Dialogue and writing in a way that hooks people. The latter is what I've been told by many people. I don't always believe it, but I do know I'm good at dialogue.Do you enjoy any other creative outlets? I read (though recently not as much as I'd like to) and I knit (although much less than I used to).Your best tip for punching writer's block? Writing every day, no matter what.Who do you write for? Me, and other readers who like the same genres I do.List 5 things you value in a story. Sympathetic characters (I don't have to love them or even like what they do, but I have to at the very least be able to sympathize with them even if I simultaneously want to smack them with their own book). Good plot (stuff has to happen and it needs to be interesting or I'll get bored. If it's fast-paced, even better). Complex relationships (Clichés don't piss me off as they probably should, but I hate one-note anything in a book: especially relationships). Good world building (slightly ironic since this is a major weakspot in my writing—at least in my opinion. I need to immerse myself in the book, and that requires good world building). And lastly a good message (I'm not talking about a moral like in ​Aesop's Fables or a hit-you-over-the-head lesson, but I want to come out of reading a book having learned something or at the very least being challenged to look at something from a different perspective).
Want to answer these questions for yourself? Click here .Questions Brought To You By

Cover Reveal + Giveaway: Twisted Fate by Jessi Elliott

About the BookTitle: Twisted Fate
Series: Twisted, 1
Author: Jessi Elliott
Genre: NA Urban Fantasy
Publication Date: February 13, 2018
Cover Artist: Okay Creations

Being kidnapped by the Leader of the Fae really puts a dent in your senior year.

Aurora Marshall is sharp, witty, and always has a plan. Ready to finish her business degree and graduate, her life is going smoothly—until the night she meets Tristan Westbrook.

Tristan, the overbearing, gorgeous fae leader, and an admired businessman in the human world, is all kinds of dangerous. While he finds Aurora intriguing, her refusal to bend to his will keeps them locked in a constant power struggle.

Entering into a deal is the only way to escape Tristan’s clutches, which only plunges Aurora deeper into the fae world. With her future at stake, she is forced to handle his arrogance and extraordinary fae abilities as she fights to stay grounded in her mundane life.

Not to mention her struggle to ignore the growing attraction she knows she shouldn’t feel for the man who kidnapped her.

When people said college would be the most exciting time of her life, Aurora never thought this is what they meant.
Signed Paperback
About the Author Jessi Elliott is a newly graduated law clerk and debut author of both young adult and new adult romantic fiction. Her love of writing was born after many years of reading and reviewing books on her blog Living Within Fiction.

She lives in Southwestern Ontario with her family and two adorable cats.

When she’s not plotting her next writing project, she likes to spend her time hanging with friends and family, getting lost in a steamy romance novel, watching Friends, and drinking coffee.
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You can find Jessi on her website, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to stay up to date on book news and upcoming releases. Giveawaya Rafflecopter giveaway