Love in Bloom
Giveaway Hop
Featuring Lighthearted/Contemporary Young Adult Romance
& Sweet, Clean Adult Romance
May 16th to 22nd
Thanks to I Am A Reader, Not a Writer and Portrait of Book hosting this great giveaway! I have the privilege of introducing you all to one of my most favorite new YA authors, Tamara Ireland Stone, who not only is an amazing writer and accomplished business woman, but she is also the sweetest person ever who gives great hugs!
Goodreads Book description: Anna and Bennett were never supposed to meet: she lives in 1995 Chicago and he lives in 2012 San Francisco. But Bennett has the unique ability to travel through time and space, which brings him into Anna’s life, and with him a new world of adventure and possibility.
As their relationship deepens, the two face the reality that time may knock Bennett back to where he belongs, even as a devastating crisis throws everything they believe into question. Against a ticking clock, Anna and Bennett are forced to ask themselves how far they can push the bounds of fate, what consequences they can bear in order to stay together, and whether their love can stand the test of time.
Fresh, exciting, and deeply romantic, Time Between Us is a stunning, spellbinding debut from an extraordinary new voice in YA fiction.
My Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Author Blurb: Tamara lives with her husband and two children just outside San Francisco, California.
TIME BETWEEN US & TIME AFTER TIME are her companion novels. TIME BETWEEN US, told from Anna's point of view, is available now. TIME AFTER TIME continues the story from Bennett's perspective, and will be on shelves on October 8, 2013.
TIME BETWEEN US has been published in English, Spanish, French, and Italian, and will be available in twelve more languages throughout 2013. It has been optioned for film by CBS Films.
TIME AFTER TIME will be published in multiple languages throughout 2014.
For more information, visit tamarairelandstone.com or timebetweenus.com.
Author Interview
1. I absolutely love your story of how you transitioned from being a high powered and successful business woman to now being a wonderful YA writer. Can you tell us a little about how you got to where you are now, and how your previous job played a part in the writer you have now become?
Throughout my career, I’ve considered myself a storyteller. In my marketing communications business, I help my clients tell a story about how their software empowers people to be more effective. In crafting their story, I rely on customers—the actual users of the technology—to make it compelling. Those customers are real people, but like characters in a book, they’re the heart and soul of the story. If you connect with them, you’ll want to hear more.
Now, I’m also a storyteller in the more traditional sense, but I’m still creating a story around people who have a challenge and are trying to figure out how to solve it. Again, the characters are the heart and soul of the story. If you connect with them and their challenge, you’ll want to keep turning the pages to see how they figure everything out.
In both cases, I write stories that I hope will inspire you to act. In my marketing world, I want you to buy something. In my author world, I want you to do what many people have written to tell me they did after reading Time Between Us, like taking up running or looking into a student exchange program in another part of the world or trying rock climbing or setting their sights on an important goal and going for it.
I don’t have to tell you which one I find more personally rewarding, do I?
2. Your characters are terrific. What aspects of their personality were derived from people you know? Which character was the most surprising?
Thank you. I’m glad you like them! A lot of people I know and love are sprinkled throughout those pages.
Anna was inspired by two teens I greatly admire, but there’s probably a little of me in both Anna and Bennett as well. Anna is more like my 22-year-old self, when I first moved to San Francisco, discovered running, and sped up hills with Nirvana playing loud in my ears. But I didn’t have Anna’s restlessness. We moved a lot when I was young, so like Bennett, I was always looking for more stability.
I was probably most surprised by Bennett’s grandma, Maggie. She started off a bit like my mother-in-law and my grandmother combined, but as I was writing this story, she became a completely unique person. I thought she’d be a minor side character, but she stole my heart.
Justin is a lot like my husband, Mike, who is sweet and kind and a bit on the shy side. We met through a mutual friend and totally hit it off, but it took him ten days to call and ask me out (I know. I was counting). When we first started dating, Mike would make me mix tapes and decorate the covers with watercolors, just like Justin does for Anna (can I get a group “awww...”). Bennett’s got the confidence, but for me... I’ve always been attracted to the sweet, shy guy who doesn’t quite know how amazing he is.
3. What was the most difficult aspect about writing about time travel? The most fun?
Everyone says that you need to establish your rules and stick to them like glue, but let me tell you, that’s a heck of a lot harder than it sounds. Sometimes you have this great idea and think it’ll be twisty and cool and totally fun for the reader, but one you start working out the logistics—which I do all the time, using timelines and stick figures and arrows—you realize it just doesn’t work. Or, more often, it breaks some other element you’ve already established. I’ve wasted a lot of time trying to figure out how to make a fun idea work that was inherently impossible given the rules I’d defined.
I had the most fun once I came up with the rule that Bennett could only travel within his lifetime. I wanted him to be 17 in present-day, and when I realized that meant he was born in 1995, this whole story opened up for me. I lived in Evanston, Illinois in 1995, so I set the story there, picked the music I loved back then, and got to time travel myself—going back to a point in my life where I was experiencing a lot of things for the first time. It was a blast.
4. Tell us a little about your editing process. How many drafts did you go through to get to the final draft?
Far too many! I started it in December 2008 and exactly a year later, I had the full story on paper from beginning to end. After that, I worked with a writing coach on the second draft, and that took about six months. Once I found my agent, I spent another three months revising it and rewrote big chunks of the story with her guidance. When it sold to Disney-Hyperion, my editor and I spent another eight months working on it together and we went through multiple drafts. That sounds like five or six drafts, but there was so much changing in between the formal revisions as well. I think it was closer to fifteen, at least.
5. You are a busy woman! Tell us how you found the time to write a novel when you have so many other responsibilities!
If I’d listened to that little voice in my head that said, “What are you doing? You don’t have time to write a novel!” I never would have done it. Because trust me, that voice was loud and constant!
No one has time to write a novel. You write a novel because you love to write, and if you’re lucky enough to get a story in your head and you feel you have to tell it, you’ll find the time.
I wrote the first draft in small chunks of time, wherever and whenever I could—in bed in the middle on the night, in the evening instead of watching TV, and on my iPhone while I was waiting in lobbies for meetings to start or sitting in the carpool line. I wrote all the time, as fast as I could.
And I tried not to think, “I’m writing a novel.” Instead, I thought of each part as a scene in a movie and I’d say to myself, “You can do this. You’re just writing a scene”. After I had a bunch of scenes, I started building them like Lego blocks, figuring out how they worked together, what was missing, and what didn’t need to be in the story at all. Surprisingly, it started to look a lot like a novel. Thank goodness for the amazing coaches who helped me make it into one.
6. On your blog, you talk about stories you tell your children. What is their favorite one?
Their favorites are what we call “popcorn stories”. They’re always silly and different every time.
I ask them to give me two things they each want in their story and they shout out things like “giant ants” or “fairies” or “horses”, at which point, my son usually bounces up and adds “horses that poop gold” and my daughter rolls her eyes and agrees with the gold pooping horses.
Then I bring them all together to create a story about a world where a powerful fairy army rides giant ants, and all’s well until an evil anteater discovers their secret land. One of the fairies goes on a quest to find help and discovers a neighboring village with these beautiful horses who posses a powerful talent. They follow her back to her land, build an enormous wall out of gold poop to protect them, and they all live happily ever after.
7. What has been your favorite YA read of the past year?
I’m a big fan of a good cry. So while I’ve read many amazing YA novels in the last year, I’m going to have to go with The Fault in Our Stars. I’ve loved John Green ever since I first read Paper Towns, so I couldn’t wait to read Fault. It was one of those stories I couldn’t put down. I devoured it in a single day, it stuck with me for months afterward, and I can still sit here and sob just thinking about it. I love Amsterdam, and my goodness, who wouldn’t love that adorable Augustus. *sigh* Now I want to go read it again.
8. Can you tell us a little bit about the companion novel to this book? Was it difficult to get in Bennett's head?
Time After Time, the companion to Time Between Us, comes out this October. We’ve always known that the second book would be a sequel and I really wanted to continue Anna and Bennett’s love story from Bennett’s point of view. But I was really nervous about it. After all, I’ve been a 16-year-old girl, but I’ve never been a 17-year-old boy. Nor, have I been someone who could time travel. But I like a good challenge, and frankly, Bennett was the only person who could tell the story I wanted to tell. I’ve loved being in his head for the last year and a half. I hope readers enjoy it too.
9. What do you have in mind after that book is finished? I'm curious if you'll use your techie background to do a science fiction novel! :-)
My next story probably won’t be a sci-fi, but that’s not to say I won’t ever write one—I love technology and adore all the fun twists sci-fi affords.
I have this other story that’s been rattling around in my head for a good three years now and it’s itching to get out. After that, who knows? I’m up for anything. Maybe even gold pooping horses.
Thanks so much, Tamara, for such a wonderful interview! All of us are dying to get our hands on the sequel to Time Between Us. Enter now!
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