Untangling The Knot by Deanne Wilstead

UNTANGLINGTHE KNOT

By

Deanne Wilsted

BLURB:  

“I did what?”

Twenty-eight year old Gabriella Bessu is St. Therese’s meticulous wedding ceremony coordinator. So the fact that she has mistakenly signed her newest couple up for an annulment, rather than a wedding, sends her Catholic guilt into overdrive.

But who can blame her? The groom is gorgeous and his two kids tug at Gabriella’s heart in a way that overcomes all her best intentions. Before long she’s in over her head, fixing her mixed-up plans and helping the children and dad come to terms with their haunting grief for the mother and wife they lost years earlier.

 

Can Gabriella untangle her own fears and accept the messy life that God has handed them?

EXCERPT:

“Umm, Gabriella,” Chloe said, “I don’t think that’s the plumber. It sounds like . . .”

The last thing Ryan had expected to see when he’d entered the cottage was Gabriella flat on her back in a puddle of water, inspecting the rear of the toilet. Chloe was holding a bucket and a sopping wet towel, and Peter was nowhere to be seen.

“Hi, Chloe,” he said quickly. “Where’s Peter?”

“Dad!” Peter came flying from another room and flung himself into Ryan’s arms.

“RYAN?” Gabriella yelled and quickly sat up. The thump of her head smacking the toilet bowl echoed around the tiny room.

“Ow,” she cried. “Damn it! Ow, ow, ow.”

Ryan grimaced. Gabriella sat on the wet floor, near tears, rubbing at the welt already forming on her forehead.

“I’m sorry,” she said, clearly at the end of her rope. “I can’t believe I said that in front of the kids. It’s just, everything has gone wrong today.”

She hung her head in her lap and began to cry for real.

Ryan had to hold back a smile. She looked so much like a wet cat. And, to top it off, she had yet to hear how wrong things had really gone with the day.

“Come on, now. It’s not that bad,” he finally said. “We’ll get it all fixed. Don’t worry.”

Chloe’s face lit up with an expression he hadn’t seen in years. For a few moments at least he was back to being her superhero dad.

AUTHOR INFORMATION:

With an English teacher for a mom, DEANNE WILSTED, grew up reciting conjugation instead of nursery rhymes. Now, forty years later, she's sharing that special skill through her writing and her mothering. Her first book, a contemporary romance called BETTING JESSICA, was released October 2011. Her second Novel, UNTANGLING THE KNOT, is due out in February 2013 from Soul Mate Publishing. She is currently marketing her third book for publication and writing her fourth, fifth and sixth while blogging about the crazy stuff she overhears while writing.

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LINKS:

Author Follow Links –

www.deannewilsted.com

http://www.facebook.com/DeanneWilstedAuthor

@dwilsted - https://twitter.com/dwilsted

Goodreads  author page- http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5294824.Deanne_Wilsted

Amazon author page - http://amzn.com/e/B005YHFBQ2

Untangling the Knot Purchase Link – http://www.soulmatepublishing.com/untangling-the-knot/

www.deannewilsted.com

www.soulmatepublishing.com

Coming Soon - Preparing for a New Book Release

Pre-Release Checklist

 

Ever wonder what an author is doing the last few weeks before his or her book is released? Think she’s just sitting around with a smile on her face, eating chocolate-covered strawberries and waiting for the accolades to roll in?

 

If it were only that easy.

 

So what really does go on behind all the lights and glamor? (Oh, if only there really were lights and glamor…)

 

Technically, the author has been working his or her tail off not just for weeks, but for months before the book comes out. She needs to get ARCs (advanced reader copies) out to reviewers in hopes of getting folks to start talking about the book before it hits the street. These days, a lot of readers rely on not just the book’s back cover blurb, but also reviews. I know I use reviews to figure out if there are elements in the book that either appeal to me or don’t appeal to me before I purchase it. I find the one-star reviews the most helpful in figuring out if there’s some element I’m not going to like. I don’t care about the number of stars, per se, but I do care about certain gruesome or horrific elements (or erotic) that don’t appeal to me.

 

Blurbs and Taglines
Some publishers are kind enough to have some poor editor create the snazzy, tantalizing blurb you find on the back of the book. Others leave it up to the author. So if it’s in the author’s hands, she must to write something that is going to make readers buy her book. The blurb is generally just a paragraph or two, about one hundred words long. Most of the time, it presents the central conflict, e.g. Jane finds a dead body, is discovered standing over it, and is arrested as the prime suspect.

 

The blurb is sent to the publisher (for the back cover) and used by the author on her website and for any promotional/marketing activities.

 

In addition to the back cover blurb, the author needs to come up with a sentence, i.e. tagline, that encapsulates the brilliant premise of the book. Jane must find the real murderer before he finds her! Jane sees dead people! Whatever. It sounds really easy, but trust me, it’s not. This tagline (plus the blurb) has to be so enticing that readers are hooked.

 

The Final Few Weeks
Right before the book is released, there is a flurry of activities.

• Updates to the author’s website 
• The new release should be listed (coming soon!) on the main web page, with a link to the book’s web page 
• A web page should exist for the book with the following information:
• Cover image & publishing information (e.g. release date)
• Back cover blurb and tagline
• Purchase links which the author will activate when the book becomes available for purchase
• An excerpt (optional)
• Links to any reviews (from the ARCs the author sent out)
• Tweet, blog, and otherwise socialize—the book is coming soon!
• Figure out a marketing plan including any contests, e.g. GoodReads, from your website, Facebook, etc.
• Line up blogs with other bloggers to spread the news – but just schedule blogs for now. Don’t actually start blogging too heavily until the book is out and has a purchase link, otherwise “I want it now!” readers will forget all about it by the time the book is released. 

Timing is everything. In this digital world, there is an expectation that there should be a “buy now!” link on any blog or other social media note about a book. This can actually be the hardest part: holding back until the book is “live” and folks can actually buy it!

 

I know I can’t wait to start talking about Christmas Spirit which will be out in November. There’s no buy link, but it is coming soon to an eReader near you!

 

Guest Author: Marian Allen

The talented science fiction writer, Marian Allen, agreed to join us and I'm so glad she did. She's written a great new book, Force of Habit, as well as a short story, By the Book. I'm a huge fan of the original Star Trek television show (although I'd like to claim that I was too young to see the episodes when they originally aired, LOL) and Marian has woven a story that will delight fans of that series.
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Thanks for having me today, Amy! I love talking story. :)

I was born in Louisville, Kentucky and now live in rural Indiana. For as long as I can remember, I've loved telling and being told stories. When, at the age of about six, I was informed that somebody got paid for writing all those books and movies and television shows, I abandoned my previous ambition (beachcomber), and became a writer.

On Aliens and Alley Jammers
One of the eternal questions, right up there with, "Which came first: the chicken or the egg?" is, "Are you a plotter or a pantser?" Sometimes the answer isn't that easy.

When I wrote my upcoming novel, FORCE OF HABIT, I began with a short story I had written by the seat of my pants. It was a take-off of the original Star Trek show, with the elements and characters of the show in the background and the action carried by original characters (and Tetra Petrie, who was created by my long-time friend C. Jane Peyton).

As a farce, the story moved so far from the original tone of the show, it wasn't difficult to move it to a totally original work, and this was where the plotting and planning came into the picture.

I had already created an alien world for the action and peopled it with a police force and a planetary governing body representing the various types of interests. My main characters were original, although Tetra was Vulcan. Or was she half-Vulcan? There seemed to be a lot of that going around in fan fiction. The villains, of course, were Klingons.

That wouldn't do. Tetra became an amphibious humanoid from the water planet Gilhoo. Spock became her brother, Quatro, and moved from the background to the middle ground. The Klingons became the Stokk: smooth customers with violence as part of their courtesy. Since mistaken identity was the pivot of the plot, I gave the Stokk brightly colored skin and hair so that people with skin and hair tones within a wide range of similarity are hard for them to tell apart.

I planned to just change the names of the rest of the television show's characters, but a strange thing happened: they became themselves. As the framework of the story was expanded to the size of a novel, all the characters stopped being tweaks of other people's characters and took on their own personalities, flaws, strengths, attitudes and abilities. They changed gender. They changed species. Since they weren't under contract and didn't have any fans, they faded into the background if I didn't need them.

And, somewhere along the line, alley jammers got into the picture. In the first scene of the book, one of the Stokk is accused of starting a rumor that an eating establishment is using alley jammers in its cuisine. That was supposed to be a one-time reference, but the name stuck in my head. In another scene, a character taking a short cut through back ways and byways pulls an alley jammer out of his pocket. At the end, Bel, my main character, ends up with a pink alley jammer as a pet.

I ran a contest last year to promote my previous novel (a fantasy, and unconnected with this book), EEL'S REVERENCE. One of the prizes was choice of name in a story I proposed to write promoting FORCE OF HABIT. That story, "By the Book", is set on the world of FORCE OF HABIT and features one of the characters. It's free at Smashwords.

I'm running a similar contest this year. Details are at my blog.

FORCE OF HABIT is also available at Kindle and the NookBook store.


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Thank you, Marian!
Live Long and Prosper!