C. Lee McKenzie

Young Adult and Middle Grade Author

Last Call for Free Signed Hardcopy of The Namesake & Motley Education Cover Reveal

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Barnes and Noble. Amazon. Indiebound

I need a BIG favor. If you haven’t already added Double Negative on your TBR Goodreads list, I’d really appreciate it if you would now. I’m #47 on the LISTOPIA. THANK YOU 3X!



This is the last week to opt in for a chance to win a signed hardcopy of The Namesake by my September Featured Follower, Steve Parlato. If you like good writing, interesting characters and a story that probes the human heart, you’ll love owning this book. Sign up on my Email Connect and ask for your copy. Once the winner is pulled out of that lovely hat, Steve will see that your signed copy is on the way. Good luck.
The next Email Connect will come out at the end of this month (fingers crossed), announcing my October Featured Follower, How I Mine Goodreads for Reviews, and some interesting links I’ve discovered this past month. 
And now here’s a new book by my friend, S.A. Larsen. This is your chance to congratulate her on her new book! And enter her giveaway.
Title: Motley
Education (Book One: The URD Saga)
Author: S.A.
Larsen
Release Date: October
10, 2016
Forget having a lively after school social life, Ebony Charmed is fighting
to keep the entire Afterlife alive.
Ebony’s less-than-average spirit tracking abilities are ruining more
than sixth grade at Motley
Junior High: School for the Psychically & Celestially gifted. Her parents
argue so much her dad moved out. And, even though he’s scared of his own shadow
and insists on bringing his slimy, legless lizard everywhere they go, Ebony
wouldn’t survive without her best friend, Fleishman.
When Ebony’s Deadly Creatures & Relics’ project goes missing, she
learns her missing project is one of the keys to saving the spirit world. Now
Ebony and Fleishman must battle beasts from Norse Mythology to retrieve her
project before spirits are lost, the Well of Urd dries up, and Ebony loses all
hope of reuniting her family. But someone lies in wait, and he has other
plans…including creating a new world of spirits without them in it.
ADD TO
GOODREADS
Motley
Education has been aligned with Core Standards for grades 4-7. A guide will be
available on the author’s website
to download for FREE after the book’s release date.



About S.A. Larsen
S.A. LARSEN is the author of Motley Education, the first book in a middle grade fantasy-adventure series.
Her work has appeared in numerous local publications and young adult
anthologies Gears
of Brass and
Under A Brass
Moon by
Curiosity Quills Press.
Look for her
debut young adult novel, Marked
Beauty, set
for release in 2017. Find her in the land of lobsters, snowy winters, and the
occasional Eh’ya with her husband of over twenty years, four children, a
playful pooch, and two kittens.
You can visit her online at www.salarsenbooks.com.
Follow her on Facebook
| Twitter | Instagram and connect with her
on her Website & Blog.

Rafflecopter Giveaway Code
Five lucky winners will each
receive a signed bookmark and assorted swag! Contest runs from 09/15/16 to
09/23/16. Winners will be chosen my random.com.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Direct link to giveaway


Quote of the Week: “Talent is a pursued interest. Anything that you’re willing to practice, you can do.” Bob Ross, Painter and TV Host

A Writer’s Ups and Downs and Inspiration

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Blog. Twitter. Facebook
 Signed Copy of The Namesake for the first U. S. 
Email Connect Follower who raises a hand!

Steve Parlato is my Featured Follower for September and he has a new book on the brink of publication. Here he talks about it and about some of his experiences as a writer. 

Take it away, Steve!

I’ve finished my second book. While this hardly makes me Patterson prolific, I’m sort of impressed. I mean, it took ELEVEN YEARS for my debut, The Namesake, to go from initial scribblings in a college notebook to finished hardcover. By comparison, Book Two, The Precious Dreadful, was crafted with lightning speed: roughly two years start to finish—Start being a literal whisper in my head, sharing details of story at 5:00 AM on July 8, 2013. Finish = a solid revision submitted to my agent at last August’s end.

My newfound speed mostly results from expectations. I labored over my debut in blissful anonymity. No one outside family and friends was eager for me to complete a book. Sure, they cheered me on, but there was no reading public to consider. At least, no reading public keen on a follow-up from Publishers Weekly’s “name to watch.”

Steve and other authors. 
Networking, appearing, signing books. All part of the author’s life.

C. Lee Review 
Barnes and Noble. Amazon. Indiebound

I won’t pretend obscurity was idyllic. There were major disappointments en route to The Namesake’s release: false starts, agent misfires, rejections. And The Precious Dreadful has yet to hit bookshelves—plus I’m suddenly agentless—but with this novel, I’m a known quantity. While that caused sophomore trepidation, it also inspires me. 

If The Namesake was a thrilling leap into the unknown, with The Precious Dreadful, I have a better sense of where I’ll land. Writing TPD has been more purposeful, and I feel uncharacteristically confident. But I promise you, no less thrilled.
Getting to know my new protagonist, a young woman named Teddi Alder, has been a joy. The teen daughter of a trainwreck single mom, Teddi struggles to define herself one hot summer. Her decision to join SUMMERTEENS, a library writing group, leads to unexpected consequences— romantic and dramatic—as she works to solve two mysteries: the whereabouts of a long-lost childhood friend, and the appearance of a ghost-girl who emerges from the park pool late one night. As Teddi juggles mysterious events, and two guys with potential, The Precious Dreadful balances romance and humor with elements of horror and deeply felt emotion. 
Though the book isn’t technically a follow-up to The Namesake, Teddi’s story takes place in the same town as Evan’s, and there are sly references fans of my first novel will recognize. I’m excited to get The Precious Dreadful out there; thanks for the chance to share my news!

Be among the first to read an excerpt from Steve’s new book. Click HERE!

Quote of the Week: “Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it.” Muhammad Ali

My September Featured Follower is… And Don’t Miss #InkRipples

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 Barnes and Noble. Amazon. Indiebound
. . . Steve Parlato, author of The Namesake. I first met Steve in the UncommonYa group and came to appreciate his hard work and generous nature. He always chimed in during discussions, tweeted and re-tweeted author news, and posted regularly on the blog. Then I read his book and was drawn into his story by some seriously good writing and a story that touched my heart. I reviewed it just recently. This an example of a young adult story that can be devoured by a more mature reader and truly appreciated by them. My Review.
BLURB: The Namesake ~ (Adapted from Merit’s dustjacket copy)
For his teenage son, Evan Sr.’s decision to end his life is a deep betrayal. Evan was named for his father, and looks eerily like him, but the suicide proves the father he thought he knew was just a myth. A locked trunk may hold answers, and, thanks to his grandmother, the key is literally in Evan’s hand. Will his quest for answers help Evan find peace, or will he merely follow his father’s path to despair?  
In a voice that resonates with the authenticity of grief, Steven Parlato tells a different coming-of-age story, about a boy thrust into adulthood too soon, through the corridor of shame, disbelief, and finally…compassion. 

Kirkus Reviews: 
Evan Galloway, in his third year at Saint Sebastian’s Catholic High School, is told to “write what you know” for his college-application essays. But it’s what he doesn’t know that is haunting him.
“It’s funny how perfectly life splits into before and after,” Evan says. Before his father killed himself, home life was pretty normal—Now there’s a hole in that life that can’t be filled or explained. Evan takes on a quest…and the story becomes compelling, as answers to questions slowly surface…His digging… “let[s] the dragon out of the cave,” though, as troubling information unfolds about his father… Parlato’s debut novel, many years in the making, is a painstaking dissection of a father’s past and its reverberations in his son’s life.

A memorable, disturbing story, carefully wrought. (Fiction. 14 & up)
Blog. Twitter. Facebook

Steven Parlato, novelist, poet, and illustrator, is Associate Professor of English at Naugatuck Valley Community College, where he serves as advisor to the student newspaper, The Tamarack. Parlato’s played roles ranging from the Scarecrow to Macbeth; his poetry appears in Freshwater, MARGIE, Borderlands, Pirene’s Fountain, and Peregrine. Steven’s YA manuscript won a 2011 CT Shoreline Arts Alliance Tassy Walden Award. Upon The Namesake’s 2013 release, Kirkus called Parlato’s novel “a memorable, disturbing story, carefully wrought.”  

Lee, I’m so honored to be September’s Featured Follower. It’s been a summer of deep personal loss—my dad passed in July after a long cancer battle—and I’ve been in a bit of a creative slump. But the chance to share with your readers is inspiring. And it couldn’t come at a better time: I’m excited to share the news that Brilliance Audio’s new CD version of The Namesake audiobook releases September 6. It’s available for pre-order now on Amazon and Barnes and Noble

And stay tuned because Steve has more news about his next book. I’ll be posting all about it next week! The Precious Dreadful! is the title. Can’t wait to find out more.

#InkRipples is a monthly meme created by Kai Strand, Mary Waibel, and Katie L. Carroll. They post on the first Monday of every month with a new topic. They’re all authors, but you don’t have to be to participate.

The idea of #InkRipples is to toss a word, idea, image, whatever into the inkwell and see what kind of ripples it makes. They provide the topics and will be blogging about them on the first Monday of the month. You can spread your own ripples by blogging about the topic any day of the month that fits your schedule, just be sure to include links back to Katie, Kai, and Mary.

My favorite banned book is Catch 22. I still have a torn and marked up paperback of my first copy, and I wouldn’t part with it. Every time I run into situations that seem to have no solutions or are totally insane, I hear Heller’s words in my head. 



So here are 3 Quotes for the Week from Joseph Heller’s Catch-22:


“Insanity is contagious.” 
“[They] agreed that it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.”
“Why are they going to ‘disappear him?'”
“I don’t know.”
“It doesn’t make sense. It isn’t even good grammar.”