Kimberly Loth's Blog, page 5

Excerpt time! Read the first five pages of Kissed.

Two weeks folks!  I’m so excited. Lots of people have been asking for a sneak peek, so here it is. Enjoy!

Chapter 1

Birthdays are supposed to be special like my Kaiser Wilhelm rosebushes. They bloom once a year, huge violet and crimson cups full to bursting with petals. When I part the petals with my nose and inhale, I go weak in the knees from the fruity perfume. But my birthdays are more like the daisies that grow alongside the roses. Igno red.

The sink looked odd next to our front door. My mother had it installed after I kept tracking in dirt and fertilizer from my green house. I washed the soil off my hands with the warm water and used a file to clear the dirt out from under my nails. Then I exchanged one dirty pair of ugly tennis shoes for a pair of clean ugly tennis shoes and made my way into the kitchen. Mother didn’t allow a speck of soil from my greenhouse to dirty her home.

Paint on the cabinets peeled away in white curls. A single light bulb gave enough light to cook but not enough to read a recipe. My mother stood by the tiny window, her bottle blond hair twisted in a bun on the back of her head. She wiped her hands on her apron then smoothed a stray hair from my braid. I knelt down to tie my shoes, anything to avoid her touch. Physical touch burned, even something as little as a finger brushing my forehead.

“Wash your face. We have guests for dinner.” My stomach knotted. I tied and untied my shoes three times, wondering how to respond. Years ago, my father had closed our home to visitors. No one crossed our threshold. I was allowed to leave only to go to school and to church. Well, if you want to call it that. I’ve watched movies in school and I went to the Baptist church until I was eight. Our new church, Crusaders of God, was a bigger shock than no more pants. But Mother and Father called it church.

“Why?” I asked. My curiosity overrode my memory of the last question I asked when Grandma died and I wanted to know why I couldn’t go to the funeral. I stood and waited for the slap and a lecture.

Instead, she smiled like she was hiding something important.

“For your birthday. They’re friends of your father’s from church. We have a big surprise for you.”

Of course. Friends of my father. Nothing ever happened in our house unless he was the center of attention. Even on my birthday. At least they remembered. The surprise concerned me though, as the last surprise they announced turned out to be a drastic lifestyle change complete with long denim skirts and strict obedience. Oh, and no more birthdays. Until now, apparently. Maybe the surprise would be that my father finally found his sanity. That would be an amazing birthday present. I doubted I’d get that lucky.

Dinner took place in the dining room. The cheap chandelier struggled to fill the room with light as two of the bulbs were out and nobody bothered to replace them. Our mysterious dinner guest turned out to be familiar. And not the good kind of familiar either.

Dwayne Yerdin sat at the table. He was a senior at my school but ended up in quite a few of my classes even though he was two years older. I probably shouldn’t judge him. But with his heavy lidded, half closed eyes, buzzed head, and classic bully laugh, I had disliked him the moment I saw him. Perhaps he would prove my judgment wrong tonight. Seated next to him was a pudgy man in a suit. He wore a tie, but his neck was too thick to fasten the top button. He had the same heavy lidded eyes as Dwayne.

My father, a tall thin man with thick blond hair, saw me waiting in the doorway.

“Naomi, it’s about time. Come and meet Dwayne and his father. They go to church with us. Here, sit.”

My father indicated the chair next to Dwayne, but I sat across from him instead. My head buzzed with the act of disobedience and the air smelled faintly of wisteria. I almost smiled. A look of irritation passed over my father’s face, but he didn’t say anything. Next to my father, the pudgy man stared at me with piercing gray eyes.

My mother served us all pot roast and baked potatoes. She piled every plate high but hers and mine. Hunger kept me humble. And skinny. I focused on my food most of the dinner, not wanting to meet the pudgy man’s gaze. Or Dwayne’s. His eyes shifted rapidly around the room as if he were looking for the nearest exit. But when his eyes met mine he smirked, like he knew something I didn’t.

My father and Mr. Yerdin talked of politics and religion, not once acknowledging that anyone else sat at the table. Of course, I shouldn’t have been surprised since more than one sermon had been preached about the place of women and children. We were inferior and didn’t deserve an opinion that differed from our husbands’ or fathers’, so it was best that we just didn’t say anything at all. As the conversation turned to the medical experiments Dad performed on the dog that had been dumped in our yard last week, I tuned out and tried to think of what I would get if I crossed an Iceberg rose with a Sunsprite. A nice pale yellow and only a few thorns. Could be interesting. If Grandma were still alive, she’d appreciate it.

A quick glance at the clock told me they’d only been here forty-five minutes, but it felt like days. After another excruciating hour, Mother presented the cake. The carrot cake (my father’s favorite) had sixteen candles on it. I had not had a cake with candles since my eighth birthday. On that day, the cake was chocolate, my favorite, but that was before Father went insane. I missed those days, the ones before he went crazy. When he would come home and take me canoeing and fishing. When we would wake up early on Saturdays and go to breakfast at Sheila’s Café. I blinked back tears thinking of the father he used to be.

After the cake, I moved to help my mother clean up, but Father put a hand on my wrist, a signal to stay seated. The skin burned where he touched it.

“See,” my father said, “she’s obedient.”

Mr. Yerdin grinned. “Yes, of course she is. I wouldn’t expect anything less from you, Dr. Aren. Dwayne, what do you think?”

Dwayne shrugged and shifted his eyes. Me, I kept my mouth shut and listened for the words that weren’t being said.

Mr. Yerdin eyed me up and down. “Well she certainly has the required blond hair and blue eyes.”

“And she’s a virgin.” My father spoke this a little too loudly and I flinched. My mother paused before picking up Mr. Yerdin’s plate. She met my father’s eyes and nodded. Then the corners of her mouth turned up ever so slightly.

My stomach sank at the thought of what my birthday surprise would be. Although part of me did not want to hear the rest of the conversation, but to escape back into the quiet world of flowers and dirt, another part of me needed to know what my future held, where being a virgin was important.

I cleared my throat. Dwayne smiled a wide toothy smile and my father glowered like I’d done something wrong. Which, of course I had, but it would be worth the punishment if I got the answers I needed.

“Could someone please explain?” There. I asked the question. So out of character for me and yet satisfying in a strange way, like the way I felt when a teacher praised me for a good job. I bit my bottom lip and tasted butterscotch, which was weird because the cake we had, contained nothing of the sort. While I knew asking questions was not an act of disobedience, I also recognized the power in the asking. As if I was taking control, even if that control was small. I took a sip of my water. Father hesitated for a moment and then frowned. He looked up and saw my mother standing in the kitchen, her eyes boring into his. He didn’t look away from her when he answered me.

“You’ll be marrying Dwayne.”

Who doesn’t like a kissing book?

I hope you’ve gathered from the title that Kissed is indeed a kissing book. I’m a big fan of kissing, a fact that my husband appreciates :-). I love young adult romance books, romantic comedy movies, and anything where there is magic behind the first kiss. That’s where the idea of Kissed came from. The fact that first kisses can be magical. Without giving too much away lets just say there’s something supernatural going on with the kissing.

We are officially three weeks out from release date and I thought we’d do something fun this week. A contest! I’m doing a fairly large contest when the book is released and I don’t want to screw it up so I thought I’d do a mini contest this week.

I’m doing a rafflecoptor contest for a $10 amazon giftcard. There are a number of ways you can get entries. Like being a facebook fan or following me on twitter. Also, you can sign up for my newsletter. But that’s not all. I thought it’d be fun add something a little different. I want to see your favorite kissing pictures. It can be one from a movie, a book, one you’ve found online or your own. Please keep it appropriate (PG-13). Post it on my facebook page or tweet it with #kissed and earn ten entries. Make sure you come back and enter. Good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

 

 

 

 

Things I learned while writing Kissed

We are exactly four weeks out from release day! I’ve got a lot planned over the next month and I can’t wait to share it with you all. I’ll be blogging once a week (on Thursdays) and posting things on Twitter and Facebook everyday. I hope you’ll join me on this countdown to release day.

This week I’m going to be talking about things  I’ve learned while writing the book.

The first interview question people always ask when asking about a book is, “Where did you get the idea for this book?”

That answer is complicated. There’s a lot to a book. What part do you want to know about? The kissing, the cult, the roses, the Ozarks, Vegas, the list goes on and on and on. A book is so much more than just one idea. In every book I read there are literally thousands of ideas.  I will say this, this book started with the idea of the first kiss of the book (more on that next week.)

I love learning things from reading fiction. Mostly this is about places. I’ve read books set in India, Australia, England, China, and more. Each one fuels my desire to travel and see those places. (Most of the time. Australia is still on my no way list. Too many snakes.) But other books have taught me about things the main characters were interested in. Falconry, Geocaching, elephants, and BMX biking. I love books that teach me something new. Something that I’d never sought out myself if I’d never read the book. I try to infuse that into all the books I write. Of course, Kissed was about the roses.

When I was a child I spent every summer with my grandparents in western Michigan. My grandfather always had amazing rosebushes. I loved helping him trim the bushes (in another words, hold the bucket while he deadhead the roses) and taking in roses to put in a vase on the table. One of my favorite memories was when I decided I wanted to make rose perfume. My grandma obliged and in no time we were boiling rose petals. Let me tell you, rose perfume does not come from boiling petals. The whole house stank for days. I can’t even describe the smell.

When Naomi needed an obsession I decided on roses. I checked out all the books in our little hometown library on growing roses (a total of six books) and my research began. Soon, just reading about them wasn’t enough. We went to Lowe’s and bought five rose bushes. I loved those roses and they flourished. I’m firmly convinced that plants can tell when you love them because roses are supposed to be tricky to grow and I had no trouble at all. Anything else I’ve ever tried to grow died in a couple of weeks. I have a black thumb. (The pic above is from my own rosebushes. I was so proud of them.)

Here are a few things I learned:

There are over 1500 species of roses.

There isn’t just one rose smell. Roses can smell like oranges, cinnamon, clove, sweet, or spicy.

You can make rose tea from rose petals. I imagine it would taste a lot like the smell from my grandma’s kitchen the day we made rose perfume. Yuck.

Join me this week as I share other things I learned while writing the book. 28 days until Kissed is released.

The scariest part of living in Egypt

I’ve been meaning to do a post like this since I moved here and somehow it never happened.  Here I am nearly eight months later and I don’t think I’ve blogged about Egypt even once.

For the record, most of the time I don’t feel like I’m living in a foreign country.  Yes, the food is a little different but I can still get my Cheetos. And the chocolate is actually pretty good.  The only time I remember that I’m outside the states is when I get stuck in a cab with a driver who doesn’t know English.  Then I rely on my very limited Arabic to get me where I need to go.

I know, you want to hear all the scary things about living in a country in the midst of a revolution.  Guess what.  It’s not scary. We have had moments where we’ve questioned our sanity.  But those are rare moments that could happen in any city anywhere in the world.  Crime is low.  But men make snide comments when I walk down the street by myself.  The comments are in Arabic so I don’t know what they say. For that I’m grateful for my limited Arabic.  I don’t want to know.

But since you’ve been asking, I’ll share a couple of things.  There are barricades we have to go through to get to work.  We work right next to the Police Academy and any of the court trails for the ousted government takes place there.  The barricades are made of movable gates with barbed wire. (I’d post a pic, but I don’t want to get arrested.  That’s a whole different blog post). We’ve grown accustomed to it, but once a week or so they move the barricades then I get to witness my bus driver argue with men holding massive rifles and wearing full body armor. Eventually the bus driver will grumble and turn around or drop us off at another gate.  One day we asked him to just give up and take us home since we couldn’t see how we could possibly get to school if we couldn’t go down the street.  He didn’t listen and he actually won that one and they moved the barricade for him.  We were all disappointed.

:-).

Enough of all this seriousness.  You want to know the scariest thing about living in Egypt?

The elevators. This video is not my elevator (I suck at taking videos), but I found this one on youtube. It looks exactly like my own elevator (I live on the fourth floor, the elevators are a necessity.) To be fair, I don’t have the gaps that this one has, but everything else is exactly the same and I have friends who live in buildings with gaps in their elevators. They terrified me at first and when we started having rolling blackout I stopped riding them for a bit. But then I learned that they can be moved manually if the power goes out, but they are still scary as heck.

 

 

Cover Reveal

Here is my gorgeous cover!  I’m so excited to show it to you.  A big thanks to Robin Ludwig for the design.

I thought you might also be interested in a blurb about the book.

Trapped in a dark cult, sixteen-year-old Naomi Aren has lived a quiet, albeit unhappy, life nestled deep in the hills of the Ozarks.  With uncut hair, denim skirts, and only roses for friends, Naomi seldom questions why her life is different from other kids at school. Until the day her abusive father, who is also the cult’s leader, announces her wedding. Naomi must marry Dwayne Yerdin, a bully who reeks of sweat and manure and is the only one person who scares her worse than her father.

Then she meets Kai, the mysterious boy who brings her exotic new roses and stolen midnight kisses. Kisses that bring her a supernatural strength she never knew she had.  As the big day approaches, Naomi unearths more secrets of about her father’s cult. She learns she has power of her own and while Kai may have awakened that power, Naomi must find a way to use it to escape Dwayne and her father—without destroying herself.

 

It’s official

What’s so special about May 1st?  That’s the day my debut novel, Kissed, will be released.  *cue fireworks*

I’m a little excited, can you tell?

The next three months are going to be crazy busy with promo and writing the sequel.  Not to mention that I still have to find time for my full time job.  That pesky teaching just gets in the way of my writing time.  (I love my job though.  Where else can I hang out with teenagers all day and be considered cool?)

Not to mention that my family will want me to spend time with them too.  They’ve been so understanding of my journey so far.  I hope that I can continue to find balance in all this.

If you are reading this, it means you probably already love me, so I have a favor to ask.

If you are on goodreads, become my fan.  Please.  Same thing on Facebook.  Twitter too. Thank you!  You all are the best.

What’s next?  Cover reveal.  Date: To be determined (Probably in a week or two).  It’s so pretty.  I love it.

Finding My People

As I came into my teenage and adult years I always thought there was something wrong with me.  I think differently from others and I can be a little reclusive.  But I also have the strange bug in me that craves adventure.  If I’m not sitting at home reading a book or watching a movie I want to be out in the world doing something amazing. I’m also Mormon and strictly conservative. Then there is the fact that my husband looked at me the other day and asked, ‘when did you become a feminist?’  To which I answered, ‘when did you become a chauvinistic pig?’ I suppose as I’ve gotten older I’ve certainly become more socially liberal (which is a whole blog post in itself). I will now have to figure out how the feminist hat fits on my head, because despite the fact that I won’t admit it to my husband, I have become one.

I don’t fit.  Anywhere.  Because of the adventure bug.   It throws a wrench in the church going mommy who reads books and teaches school.  Most of my colleagues and friends from the states go on one vacation a year and that is usually the beach or a cruise.  Something easy and relaxing. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.  But while I love the beach and cruise ships, what I really want to do is go to Antarctica to see penguins in the wild.

A few years ago, we’d gone to New York for Valentines Day.  We spent the summer touring the great lakes and visiting Niagara Falls.  For Thanksgiving we’d visited my mother in Minnesota and froze our tushies off.  A colleague and I were discussing our Christmas plans.  My family and I weren’t going anywhere because we were broke (a side effect of the adventure bug).    She was excited because her kids were coming home from college and they were all going to be together for the holidays.  Me, I looked at her and with total sincerity said, “I need a vacation.  I want to go somewhere.”

She laughed and said, “You just went on vacation.”

“No, I didn’t.  My mom’s house doesn’t count.” (I’m a firm believer in visiting family doesn’t count as vacation. Unless you are on a cruise ship together.)

“But what about the summer?”  She had a point.  But.

“That was so long ago.”

Most people just don’t get it.  The second I’m home from one vacation, I’m busy planning the next.  I live from one vacation to the next.  I can’t even remember them all.  My husband and I tried to write them all down one time, but we disagreed on what counted as different vacations and finally gave up.  (If you go on a road trip that lasts three months, is that one long vacation or lots of shorts ones?)

Fast forward two years. I now live in Egypt (I still can’t quite believe it, even though we’ve been here almost six months now). My colleagues and I were again discussing Christmas plans just before the break.  Where was everyone going?  Ethiopia.  Jerusalem. Paris.  Spain.  Canada. Climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. Italy. Amsterdam.  Georgia (the country).  An African Safari. India. Valley of the Kings.

Holy Cow.

I found my people.

It really is a little intimidating.  In the states I was among the most well traveled of my friends and colleagues, here I’m not.  I never traveled internationally very much because I could afford to go more places if we stuck to the states.  I have six stamps in my passport. Most of my friends have had to get extra pages for theirs.  I can’t wait to join that club :-).

Homesick

I know I’ve disappeared into the land of Egypt and I haven’t written a single blog post.  I’m sorry.  I have no excuse, except that I’ve been busy (aren’t we all).  I’ll be better, I promise.  Maybe I’ll even post two this week.

I’ve been off lately and I’ve had trouble putting my finger on why.

Could it be that after spending too much money on new hearing aids that they still don’t help me hear the way I want to?  Maybe.  Though I just found out about this awesome surgery that could fix it all together (60k though and insurance won’t cover it.  Maybe in a few years the price will come down.)

Could it be that I’m hungry all the time because the food here is awful?  Maybe. Though I did lose that 10-15 lbs I wanted to lose this summer.  The downside is that all my clothes that I bought over the summer don’t fit anymore.  I need to find a tailor.

It could also be the fact that I’m fighting head cold.

Something’s definitely not right.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love living in Egypt.  It’s a vibrant busy city with colorful people who will bend over backwards to help (most of the time.)  My job is amazing.  I have students who are so stinking eager to learn that they never leave my classroom.  I also work for good people.

I have a housekeeper, so I don’t have to clean my house.  She comes once a week and we are thinking about asking for another day, because it is so nice to come home to a clean house.

I have health insurance that most people in the states would kill for right now and I don’t have to pay a dime.

I live so close to the grocery store that if I run out of milk I simply hand my son 10 lbs and say, “Go get me milk,” to which he will always reply, “Can I get a candy bar too?”

I have a wonderful church family and good friends, who have made it their personal mission to make sure I never spend a Saturday at home.

But still something’s off.  I’m emotional and withdrawn.  I want to lie in bed and watch movies all day.  I’ve even thought of calling off a trip I was planning for Saturday to go shopping at the oldest souk in the world.  I had that thought as I was scrolling through facebook and I noticed a common theme from my friends in the states (at least the ones who lived in my hometown).

An ice storm is coming.  They are bunkering down and praying that it passes with little impact.  Of course my old students are hoping for a snow day  (I’m sure my colleagues are too).  And bam.  I knew what was bothering me.

I’m homesick.

I want nothing more than to be in my old home, curled up in front of my fireplace with a good book and watching the snow (or ice) fall.  My very favorite time of year at home was winter. Not because I love the cold (I don’t) but because I love holing up in my living room on snow days.  My home had these huge windows that looked over our back porch and when it snowed we’d line the rails with bird seed and watch the show of bright red and blue birds all day.  There were times we’d go through nearly a whole bag of seed in one day.  We’d listen to Christmas music and work on projects.  I’d read whole books or write a few thousand words.  Those were my very favorite days.

I miss that.  I miss the beauty of the land around my home.  Especially in the winter. 

How do you fix homesickness?

Epic Summer Road Trip

Summer Vacation starts today!  Yay!  We are going on a huge summer road trip that will take the better part of the next two months.  And I am so stinkin’ excited. Last summer we worked our butts off at Valley Fair in Minnesota to pay for this summer.  It was supposed to be used to go to Hawaii, but Egypt got in the way, so we are road tripping instead.   I think this might actually be better. We are crisscrossing the country.  We leave tonight (hopefully, if we can get everything packed and ready to go.)  And we still don’t know what direction we are heading first.  We are either going to go east to camp in TN for a few days  or north to ride the most awesome new roller coaster on the planet.  I’m sure we will discuss this heatedly while we are packing today.  I’ll let you know tomorrow which way we went.

Just an FYI, I’m going to post daily updates of our trip on facebook and I’ll try to blog once a week.

Now I need to go to one more teacher meeting, then I’m free for a whole summer.

 

Prom (a tale of remorse)

Last night I went to prom for the first time in my life.  I am 33 years old. I did not go by choice, I was dragged to prom kicking and screaming like a crazed toddler, except I’m a high school teacher. At our school prom is an assignment, not a choice.  Four teachers are assigned. You have three years to raise money and then put on the best prom ever.    We had NO clue what we were doing. From the moment I saw my name on the prom sponsor list all I could think was  I’ve never been to a prom, I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t want to do this.  And that has been my mantra this whole year, I don’t want to do this.

Prom is the crowing event of the year at our school.  We don’t have any other formal dances.  A lot of money and time is put into throwing a good prom.  I didn’t realize how important it was to our community until I saw the entourages of people that showed up just to watch the kids come in.  Grandmas and Grandpas came and asked,  with an excited glint in their eyes, to walk down the tunnel and just look at the gym.

I whined a lot as we were preparing for it.  I’m not proud of that.  If I could change anything about this year it would be that.  No whining.  We worked hard.  We had a fair amount of help from teachers who’d done it before.  The students on the prom committee were Ah-mazing.  They planned the whole thing and worked all year with us to get it ready to go.  We were feeling pretty good about things until….

There was a typo on the prom invitation.  We flipped the letters in the word Senior to Senoir.  Somehow no one caught it (I continue to argue that that was because they were so pretty that no one bothered to proof read them.  I’m a writer, which makes that doubly embarrassing).

From that day until last night that was all anybody could talk about.  That stupid typo.  Here we were working our butts off and all anybody saw was the typo.  I whined some more.  I wish I hadn’t, I wish I’d have just let that roll off my back and made bad Senoir jokes with the rest of them.

Last night though, nobody said anything about the typo.  Last night was magical.

I spent the entire prom with the love of my life. Mostly we took tickets and made sure that no kids came in that shouldn’t.  I oohed and aahed at my students’ dresses.  They were all so beautiful.

I danced with my husband.  And wished with all my heart that I could turn back the clock and knock some sense into my seventeen year old self.    I’d tell her to stop waiting around for the right person to ask her and go get a date herself.  I’d tell her to sign up for the prom committee and decorate and clean up and for pity’s sake GO.

Go have a magical night.