Category Archives: Alice

The “Meet My Main Character Blog Tour” Gone Rogue

blog-tour-graphic

The “Meet My Main Character Blog Tour” is a real thing. While I admit I was not tagged in the tour, I’m crashing the party. I discovered the tour on Eden Baylee’s Website, so I’ll pretend she tagged me in the tour.

To participate I have to answer seven questions about a main character from one of my novels, then I nominate five other authors to answer the same questions. Instead, I’m tagging all Black Rose authors to participate. Post the link to your blog tour post here or on Facebook so we can introduce each other to our main characters.

[Tweet “Zulu the Revenant revealed in the Meet My Main Character Blog Tour #YA #paranormal #book.”]

Here’s a link to Eden’s blog where I found the idea for doing this. Eden is currently promoting her novel, Stranger at Sunset on her site, a mystery/thriller from a number of viewpoints.

1. Tell us a little about this main character. Is he fictional or a historic person?

Zulu the Revenant, aka Janke Dappleford, is the fictional protagonist of my YA paranormal novel, The Revenant.

2. When and where is the story set?

The story takes place mostly in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in the present with flashbacks to the late 1800s in order to explain the origin stories of characters Zulu, Morgan the Seer and his brother, Malchus the Necromancer.

3. What should we know about him?

Zulu is a hopeless romantic who was killed when thrown from his horse on his way to elope with his girlfriend, Alma. He was buried and resurrected the next day, doomed to live forever as a revenant. He was trained in combat by Morgan the Seer so Zulu could use his powers–speed, strength and hearing–to help the people in Morgan’s premonitions.

4. What is the main conflict? What messes up his life?

Malchus, Morgan’s brother, manages to come back from the dead when a group of kids opens a portal with a Ouija board. Malchus believes Morgan responsible for his death and is out to seek revenge. Though still alive, Morgan has aged considerably over the past century and is no match for Malchus, currently in possession of a teenage body. Zulu intervenes to save  the Seer who has become a sort of father figure to him.

5. What is his personal goal?

His goal is to eliminate Malchus and emerge unscathed. Zulu and Morgan join forces with Kat the Empath and Father Paul along the way. The four of them form a sort of “Scooby Gang” out to slay Malchus and his zombie minions, while keeping themselves intact.

6. What are the titles of your novels, and where can we read more about them?

The Revenant is my latest novel. I have three other novels currently published, all of them featuring archaeologist Molly McBride and her husband Palmer Richardson, calledPhase Shift, The Mummy Wore Combat Boots and Throwaway Child. Read more about my books at eliseabram.com/book-table.

7. When can we expect your next book to be published?

I hope to have my fifth novel, ready for publication by the end of 2014. I Was, Am, Will Be Alice is a YA science fiction novel involving time travel. I started out writing a YA version ofThe Time Traveler’s Wife after getting the idea from an agent posting on the Writer’s Digest website. As I wrote, I began to incorporate ideas from Alice in Wonderland as well. Here’s the logline for the novel: after narrowly escaping death in a school shooting, 9 year old Alice Carroll realizes she can time travel when under extreme stress, a situation she is determined to learn to control in order to go back to that day and save the lives of her teacher and classmates and discover the identity of the woman who sacrificed her life so Alice could live.

 

 

Announcing the completion of “I Was, Am, Will Be Alice”!

Graphic by Parker Knight, "Family 1353" under Creative Commons

Graphic by Parker Knight, “Family 1353” under Creative Commons

Announcing…

Hot on the heels of The Revenant‘s release I am thrilled to announce the completion of my next YA novel, I Was, Am Will Be Alice.

After narrowly escaping death in a school shooting, 8 year old Alice Carroll realizes she can time travel when under extreme stress, a situation she is determined to learn to control in order to go back to that day and save the lives of her teacher and classmates and discover the identity of the woman who sacrificed her life so Alice could live.

My Inspiration

I began writing Alice when, while shopping for agents and publishers for The Revenant, I found a call for clients for a new agent on Chuck Sambuchino’s excellent “Writer’s Digest” blog. This particular agent said she would love to read a young adult version of Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife (TTW). I absolutely love TTW, and adopted her request as a personal challenge. I began with a similar premise: what if someone, a young girl, discovered she had the ability to time travel? In Niffenegger’s novel, the main character, Henry, keeps returning to his first episode of time travel, when he was in a car accident with his mother. Henry survived because he time traveled out of the car avoiding the crash which killed his mother. In my novel, Alice’s defining moment is being caught in a school shooting in grade three in which her favourite teacher killed. There is a romance and an episode with frostbite, too, but that’s where the similarities end.

The name Alice Carroll comes from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. I appropriated that name for my character early in the writing because the more I wrote, the weirder the character’s predicament until it was almost like she’d entered a bizarre world where nothing made sense to her any more. Why did she survive when others perished? Why did she time travel? What kind of future could she possibly make for herself? Would she ever learn to control it? Why did the shooting happen? Could she find a way to save her teacher? These questions, and more, confuse my Alice, much like Wonderland confused Carroll’s. To drive the parallel home, I borrowed other names from Wonderland to draw further connections.

Though a mouthful, the title for the book comes from something Henry says in TTW:

I love. I have loved. I will love.

I liked the juxtaposition of the different tenses and adapted this for my novel. Late in the writing I decided to use the title, I Was, Am, Will Be Alice, as subtitles and divide the book into sections. I Was Alice describes Alice of the past, when she discovers she can time travel and is traumatized by it. I Am Alice describes Alice of the present, when she realizes she can’t continue randomly traveling through time for the rest of her life and she decides to do something about it. I Will Be Alice describes Alice of the future, after her life comes full circle and she returns back to the day of the shooting and learns answers to some of the questions that have plagued her for most of her life.

Looking for Support

I am reaching out to the reading and writing community to look for “beta readers” and help printing and publicizing my YA sci-fi time-travel romance novel when the time comes.

If you would like to volunteer as a beta reader–finding errors in spelling, grammar, punctuation and consistency in story and possibly writing a review further into the process–please contact me at info @ eliseabram.com

[Tweet “Attention beta readers and reviewers – request your copy of I AM, WAS, WILL BE ALICE info@eliseabram.com”]

If you would like to donate to support my project, you may do so by visiting my PubSlush page at eliseabram.pubslush.com. I am giving away an eBook to all $20 donors and a hard copy, autographed, to all $50 donors (please note an additional $10 is required for international shipping outside of Canada). If you donate over $75, I will also throw in a free study guide in full colour, available as a PDF and/or printed copy sent along with your novel.

[Tweet “Support the arts – help me publish and publicise I AM, WAS, WILL BE ALICE eliseabram.pubslush.com”]

All donors will receive a mention in the acknowledgements section of the final, printed novel (eBook and hard copy).

Literary Devices from A to Z – Brought to you by the letter Y

 

 

 

is for Young Adult

 

 

 

Young adult (YA) novels are novels that appeal to adolescents and teenagers. In YA the main character is usually a pre-teen or teen and theme is often emphasized over the more traditional elements of storytelling such as plot and character. I’ve recently begun my foray into YA novel writing, with the soon to be released The Revenant and next year’s release (hopefully) of I am, Was, Will be Alice.

YA novels are usually subdivided into 3 genres, middle-grade (10 – 13ish), true YA (14ish to 18 or so) and new adult (19+). Most of the time the main character is the same age as the target audience.

The actual target audience of YA is hard to gauge as, quite often, adults enjoy these novels, too. This accounts for the popularity of such blockbuster series as Twilight or Harry Potter.

Do you read YA? Do you purposely seek out YA or do you read a book if it appeals to you regardless of it’s intended audience. Post your opinion of YA novels in the comments below.

 

 

Literary Devices from A to Z – Brought to you by the letter S

 

 

 

is for Symbolism

 

 

 

Sometimes a red rose is just a pretty flower sitting in a vase on the shelf while others it is a symbol of love. Visual symbols, like the rose, are usually linked to imagery. Other symbols may be linked to theme. The bottom line is that if something recurs in a story and means something other than the obvious literal meaning, it’s probably a symbol and not just another pretty flower.

In The Revenant, Morgan is a symbol of good, his brother Malchus, a symbol of evil. The sum of their lives show that good and evil are more than simple black and white divisions. There is a little bit of evil thought and good intentions in the best of us, but in the case of Morgan and Malchus, their personalities ultimately polarize and repeated references to this polarization is what makes them symbols (and foils).

In I am, Was, Will be Alice, the ability of Alice to control her time traveling becomes a symbol of hope. If she can control when she travels, maybe she can save the lives of her teacher and student peers and ultimately, herself.

Likewise, in the short story “Hope Floats”, a butterfly found by a child in a dystopic world becomes a symbol of hope. Having settled underground, a child ventures to the surface and captures a butterfly to give to his mother to show her there is still hope for returning to the old way of life. But when the butterfly dies, he realizes there is no turning back the clock.

Symbols are all around us in everyday life and in popular culture. I prefer the puzzle of the subtler symbols, no rose = love in my writing! Do you think of symbols at all? Can you think of any you noticed recently? Share examples of the best ones in the comments below.

Literary Devices from A to Z – Brought to you by the letter R

 

 

 

is for Repetition

 

 

 

Repetition occurs when a word or phrase is repeated for emphasis or effect.

In I Am, Was, Will Be Alice, when Tina learns Alice and Pete have not had sex yet, she tells Alice, “Maybe he’s just not that into you.” Through her adventure, Pete has been her faithful sidekick and the thought of losing him is horrifying. As Alice lies in bed that night, the phrase plays over and over like an ear-worm in Alice’s mind:

Maybe he’s just not that into you.

He tells me he loves me every time he sees me.

Maybe he’s just not that into you.

He took care of me that time at the ROM, got me out of a bad situation and took me to safety, clothed me, and fed me.

Maybe…

The point of this repetition of phrase is for the reader to identify with Alice’s stress in anticipation of another time leap.

Can you recall an effective use of repetition in something you’ve read? Why did you think it was so effective? Share your thoughts in the comments below.