Authors Are Rock Stars: Karri Thompson

Thanks to Fiktshun, Two Chicks on Books, and Magical Urban Fantasy Reads for hosting this awesome event again this year!

Welcome to KARRI THOMPSON!

Karri is such a rock star that she has written a book and working on a series about a rock star and his guardian angel! See right there? ROCK STAR!!! If you haven't read Karri's book, Amateur Angel, you should really check it out and my review here.

She might not be on a lot of radars right now, but that will soon change! She has a new series coming out soon: a spin on Rip Van Winkle!

Make sure to read the questions and answers about Karri. There are definitely some amazing facts about her. She is a rocking English teacher and those are some lucky high schoolers!

Q&A Time!

L: I’ve recently read your first YA book, Amateur Angel. How did you come up for the idea of this book?

KT: I was a huge fan of the band Duran Duran when I was in high school and had the biggest crush on the bass player, John Taylor. Over the years, I’ve watched my students go crazy over groups like N’Sync and the Jonas Brothers, and it reminded me of how I was in high school. I started to think about the different ways in which a teenage girl could meet her rock star crush, and one of the first ideas that popped into my head was having the girl become the rock star’s guardian angel.

L: Do you believe in Guardian Angels?

KT: I do believe in guardian angels, maybe not the way they appear in my book, but I think we’re all being watched and in some way protected by angels. One of my former students passed away from cancer a couple years after she graduated from high school. Before she died, she told her parents she saw angels at the foot of her hospital bed waiting for her. Stories like that help me believe.

L: William Shakespeare was part of Amateur Angel. Are you a fan of the bard?

KT: I am a huge Shakespeare fan. Being a high school English teacher, I’ve taught many of his plays. I’ve read Romeo and Juliet so many times that I practically have it memorized. It was so fun to bring Will to life in this book and use quotes from his plays to emphasize the book’s themes. In April, I’m going to Stratford, England, Shakespeare’s birthplace. I can’t wait!

L: Is there going to be another book following Amateur Angel? (That ending…oh, that ending!)

KT: Book two, Hollywood Angels, is written and ready to go. Readers should be on the lookout for it soon online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. The “angel” series will end with a third book. The outline for book 3 is complete, and I can't wait to start writing it. By the way, in Hollywood Angels, Cannon and Ashley are together all the time. Yes!

L: Woohoo!!!!

L: You have a new book coming out later this summer with Entangled Teen. What can you tell us about it?

KT: My next release is Mirror X. It’s the first book in the three-book series, The Van Winkle Chronicles. This book is full of surprises, so I can’t say much without giving it away. What I can say is that it’s about a 17- year-old girl named Cassie Dannacher who unexpectedly wakes up 1,003 years in the future and into a world ruled by three dictators. The difference of over 1, 000 years has made everyone physically – though not visually – different from Cassie, and this difference makes Cassie more valuable than her weight in gold. While Cassie struggles with her new reality, two very different and extremely hot guys enter her life, so as she continues to cope in this futuristic world, she’s overcome by additional challenges. But Cassie’s a strong girl and won’t let anyone stand in her way or take away what she values most in life.

I am so excited about this series! I can’t wait for people to meet my characters and enter the world I created.

L: What do you have in the works for after Mirror X?

KT: The second book in the Van Winkle series is written – no title for it yet, and it hasn’t been critiqued and edited either, but the first draft is complete, and it’s solid. The outline/synopsis for the third book is done and burning in my brain, ready to get down on paper. But I really need to focus on Mirror X at the moment, so book 3 will have to remain at a slow simmer while Mirror X is being finalized.

Six months ago, while I was waiting to return my focus to Mirror X, I started writing a YA, contemporary romance that takes place in Munich, Germany. I’m at about 40, 000 words and am predicting it will end around 80,000. But like book two of the Van Winkle series, it’s also on the back burner for the time being. Right now, Mirror X is my number one priority.

L: I see Charles Dickens is an influence of yours. Do you have any other writing influences?

KT: I really love Billie Letts. The Honk and Holler Opening Soon is one of my favorite contemporary novels. Her characters become real on the page – that’s what I want all of my characters to do.

L: Free time! Tell us something about yourself that might not come across in your writing or my questions.

KT: Toward the end of the last school year, I had a hard rock tune playing as my students entered the classroom. They couldn’t believe that was the type of music I listen to. They thought I liked either jazz or classical. Boy, I sure had them fooled. Some of my favorite bands include: Pearl Jam, Korn, Linkin Park, Disturbed, Slipknot, Avenge Sevenfold, and Drowning Pool. In fact, last month I saw Stone Temple Pilots in concert, and I have tickets for Pearl Jam in November. I love going to concerts. There’s nothing better than live music.

Buy Amateur Angel

Amazon

Karri and Entangled Teen have offered an ebook copy of Mirror X to one of you lucky readers. I am super jealous and think you should all enter...right now! Get to know Karri and her fun story-telling and enter the Rafflecopter! This does include International friends, too.
a Rafflecopter giveaway

Amateur Angel: Review

Title: Amateur Angel
Author: Karri Thompson
Source: Purchased ebook (Amazon)

Goodreads Summary & Cover:

Only 18-years-old, Ashley is no ordinary teenager. Not only is she dead, but upon her death, she mistakenly enters the wrong line in the afterlife, a line meant for trained, guardian angels. With a pair of wings on her back, Ashley is sent to Los Angeles to replace another angel whose "assignment" was none-other-than Cannon Michaels, a current member of the band Sendher, the sexiest man alive, and Ashley's celebrity crush in life.

Thoughts:
So, what happens when you die suddenly and there isn't anyone guiding you to the correct line in Heaven? Well, you get in the wrong line, of course!

Just graduating high school, turning 18 and on her way home for her surprise party, Ashley has a car accident and dies. Once in Heaven, her Guardian Angel vanishes and she has no clue what to do. She gets in the line she is directed to, but is scared out of it and ends up in the wrong line: the trained Guardian Angel line.

As soon as Ashley hits LA, she realizes who she is matched with: the newly 21 year old Cannon Michaels...her celebrity crush!

Since Ashley has no training and accidentally lands in the Guardian Angel line, she has to find guidance along the way. Between a massage therapist's Guardian Angel and mostly Cannon's friend and manager's Guardian Angel, Will, she learns mostly what to do. Kind of.

As the story develops, Ashley finds out that Cannon is a big ol' jerk. He's still hot and she loves him, but he's a jerk. There are a couple of moments when Ashley sees a different side of him, but the details as to why he does the good things are never explained. However, all of the bad...definitely explained!

Ashley has to learn how to control her flying, to touch things, to touch things without sending them flying across the place, to keep her wings from knocking over things, to keep her emotions calm, and to stay out of the way of touching Cannon.

All of her uncoordinated moves had me giggling. There were a whole lot of "Poor Ashley" comments that popped in my head. This book also had me tearing up a bit. There's so much that happens with Cannon. The way he was feeling, his actions, and how Ashley would "talk" to him, were just emotional for me.

Ahhh, and a cliffhanger ending! I feel so tortured!

Rating:

I hope that Karri continues this series. I will definitely read more. This book was fun and different!

Authors Are Rockstars: Author Guest Post

I am so very excited to be a part of the Authors Are Rockstars Tour hosted by Fiktshun and Two Chicks on Books. These ladies are also rockstars to me! I am so thankful for the opportunity to do this tour and getting to feature...

That's RIGHT! I pulled out the sparklies!

So creative! So beautiful! So smart! 

So, what makes Stasia Ward Kehoe a ROCKSTAR to me?

She is creator and a supporter of the Arts. Hooray for all forms of ART!

Dance is one of the most expressive forms of art, in my opinion. And when you can add music to a dance, it can cause so many emotions in a person. I would honestly love to see some of Stasia's choreography.

It is said that when someone wants to write a book, you should write about what you know. Stasia has definitely done that with AUDITION. She has created a verse novel (my first!) that flows perfectly! She graced us with a beautiful debut about a young girl trying to figure out what her dreams, aspirations, and her own voice were.

Stasia is also PRO-LIBRARIES!!!! Check out this YouTube video here. She has some wonderful tips for published authors to help educators and libraries.

If you have not read AUDITION, I say run, don't walk, to your nearest bookstore! Be ready for more of Stasia's work! I'm sure it will be a-m-a-z-i-n-g!

The topic for Stasia was "Writing AFTER the debut novel"

Here's what she had to say about it:

Before my debut novel, AUDITION, pubbed last year, people told me to “enjoy this time” because it was the “honeymoon period.” I laughed.  I’d been in agony since the book deal had been done. Revisions, edits, prepping for the blog tour, worrying about the “big day”…  How could this be a honeymoon?

Now I know that it was.  Not just because of the reality that publication proved my book to NOT be the NYT-best-selling, soon-to-be-a-movie runaway hit of which my mother was certain. (Don’t get me wrong, got some nice reviews and lots of readers seem to like it, but that’s not the same as earning out your advance, you know?)

The real reason that BEFORE-PUBLICATION feels like a honeymoon is because WRITING gets so much harder after you have reviews, sales figures, and a public identity as a certain type of writer in a certain type of genre.  Suddenly, you see yourself in phrases like “mid-list,” “contemporary-fiction” and “verse-novelist.” You’re in a tight little box surrounded by questions of whether the next book should be similar to the first, whether you should change your style in response to criticism, and whether your publisher will even print another book by you since on the first roll of the dice you didn’t exactly hit snake-eyes.

Writing has probably taken a back seat to promoting the book for a few months and when you get back to your desk, you discover that you don’t seem to be writing for YOURSELF, telling the stories that are in your heart, and focusing on your craft and your characters. As you try to resist the desire to repeatedly check your Bookscan stats and Goodreads ratings, your writing becomes strategic.  It’s not much fun anymore.  If you’re me, you probably even write a couple of hundred strategy-laden, heart-lackingly craptastic pages (cuz, um, those are words).

Don’t get me wrong.  Nobody succeeds in this business (despite the occasional weird braggy story you hear) without spending A LOT of time in front of a keyboard.  Write, revise, REWRITE, RE-REVISE, submit to your agent, RE-RE-REVISE…  This is not always a party.  But, in addition to being a job and a craft, writing is also a bit of an art.  And the rest cannot succeed without the artist in you being set free from the cages of strategy, criticism and Amazon rankings.

So, after some time (for me, sadly, months and not weeks), you take a long hard look in the mirror and ask yourself the BIG QUESTION: “Now that I’ve checked ‘publish a novel’ off my bucket list, do I really want to do this anymore?”  Another way to consider this: “If you were guaranteed that no one would ever publish your work again, would you still keep writing—and why?”

I was lucky enough to have a moment of clarity.  To remember that I’d been writing poetry and stories since eighth grade and gone unpublished for decades.  I wasn’t going to let a little thing like PUBLISHING A NOVEL destroy the essential writer-part of me.  I got back to my keyboard.  And I’m writing.  The next novel is still a bit of a work-in-progress but I know what I’m doing now.  Or, at least, I understand why I’m sitting here.

Stasia Ward Kehoe is the author of AUDITION (Viking) and a contributor to the upcoming anthology DEAR TEEN ME: AUTHORS WRITE LETTERS TO THEIR TEEN SELVES (Zest Books, October 2012).  She lives with her husband and four sons in Western Washington where she continues to write and choreographs the occasional musical.  Visit her online at www.swardkehoe.blogspot.com or @swkehoe on Twitter.

I want to thank Stasia for giving us such a great interview to read. It has been an honor to host you on my little spot on the web!

Also, a huge thank you to Rachel, Jaime, and Patricia for putting this tour together! Rock on!