Welcome Steve Shilstone!
Greetings, Friends! Today I’d like to welcome author Steve Shilstone! He has written The Wicked Wand, a middle grade fantasy your kids are sure to love.
Steve will be awarding the first 5 stories of the series in eBook format to a randomly drawn commenter during the tour. So remember to comment below!
Here’s the blurb:
Bekka, in your 6th chronicle, The Wicked Wand, please heed the warning of your best friend Kar. Be satisfied with your new collection of 22 magic rings. Don’t try to find the hiding place of the Wand just because it, too, now belongs to you. It’s dangerous. You know it. Kar knows it. You say you can control it. Kar doubts that deeply, but she will help if you insist on going. She won’t allow you to travel alone on your quest even though she thinks it foolish. You’re lucky to have a friend like Kar, and soon, oh soon, you’ll know why.
And an excerpt for your enjoyment:
I quickly fell into a fit of cackling and enjoyed it zooming above the river. Kar entertained me by lengthening her wings, shortening ‘em, changing their colors – shift, shift, shift. She stretched her neck long, long, long, made it sag in coils, made it scaly, feathery, gleamingly smooth. She lengthened her legs absurdly, so such that from a ridiculous height she could drag her paddlefeet to lightly skim the river’s surface. Her legs were a pair of lengthy strings hanging from a beeketbird bag of a body. She shimmered a glorious twang which sounded all ripply in my ears. I could no longer see her. I looked all around. Where was she? I dipped to land on the northern bank of the river at the edge of a field of oats.
“Kar!” I shouted, turning and looking, squinting in all directions.
A whizzing bizz sounded in my ear. I snatched at the annoyance. The bizz whizzed to my other ear. I snatched. The bizz whizzed to a spot two spans in front of my nose and hovered there. Tiny buzzer. A bee? No. Much too small.
“Kar?” I guessed.
The air exploded, and she was on the ground laughing and rolling, gasping and kicking.
Here’s a bio so you can get to know Steve a bit:
Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Steve moved as a toddler with his family to Denver, Colorado, where his passion for books was sparked early by such titles as McElligot’s Pool, The Little House, Little Toot, and more. His father’s employment with the Pennsylvania Railroad had the family moving to Seattle, Washington when Steve was 10. There he dragged home an armload of books every week from the library. He plowed through the Oz books, the horse books, and the dog books while maintaining vast stacks of comic books, mainly Little Lulu and Scrooge McDuck. It was at this time that he wrote his first piece, something called ‘Art Ant Off To War’.
Lo, the teenage years raged in and found Steve’s family – an older brother, a younger brother, a father and a mother – plunked down for good in Redwood City, California on the San Francisco peninsula. Now Steve’s reading frenzy really kicked into high gear. He buzzsawed through all of Dickens and all of Tolstoy in addition to his regular mound of scifi and fantasy and Moby Dick on the side. Trapped in the tentacles of teenageritis, he wrote stories with titles like ‘The Coffin’ and ‘The Guillotine’. Anguished poetry was a given.
Steve eventually attended and graduated from UCLA with a degree in Anthropology, and following that, gave thanks for the asthma which exempted him from a trip to Vietnam. From then until on, he painted and wrote, observed hippiedom with interest from the sidelines, distributed mail for the United States Postal Service, unloaded trucks and worked in the stockrooms of various Mervyn’s department stores, coached youth baseball for a quarter of a century, and became parental. He also finally got around to reading Ulysses by James Joyce, thereby freeing his writing self from the shackles of convention.
His baseball novel, Chance, debuted in 1996. His middle grade fantasy e-book series, The Bekka Chronicles, began appearing in 2010. He lives sometimes in Redwood City, sometimes at South Lake Tahoe. He continues to play with words. His child of hippies novel, CHILDREN OF VINEYARD, is due out in 2014 from Livingston Press.
Here are the links to get in contact with Steve and to buy The Wicked Wand:
Email: steve@steveshilstone.com
Remember to leave a comment. You’ll want to be entered in the drawing! (Not to mention, I love hearing what you have to say.)
And as always, thanks for stopping by.
Brenda
Tagged: Book release, Brenda Maxfield, fantasy, Good clean teen read, middle grade fantasy, Middle Grade Fiction, Steve Shilstone, The Wicked Wand
