Category Archives: Young Adult

A Very Special Halloweenie Book Fair!

I’m participating in a BookFunnel group promo with 40+ other authors to bring you a selection of dreadfully delightful books, including Braelynn’s Birthright Book 2: Fallen Angel, for only $0.99 USD. Visit BookFunnel to purchase.

Inheriting her grandmother’s ring and the family curse was just the beginning for Braelynn. Now, a few years later, she and her friends have graduated high school and set up a supernatural detective agency, helping people cleanse their homes of malevolent spirits and paranormal creatures.

When what should be a simple haunting turns out to be a portent of dark things to come, Braelynn discovers she’s up against a fallen angel with powers beyond anything she could have imagined. Chosen to fight this force of darkness, she must navigate a dangerous world of otherworldly forces, shapeshifters, and the mysterious troika that follows her every move.

Along the way, Braelynn meets other hunters who become allies and friends as they battle to save the world from the chaos and destruction of Armageddon and their souls from eternal damnation. With the fate of the world at stake, they embark on a perilous quest to defeat the fallen angel, push them to their limits, and test their strength and courage.

Set in a contemporary world where magic and the paranormal are real, this thrilling tale of adventure, danger, and self-discovery combines magical realism, paranormal and urban fantasy, the supernatural, and a touch of romance. It will keep readers on the edge of their seats and leave them eager for more.

Join Braelynn and her friends as they face their greatest challenge yet!

For fans of Lauren Kate’s Fallen and Cassandra Clare’s The Mortal Instruments.

Free this month: Braelynn’s Birthright Book 1: Wendigo. Download at Bookfunnel.

Free Scary Fun Fiction

Craving fiction that’s creepy, thrilling, and just plain fun?

I’ve partnered with 30+ other authors across a wide range of sub-genres, including horror, paranormal, and thriller, for a BookFunnel promo featuring free scary fun books. Discover new authors and add some seriously entertaining reads to your TBR without spending a cent. This promo runs for a limited time, so grab your free books while you can, and get ready for some scary fun!

My book, Braelynn’s Birthright, is free for the month of October!

When fifteen-year-old Braelynn Hanlon inherits her grandmother’s ring, she discovers that the creatures of nightmare are real, and that the women in her family have been hunting them for generations.

The ring comes with one major advantage: super-healing powers. The downside? It makes Braelynn a magnet for all things supernatural.

Her boyfriend, Seth, turns out to be a vampire. Her best friend, Shannon, is a werewolf. And the school’s activist, Winona, is an Ojibwe shaman-in-training who is tracking a wendigo disguised as a local businessman. When the wendigo threatens to destroy the local watershed, Braelynn and her friends agree to help stop it. But after Braelynn vanquishes Seth, the leader of his vampire gang sends a bugbear to seek revenge.

Will Braelynn master her newfound powers to protect her friends before the supernatural forces closing in on them become too much to handle?

Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets The Mortal Instruments in this fast-paced YA paranormal adventure.

To get Braelynn’s Birthright Book 1: Wendigo for free, click on the button below and scroll to find my cover. And while your there, take a look at some of the other bestselling independent authors, fresh voices, and scary fun stories.

DOWNLOAD YOUR NEXT SCARY FUN READ

From Concept to Final Design

This month, my award-winning YA urban fantasy novel, I Was, Am, Will Be Alice, is on sale for just $0.99 USD! To celebrate, I’m looking back at how its cover evolved from initial concept to final design.

My Inspiration

Because I planned to market the book to fans of The Time Traveler’s Wife (TTTW) and Alice in Wonderland (AIW), I used their iconic covers as a starting point.

I fell in love with the image’s vintage aesthetic, from the soft focus to the retro clothing and battered. I also loved how the cover zoomed in on a partial image rather than showing the full scene.

Ever since the classic Disney animation, Alice in Wonderland has been defined by her iconic blue dress and white apron. I knew I needed to weave that recognizable colour into my own cover.

Version 1

Version 1 captured the vintage feel of TTTW through the frame, clothing, and worn shoes, while adopting AIW’s classic blue dress. I experimented with different images inside the frame, but ultimately decided to discard the framing concept.

Warped Time

Next, I toyed with the concept of distorted time. This version kept the cropped perspective, focusing solely on the girl’s hands, and introduced a pocket watch. This represented time travel while channelling the White Rabbit from AIW.

In the end, I returned to the blue dresses to tie back into Alice’s blue dress and strengthen the allusions to AIW in the book.

Refining the Dress: Lace and Petticoat

This version featured a blue dress with black lace and a petticoat, paired with shoes, which was a nod to TTTW. It was also the first iteration where I introduced colour banners to make the title text pop.

Refining the Dress: School-Day Style

I liked this dress style sightly more because of it’s white lace, which calls to mind AIW’s iconic white apron. The shoes were also more utilitarian, something a child might wear to school on picture day.

The Final Cover

This is the design I ultimately chose! Like TTTW, it focuses tightly on a single detail, but in this case, it’s the hands instead of the shoes. The girl wears a dress in that signature AIW blue, offset by delicate embroidered flowers that break up the background colour blocks.

I Was, Am, Will Be Alice is available for just $0.99 USD all month long. Head over to my BookFunnel group promo to grab your copy, and be sure to check out the 12+ other incredible fantasy reads featured in the sale!

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.

READ ALL ABOUT MY BOOK ON BOOKFUNNEL

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.

CLICK HERE FOR LIMITED TIME FANTASY DEALS

Fantasy Book Sale Promotion

Fantasy readers, your next great adventure awaits!

I’ve partnered with 12+ other fantasy authors across a wide range of fantasy sub-genres for a BookFunnel promo featuring great fantasy books. Whether you love epic quests, dark magic, paranormal worlds, or urban fantasy, this collection has something for every kind of fantasy reader.

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

To get I Was, Am, Will Be Alice for only $0.99, click on the button below. And while your there, take a look at some of the other bestselling independent authors, fresh voices, and fantasy genres you may not have tried before.

FIND YOUR NEXT FANTASY ADVENTURE

WINNER OF THE KINDLE BOOK REVIEW AWARD FOR YA FICTION AND THE A WOMAN’S WRITE COMPETITION!

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!

#BookTok

Braelynn’s Birthright–Book 1: Wendigo BookTok

What is a booktok, you might ask?

A booktok is a video posted on TikTok in which readers discuss books they’ve read. This is supposed to be a great marketing tool, as well, so I’ve decided to dip my foot into the TikTok waters.

Creating this video was no mean feat. First, I had to write the script. Next, I filmed myself which necessitated getting used to seeing myself on the screen. After more than twenty takes, I managed to de-sensitize myself to this phenomenon. Lastly–and perhaps the most daunting–I had to figure out how to edit the video. This meant learning how to use Adobe Premiere Pro. If you’ve ever used any Adobe Suite products, you know just how complicated and confusing a task this can be. I managed to find an amazing video describing the basics (Thanks to Justin Brown an Saj Adibs for their amazing YouTube how tos).

The result is fairly successful (I think), particularly for a first try. Take a look for yourself (see video embedded above).

Here is the transcript for this booktok:

Hey, there.

Author Elise Abram here with what I hope will be one of many more BookToks to come.

Today’s book is Braelynn’s Birthright—Book 1: Wendigo. If you’re a fan of Supernatural, the Nancy Drew television series, or Legacies, you’re sure to be a fan of this book.

In the book, Braelynn inherits her grandmother’s ring, but the ring has been cursed, making her a magnet for supernatural entities. As she learns to navigate her new powers, she’s joined by her friends Sommer, Shannon (who happens to be a werewolf), and Winona, an Ojibwe shaman-in-training. The four of them band together to vanquish the wendigo threatening to destroy the local watershed.

This book explores what It’s like to feel as if you are different from everyone else and you don’t belong. It shows how powerful you can be when you embrace your differences instead of try to fit in and be like everyone else.

Braelynn’s Birthright is available at all major online retailers.

I hope you’ll let me know what you think if you read it.

Until next time, goodbye!

To buy Braelynn’s Birthright–Book 1: Wendigo, please see my list of YA books for purchase links.

New Release!

Braelynn’s Birthright–Book 1: Wendigo

I am proud to have published Braelynn’s Birthright–Book 1: Wendigo. This is the first in what I hope will be a series of books featuring the same set of characters. Book1: Wendigo is a young adult supernatural/horror urban fantasy novel.

Book 2: Fallen Angel is near completion. This book is a new adult novel, taking place a few years after Book 1. It also unites characters from a number of my books including Phase Shift, The Revenant, and Revamped. Look for the release of Book 2: Fallen Angel in November of this year.

If you’re a fan of Supernatural, Nancy Drew (current TV series), or Legacies (Vampire Diaries spin-off) you will love the Braelynn’s Birthright series, as well as the other books mentioned here.

Here is a closer look at what Braelynn’s Birthright–Book 1: Wendigo is about:

Imagine a world where the creatures of nightmare are real. This becomes fifteen-year-old Braelynn Hanlon’s world once she inherits her birthright in the form of her grandmother’s ring and is tricked into putting it on. You see, the women in her family have been cursed, doomed to defend humanity from things that go bump in the night. On the upside, the ring comes with super-healing powers, but it also makes her a magnet for all things supernatural. Her mother has had years to come to terms with her fate, but Braelynn’s about to get a crash course on how to be a hunter of all things paranormal.

Her boyfriend, Seth, turns out to be a vampire. When Braelynn vanquishes him, the leader of Seth’s gang sends a bugbear to seek revenge. If that’s not bad enough, her best friend, Shannon, is a werewolf, and Shannon’s girl crush is enchanted. To make matters worse, the school’s activist, Winona, is an Ojibwe shaman in training, hot on the trail of a wendigo disguised as a local businessman who is threatening to destroy the local watershed. Braelynn and her friends agree to help Winona vanquish the wendigo, but will her ring and her new-found powers be enough to keep her safe?

Braelynn’s Birthright–Book 1: Wendigo is available at Amazon (paperback and eBook), B & N, Apple Books, and Rakuten Kobo.

ALICE wins 2017 Kindle Book Review Award for YA

The title says it all.

I Was, Am, Will Be Alice has won the 2017 Kindle Book Review Award for YA!

Thank you so much to Jeff Bennington from the Kindle Book Review and all of the panelists and prize-givers for this much-gilded feather in my writing cap.

Here’s my badge:

To celebrate, I Was, Am, Will Be Alice will remain on sale (for a limited time) for only $0.99! Here’s what the book looks like (beside the other winners):

Here it is in the list that follows, marking it as the winner:

2017 Kindle Book Review Award Semi-Finalist

I Was, Am, Will Be Alice has made it through to the 2017 Kindle Book Review Award Semi-Finals. Keep reading for a very special offer at the bottom of this post.

2017 Kindle Book Review Award Semi-Finalist

Winner of the 2015 A Woman’s Write Competition

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.

To celebrate, the eBook of I Was, Am, Will Be Alice is on sale for $0.99! Get your copy wherever eBooks are sold.