Category Archives: BookFunnel

Revisiting Inspiration for Alice

I Was, Am, Will Be Alice is on sale for $0.99 USD for the month of August. To celebrate, I’m looking posting about my inspiration for writing the novel that made me an award-winning author.

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In I Was, Am, Will Be Alice, 9 year old Alice Carroll disappears from her classroom during a school shooting. She later learns she is able to time travel when under extreme stress, a situation she is determined to learn to control in order to go back to the day of the shooting to save the lives of her teacher and classmates and to discover the identity of the woman who sacrificed herself so Alice could live.

Here are some excellent read-alikes, books with similar themes or in similar genres that have inspired me and my writing, especially with respect to I Was, Am, Will Be Alice. If you liked these books, you are sure to love ALICE (and vice-versa):

The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

Life Henry, Alice travels through time, but due to a different genetic anomaly. Also like Henry, Alice’s episodes of time travel centre around the most traumatic event in her life: being caught in a school shooting. Unlike The Time Traveler’s Wife, Alice eventually learns how to control her traveling and tries to use it to prevent the shooting from happening.

My novel is not primarily a romance, but rather a coming of age story in which Alice learns that the curves life has thrown her do not have to define her. It is about a young girl coming to terms with her disability and using it to empower herself.

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Names and phrases were borrowed from Alice in Wonderland, but aside from my Alice feeling as if she’s stepped into the bizzaro world of the looking glass, the story does not compare. I include Wonderland in this list with the hope that it might inspire my readers to go back and take a look at the classic work that inspired me, if not the story.

The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

In The Shining Girls, Kirby is the victim of a time traveller. She uses her traumatic event—nearly being murdered by serial killer, Harper—and her job as a reporter to turn the event around and bring her attacker to justice. Like Alice, Kirby uses the curves life has thrown her to empower herself and overcome her past. In The Shining Girls, it is Harper who does the travelling through a door in a magical house. Kirby is assisted by fellow reporter, Dan, in her investigation and there are hints of a romance, much like Alice is assisted by Pete, and there are hints of a romance.

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

In The Lovely Bones, Susie has been raped and murdered. She spends the book in heaven, looking down on her friends and family as her murder investigation unfolds. Susie must come to terms with her death as she hopes her murderer will be caught. As the story progresses, Susie comes of age as she accepts her fate and learns of a clue that has been uncovered that will ultimately lead to the capture of her murderer.

Alice is very much alive throughout the novel. The parallel here is the trauma and the need to come to terms with how the character’s life has changed as a result of the trauma. As the character comes of age, she learns to use her trauma as a tool for empowerment, rather than defeat.

The Half-Life of Molly Pierce by Katrina Leno

Molly suffers from split-personality disorder. The book opens with a trauma—Molly witnesses a boy on a motorcycle as he is hit and killed in a car accident—and she doesn’t know what to make of it. Because life around her goes on and each of Molly’s personalities are only aware of half of it, she must learn to overcome her disability in order to figure out who the boy on the motorcycle was, to regain her memory, and to get better. In other words, like Alice, she must learn to come to terms with her disability, and she eventually uses it to piece her life together, thus empowering herself so she can get well.

Purchase I Was, Am, Will Be Alice for only $0.99 this month on BookFunnel’s Fantasy Book Sale Promo. Click on the button and scroll to find my cover. While you’re there, be sure to check out the work of 12+ bestselling authors in the promotion.

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Fantasy Book Sale Promotion

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My book, I Was, Am, Will Be Alice, is on sale for $0.99 USD for the month of August!

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When Alice Carroll is in grade three she narrowly escapes losing her life in a school shooting. All she remembers is the woman comforting her in the moments before the gunshot, and that one second she was there, the next she wasn’t.

It’s bad enough coming to terms with surviving while others, including her favourite teacher, didn’t, let alone dealing with the fact that she might wink out of existence at any time.

Alice spends the next few years seeing specialists about her Post Traumatic Stress as a result of VD–Voldemort Day–but it’s not until she has a nightmare about The Day That Shall Not Be Mentioned, disappears from her bed, is found by police, and taken home to meet her four-year-old self that she realizes she’s been time travelling.

Alice is unsure if her getting unstuck in time should be considered an ability or a liability, until she disappears right in front of her high school at dismissal time, the busiest time of day. Worried that someone may find out about her problem before long, Alice enlists her best friend (and maybe boyfriend), Pete, to help her try to control her shifting through time with limited success. She’s just about ready to give up when the shooter is caught. Alice resolves to take control of her time travelling in order to go back to That Day, stop the shooting, and figure out the identity of the stranger who shielded Alice’s body with her own.

Fantasy & Sci-Fi Mania August

I joined BookFunnel a few days ago at the recommendation of a fellow author and joined in the Fantasy & Sci-Fi Mania August promo. My book, The Revenant: A YA Paranormal Thriller with Zombies, is one of the books being featured as a FREE download. In this post, I share my inspiration for writing the book.

It started with vampires

I’ve always been intrigued with vampire lore in popular culture, and I don’t know why. Most sources will tell you it’s the romance, the association of blood with other bodily fluids, and the parallel of tooth penetration with…well, you get the idea.

I just like a good story. Vampires (and other supernatural creatures) live by a set of rules they can’t escape–like not going out in the daytime, or having to be invited into a residence–and there’s something comforting and familiar about that.

I’m a teacher, and I was introduced to peer mediation around the same time I started writing seriously. Peer mediation is when students are trained to mediate problems between other students. As the teacher liason for the program, I did a lot of reading around the mediation process, and that’s when the idea struck: write the story of a mediation between a vampire and a hunter. I knew all there was about the characters, their histories and how they got to the point of mediation, I just couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to end it.

When in doubt, research

My cure for writer’s block is to read around the subject, so I went to the Internet and started researching vampires. I knew the vampire would probably kill the hunter in a fit of rage. I also knew the hunter would not be satisfied unless he’d killed the vampire. Maybe I could find some other sort of happy medium for the two? It was while searching I came upon the idea of revenants.

So little has been done about supernatural revenants–the odd B-movie or novel or video game–that there are no rules compelling their actions. That was one of the reasons I started thinking about using one in my story. If no one really knew what they were or how they had to live their lives, I could create the lore myself. The general definition of a revenant is someone who returns after a long absence. In history, this grew to include people presumed dead, like soldiers lost in the war, who eventually came home. They are associated with vampires, because like vampires, they are associated with death and rebirth.

I realized that I couldn’t build a whole novel around a single character, but my other characters couldn’t be the usual werewolves, ghosts, and witches associated with stereotypical vampires. I made my other protagonist female to appeal to female readers (I had the male angle covered with Zulu, the revenant in my story). I thought of other superpowers I could give her that were different from the norm and settled on seeing auras and being an empath.

The necromancer/zombie angle came from Zulu’s origin story and the simple reason that there had to be an explanation for his rising from the dead.

About The Revenant

To learn more about Zulu, Kat and how the necromancy/zombie angle fits into their story, read The Revenant. In The Revenant: A YA Paranormal Thriller with Zombies, Zulu and Kat join a seer to help save people from catastrophe, mostly as a result of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The real catastrophe begins when they learn the Seer’s brother, Malchus, once a powerful necromancer, has returned from the grave seeking revenge, for he believes the Seer responsible for his death.

Next up . . .

Check back with me throughout the month for more teasers, excerpts, and insight into how I put this book together.

And don’t forget to visit my promo, Fantasy & Sci-Fi Mania August, on BookFunnel to download The Revenant (sorry, but you’ll have to scroll to find it) and more than 30 other books by some very talented sci-fi, fantasy, and YA authors!