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Albert Camus

Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Guest Post and Giveaway: Eye of the Storm (Storm #2) by M. Stratton

Published: February 21st, 2014

Description:

Evie Taylor loves her life in Boston, running her bookstore and café, but an accident has made it so she needs to return home to take care of her grandmother. With extra time on her hands, she decides to start looking for the monster that haunts her best friend’s nightmares. A chain of events starts no one could see coming.
When the last person she ever expects shows up and rings her grandmother’s doorbell she finds herself in the middle of danger. Bound together in a common mission, they’ll search the world looking for answers. But can they find them in time or will they end up paying the ultimate price? As the storm rages around them, they find each other, and the calm in the Eye of the Storm.

GUEST POST
To write a re-re-readable book

For me, a re-readable book is an excellent story with characters I either can relate to, or would love to be. Romantic men that make you sigh and shiver with their action and words. Plots that stand the test of time.

There are certain formulas in books, movies, or TV shows. It's all around us. It hasn't changed in years. Boy meets girl, they fall in love, something happens to destroy their happiness, they find a way to overcome all obstacles and they live happily ever after. This is what we all want in fiction. A nice fairytale to escape our average lives. A love that will overcome all and adventures we could only dream to have.

As a reader I want to connect with the characters, I want to laugh, cry and be scared with them. I want to know what happens next. I want to not be able to put the book down until the very last page. 

As an author this is our job. Sometimes we hit it out of the park, sometimes we don't. I think if you want to write a book that can be read twenty years from and now you have to write a story where the reader can get lost in the story and you don’t get jolted out of it by something which flashes through your brain that it went out of style twenty years ago. Describe enough in the story so the reader knows what is going on, but leave current trends out, or at least to a minimum. You have to create stories that will be as relevant years from now and try to make it a little different so that it stands out. 

When I created the Storm Series I tried to do that. I hoped that I’d have a reader or two that loved the books and maybe a few years from now want to read it again. But what is re-readable to one person isn’t to another, therefore I created a story that I would want to re-read in the hopes someone else would too.

About the author:
M. Stratton is an International Amazon bestselling author in the romantic suspense and mystery suspense categories for her debut novel After the Storm. She is a self-proclaimed dork that loves to make people laugh and can trip over nothing. Her inner rock star is always on stage performing to a sold out crowd but is quiet and shy on the outside.

She lives with her husband and son in Arizona, which is a big difference from where she grew up north of Chicago Illinois. As an only child she learned to tell herself stories to make the long winters go by quicker while dreaming of summer vacations. Now as an adult she still makes up stories to pass the time, but now she writes them down to share with other people. When not writing you can find M. watching football (Go Bears!), NASCAR, or classic movies, watching her husband and father restore classic cars, and seeing who can be sillier, her or her son, and of course reading. 
Things you don’t know about M. Stratton: 
1. She loves the movie Twister… she can say all the lines along with the actors. She will also use those lines in real life as often as possible. 
 2. Halloween is her favorite holiday. She starts planning months in advance. She has more Halloween decorations than Christmas. 
 3. She once made up a monologue about her love of chocolate chip cookie dough for her high school drama class. 
 4. There are times she thinks she is so funny she has tears running down her face while laughing at herself. 
 5. M. can play the clarinet but is in awe of anyone who can play the guitar, piano or drums, pretty much anything where your hands have to do two different things at the same time. 
 6. Cary Grant is her favorite actor. When she was in high school after Cary Grant died one of the cable stations ran a marathon, she watched his movies from 6 in the morning all day and night until 4 AM the next day. 
 7. Reading has always been an escape for her. She can devour a book in hours. When she moved in with her husband she literally donated over 1,000 books and saved over 1,000 for herself. She can reread books over and over again if she loves them. There are some that she has reread about once a year for the past 20 years. 
8. She eloped after knowing her husband for only two months in 2006. They are still married over seven years later.


Author's Giveaway

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