P.D. Workman's Blog, page 124

Excerpt from As Night Falls

I am currently running a fundraising campaign for Avenue 15, a local youth shelter run by the Boys and Girls Club. I am getting a good number of clicks, but sadly not much by way of donations. If you want to help give homeless kids a place to sleep, don’t assume that someone else will; please donate!

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme. Read the rules at Books and a Beat. Anyone can play along!

My read this week is As Night Falls by Jenny Milchman. It is a psychological thriller, well done, with a couple of surprise twists. Good tension and well-developed characters. If you’re up for a hostage situation in an isolated house in the middle of a snowstorm, this one is for you!

But the charge Ivy had hurled was absurd. Sandy had treasured her daughter from the moment she was born, and worked hard to weave closeness between the two of them. She’d never lied to Ivy—not even taking advantage of the shortcuts all parents used: substituting a maybe when the answer was clearly no way, or promising that the goldfish was going to live.

Jenny Milchman, As Night Falls

Sandy Tremont has always tried to give her family everything. But, as the sky darkens over the Adirondacks and a heavy snowfall looms, an escaped murderer with the power to take it all away draws close.

In her isolated home in the shadowy woods, Sandy prepares dinner after a fight with her daughter, Ivy. Upstairs, the fifteen-year-old—smart, brave, and with every reason to be angry tonight—keeps her distance from her mother. Sandy’s husband, Ben, a wilderness guide, arrives late to find a home simmering with unease.

Nearby, two desperate men on the run make their way through the fading light, bloodstained and determined to leave no loose ends or witnesses. After almost twenty years as prison cellmates, they have become a deadly team: Harlan the muscle, Nick the mind and will. As they approach a secluded house and look through its windows to see a cozy domestic scene, Nick knows that here he will find what he’s looking for . . . before he disappears forever.

Help homeless teens and get a free Kindle book

How would you like to help homeless kids in Calgary and get a free Kindle* copy of Questing for a Dream?

I am running a donation campaign for the youth shelter Avenue 15, run by the Boys and Girls Club of Calgary. This is not sponsored or endorsed by the Boys and Girls Club, it is just me, picking out a shelter that I know helps teens like Nadie in Questing for a Dream, who are homeless or out on the street in Calgary. Avenue 15 is a well-established shelter that has been around since before I was a teenager. Here is a video about them.

Here’s how my fundraiser works:

Send me your donation (you choose how much) through PayPal by clicking the button below.
Your email address will be added to my email mailing list (you will be notified of new releases, promotions, etc.)
The first twenty donors will be gifted a free Kindle copy of Questing for a Dream
I will send 100% of the donations to The Boys and Girls Club of Calgary

*A Kindle is not required to read this book. You can download the Kindle App onto your phone, tablet, computer, or use the Cloud Reader in your browser.

Excerpt from best-seller Defending Jacob

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme. Read the rules at Books and a Beat. Anyone can play along!

I recently finished William Landay’s New York Times bestseller Defending Jacob. Wow. My only hesitation in a wholehearted recommendation of Defending Jacob is the frequent use of the f-bomb. Sensitive readers, stay away from this one.

If you are a fan of courtroom procedurals, police procedurals, and psychological thrillers, Defending Jacob deserves a place on your shelf. Well-developed characters with real, complex relationships, plenty of tension, and a couple of twists that will take your breath away.

You may think you know what is coming, but you don’t! If you are tired of tropes, Defending Jacob will hit the spot!

‘You’re staring.’

‘You’re my wife. I’m allowed to stare.’

‘Is that the rule?’

‘Yes. Stare, leer, ogle, anything I want. Trust me. I’m a lawyer.’

William Landay, Defending Jacob

Andy Barber has been an assistant district attorney for two decades. He is respected. Admired in the courtroom. Happy at home with the loves of his life, his wife, Laurie, and teenage son, Jacob.

Then Andy’s quiet suburb is stunned by a shocking crime: a young boy stabbed to death in a leafy park. And an even greater shock: The accused is Andy’s own son—shy, awkward, mysterious Jacob.

Andy believes in Jacob’s innocence. Any parent would. But the pressure mounts. Damning evidence. Doubt. A faltering marriage. The neighbors’ contempt. A murder trial that threatens to obliterate Andy’s family.

It is the ultimate test for any parent: How far would you go to protect your child? It is a test of devotion. A test of how well a parent can know a child. For Andy Barber, a man with an iron will and a dark secret, it is a test of guilt and innocence in the deepest sense.

How far would you go?

What do you do when you’re not writing?

If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ve probably noticed that I am not always working on the first draft of a new book. Generally, I spend a few weeks writing a new book and then take a few weeks off before writing the next one. What happens after the first draft? What am I doing in the intervening weeks when it looks like there is no activity?

Here is a peek behind the scenes at what I have been working on since finishing the first draft of Making her Mark at the end of April.

Making her Mark is ‘seasoning’. After writing a new book, it goes on the shelf for a month so that I can look at it with fresh eyes to spot any plot holes, continuity issues, missing descriptions, etc. I forget enough about what I wrote in the high-speed first draft to be pleasantly surprised when I read it a month later.

 

Gem Himself Alone is a title you haven’t seen here yet. This is a book that I wrote some time ago that needed some work. In March, I wrote a fresh ending to it, worked on the title and cover design, and polished it up. Now I am doing a careful proof and will look at my production schedule to choose the best time to publish it.

 

In the Tick of Time is my next book to be published. It has been through beta reading and is now out with my editor for final proofing. I need to finish setting it up on the various platforms and doing final formatting when I get it back. It will be out in a couple of weeks.

 

 

Like Gem, Running Out is another older book that I have been whipping into shape. It still needs some work on story arc, what to leave in and what to take out, and whether it will be one book or two. But it’s getting there!

 

 

In March, I released a collection of stand-alone novels with girls as the protagonists bundled together in one ebook called Dark is Deepest. I have now released a collection of stand-alone novels with boys as the protagonists bundled together in one ebook called A Single Soul. These are great products for promos and people who want to save money by buying in bulk!

 

My Medical Kidnap series is going to be released later this year, and I have just gone through editing the three intial books and reading for continuity throughout the series. They will soon be going out to beta readers.

 

I like to help out other authors. Here are a couple of covers that I designed for a friend who is printing two books that her English class wrote. I am also helping another right now with managing and formatting his first book for publication.

 

 

I have a couple of classics that I am working on getting ready for publication, one this month and one in July.

 

 

 

I have also been working on:

Promotions – all of my translations are going on sale later this month. I am setting up a new promotion for Questing for a Dream. It may be time to try some Facebook ads again.
Redesigning my web pages to make it easier to see (and load) all of my works
Formatting and uploading various works with new aggregators and distributors for wider coverage. This means reformatting various covers and interiors and is tedious work.
Working on another older, unfinished book that, like Gem, needs a proper ending, title, and cover
I pulled out an old short story the other day and realized it is close to publishable quality. Maybe it’s time to start publishing some of my shorter works as well! I spent a couple of days editing it, but it needs a title and an ebook cover now.

What is coming in the second half of the year?

As well as In the Tick of Time the Medical Kidnap series, I have one other book to get published this year. Chloe, the fourth installment of the Between the Cracks series, which is slated to be published in January, will also need to go out to beta readers soon
I have a couple of ideas for non-fiction books that I am thinking about
I still have at least two more novels to write this year, perhaps three… or so…

So if I tell you I’m not writing anything new this month, that doesn’t mean I’m not busy!

Excerpt from Lisa Black’s That Darkness

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme. Read the rules at Books and a Beat. Anyone can play along!

I am reading Lisa Black’s That Darkness. I am a big fan of the TV series Bones, and a few months ago read one of Kathy Reichs’ Temperance Brennan books, and was so disappointed with it. But when I started That Darkness, I felt like I had walked back into Brennan’s lab. Black’s protagonist, Maggie Gardiner, is a forensic investigator, as is Lisa Black herself. The writing is authentic and gripping.

However, it was remarkably easy to convince people you were what you were not, if you simply paid a little attention to detail.

Jack was good at detail.

Lisa Black, That Darkness

As a forensic investigator for the Cleveland Police Department, Maggie Gardiner has seen her share of Jane Does. The latest is an unidentified female in her early teens, discovered in a local cemetery. More shocking than the girl’s injuries–for Maggie at least–is the fact that no one has reported her missing. She and the detectives assigned to the case (including her cop ex-husband) are determined to follow every lead, run down every scrap of evidence. But the monster they seek is watching every move, closer to them than they could possibly imagine.

Jack Renner is a killer. He doesn’t murder because he enjoys it, or because he believes himself omnipotent, or for any reason other than to make the world a safer place. When he follows the trail of this Jane Doe to a locked room in a small apartment where eighteen teenaged girls are anything but safe, he knows something must be done. But his pursuit of their captor takes an unexpected turn.

Maggie Gardiner finds another body waiting for her in the autopsy room–and a host of questions that will challenge everything she believes about justice, morality, and the true nature of evil …

Excerpt from Robert B. Parker’s Kickback

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme. Read the rules at Books and a Beat. Anyone can play along!

I recently read Robert B. Parker’s Kickback, by Ace Adams. In case you don’t know (I didn’t) Robert B. Parker, the ‘dean of American crime fiction’ was the author of the books that inspired the Jesse Stone movies and Spenser for Hire TV Show. This is one of the books in the Spenser series.

“I often say that, when it comes to detective fiction, ninety percent of writers admit Robert B. Parker was an influence and the other ten percent lie about it,” mystery writer Harlan Coben says in an e-mail.

When Robert B. Parker died, Ace Atkins was retained to continue writing the Spenser series. Kickback was a fun, tightly-plotted suspense book that kept my interest all the way though.

“Then you know what kind of crap these kids are capable of,” he said. “I back down an inch, show I’m weak, and they’ll take advantage of it. I see them looking at me like I’m just some fat doofus. They think protecting this school is a joke. I start laughing with them and the next thing I know some kid like Dillon Yates is running down the halls with an AR-15.”

Ace Atkins, Robert B. Parker’s Kickback

I had to include this little quote about Parker by his widow:

She points to the pictures of the dog, noting that they actually show three different dogs, all named Pearl. “One would die and then he’d get another German shorthaired pointer,” she says. “In his mind, he had one Pearl for thirty years.” She used to give him a hard time about it. “If I predecease you,” she’d say, “you’ll find someone my height, my hair color, you’ll rename her Joan, and it will be as though I never left.”

Boston Globe

What started out as a joke landed seventeen-year-old Dillon Yates in a lockdown juvenile facility in Boston Harbor. When he set up a prank Twitter account for his vice principal, he never dreamed he could be brought up on criminal charges, but that’s exactly what happened.

This is Blackburn, Massachusetts, where zero tolerance for minors is a way of life.

Leading the movement is tough-as-nails Judge Joe Scali, who gives speeches about getting tough on today’s wild youth. But Dillon’s mother, who knows other Blackburn kids who are doing hard time for minor infractions, isn’t buying Scali’s line. She hires Spenser to find the truth behind the draconian sentencing.

From the Harbor Islands to a gated Florida community, Spenser and trusted ally Hawk follow a trail through the Boston underworld with links to a shadowy corporation that runs New England’s private prisons. They eventually uncover a culture of corruption and cover-ups in the old mill town, where hundreds of kids are sent off to for-profit juvie jails.

Last chance to enter Goodreads Giveaway for Autographed Copy of Intersexion

I am currently running a Goodreads Giveaway for an autographed copy of Intersexion. Today is the last day, so sign up now to get in on the action!

About Intersexion:

Award-winning author P.D. Workman brings you a compelling and thought-provoking tale of human growth, compassion, and understanding.

Taylor is a teen teetering on the edge of a steep precipice. Disowned by his family, living on the street, battling abuse and prejudice, he struggles to discover who he really is and how to carry on with life.

The last person you would expect to touch him is Roz, whose foremost identity is a Christian wife and mother. But her world is about to be shaken. Through all that happens, Roz understands she has to be there for Taylor, knowing he is only one step from despair and self-destruction.

By the author of Tattooed Teardrops, winner of the Top Fiction award in the 2016 In the Margins Top Ten Best Books for Teens literary award, Intersection will challenge your deepest beliefs about identity.

Praise for Intersexion

—My heart went out to Taylor as he dealt with abuse and rejection. I had a hard time putting down the book because I couldn’t wait to see what happened.

—I think this kind of story needs to be told right now.

—I applaud you for creating such a book that was so near to my heart and one that could and did make me forget daily life.

Praise for P.D. Workman

“Every single one of [P.D. Workman’s] books has spoken to me in ways no one or almost anything else has. And I have found strength in the books I’ve read.”

“The way that P.D. Workman writes just flows amazingly and allows the reader to get really invested in a book.”

Excerpt from The Last Apprentice

In case you missed it, I finished my Camp Nano novel yesterday!

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme. Read the rules at Books and a Beat. Anyone can play along!

I don’t think I’ve previously read anything else by British author Joseph Delaney, but I am enjoying The Last Apprentice: Revenge of the Witch, the first book in a thirteen book series. Witches, ghosts, and boggarts abound in this magical fantasy book.

“I love everyone in this house,” she said, her voice softening, “but in the whole wide County, you’re the only person who’s really like me. As yet, you’re just a boy who’s still got a lot of growing to do, but you’re the seventh son of a seventh son. You’ve the gift and the strength to do what has to be done. I know you’re going to make me proud of you.”

Joseph Delaney, The Last Apprentice: Revenge of the Witch

For years, Old Gregory has been the Spook for the county, ridding the local villages of evil. Now his time is coming to an end. But who will take over for him? Twenty-nine apprentices have tried—some floundered, some fled, some failed to stay alive.

Only Thomas Ward is left. He’s the last hope, the last apprentice.

 

Camp Nano for the Win! Ringing in at 117,575 words

I have just completed the first draft of Making her Mark, my latest Camp Nanowrimo novel!

I had planned on 100,000 words, so I was a little surprised when I was getting toward 90,000 words and could see by my outline that I was going to exceed that by quite a bit. The paperback will come in at about 450 pages.

Now I have to catch up on the other stuff I’ve been putting off. Like accounting and tax filings. Ugh. You know, I had a great idea a couple of days ago for a new book… I actually have the cover concept drafted already.

Excerpt from Stone and Spark

Up to 85,763 words so far on my CampNano book! A few more days, and I will be done. In spite of limited time, I have been able to get in >5,000 words per writing day.

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme. Read the rules at Books and a Beat. Anyone can play along!

I am currently reading Sibella Giorello’s Stone and Spark: Book 1 in the Raleigh Harmon mystery series. I don’t remember where I saw this book and what inspired me to pick it up, but I am really enjoying it so far. Raleigh Harmon is a teen with a mentally ill parent, whose brilliant and somewhat OCD friend has mysteriously disappeared (but, seeing as her mother is a drunk and father is a pothead, and she has run away in the past, neither of them has bothered to report her missing.) You know how I like a good book with mentally ill characters!

“You’re not fooling us.” She turns the notebook, holding up the page so I can see it, showing me my own foot which is somehow evidence that I’m not me. “We know you’re not Raleigh.”

We. Not the royal We.

The crazy We.

Sibella Giorello, Stone and Spark

Her best friend is missing. And time is running out.

Raleigh Harmon finally conquers her worst fear—by trespassing—and wants to tell her best friend, a smart-mouthed physics genius girl named Drew Levinson.

Only Drew’s gone. Really gone.

Everybody says Drew ran away. But that only skyrockets Raleigh’s suspicions. Drew Levinson is the least impulsive person she knows.

Armed with an encyclopedic knowledge of city criminal codes, her rock hammer, and a stubborn streak wide as the Chesapeake Bay, Raleigh scours her hometown for clues. But not even the cops are on her side.

Was Drew meeting somebody in secret?

Escaping her loony parents?

Or is Raleigh’s hunch dead-on: her best friend didn’t choose to leave . . . .

“Stone and Spark” is the first book in the long-running Raleigh Harmon mystery series. It introduces the girl who will become a forensic geologist and FBI agent—provided she survives her high school years.