Blog Tour - Re-runs - Day 1

For those of you who missed my blog tour last week, I thought I'd re-post all the posts here for a catch up, and for those of you who don't know, a blog tour is a virtual book tour. Over the last seven days I've had a mixture of guest posts and Witchblood reviews posted on some great book blogs, in the UK, US and Austrailia.

Day 1 was an author interview with me, hosted by a fellow northern girl, Caitlin on her blog The Cait Files which you can find at http://thecaitfiles.blogspot.com/

Here is the interview:

·         In the spirit of Twitter, can you tell us about your book in 140 characters or less?

Girl dies, gets saved by a vampire, turned into a vampire & fights to keep her soul, as she attempts to control her desire & newfound powers!

·         What tempted you to write YA, and why paranormal YA in particular?

It had to be YA, because that is what I love reading at the moment. I am in a book club and read other prize winning type adult books each month, but YA gives me the most enjoyment. I went for paranormal because I’ve always had an interest in Wicca, witches and had a secret love of vampires!

·         The setting of Witchblood is really unique, both in the sense it is set in Britain and that it is then set outside of London. What was your reasoning for this?

It was after loving the Twilight Saga, then the Evernight, Wings, Morganville, & House of Night series, amongst others that I came up with my own idea for a book series and I thought it would be great to add a British voice. There seem to be plenty of UK YA writers, but not many seem to do paranormal…or maybe I haven’t found them! It was an obvious choice to then set it in Manchester, rather than London, because I’ve grown up here and know it well, where as I’ve only been to London a couple of times. Plus in my opinion Manchester is a great city, which has everything, and is currently very ‘in’.

·         I've been following your blog posts about your journey through self-publishing, has it been easier or harder than you imagined?

Both! On the one hand it is far more time consuming, and has had many more facets to it than I initially thought – for example Blog tours & Book trailers were something I didn’t know about, and it all seems rather daunting. Yet once you get into it and learn about each thing you realise that, yes it is extremely time consuming, but it is also very ‘do-able’, so things I initially thought would be impossible, become possible.

·         If you could choose to become a paranormal creature, which would you choose?

Hmm I’d probably choose to be a witch! I love the idea of spell casting and potion making, and if I could fly a broomstick and have a go at Quidditch I’d be in heaven! Although, after loving Aprilynne Pike’s, ‘Wings’ series I would also quite fancy being a faery!

·         Can you tell us a bit about what you're working on right now?
Currently I am writing ‘Witchcraft’, which is the sequel to ‘Witchblood’.  I was doing really well and writing 1000-1500 words a day a couple of weeks ago, but unfortunately it has been neglected the last couple of weeks, due to me arranging this tour, designing the poster and other promotional issues. My last word count was 13,661 and I’m at chapter 5. You can keep an eye on where I’m up to with Witchcraft and read sneak excerpts on my blog.

It was great fun answering Caitlin's questions and the post did better than I could have hoped for with 12 blog comments entering the giveaway for a free copy of Witchblood. Tommorow I will post Day 2's post which is a guest post written by me about my love of YA fiction.