Book Extract: Dragon Kin’s Choice by Jo Gatenby
I am beyond excited to be welcoming Jo Gatenby and the blog tour for her book, Dragon Kin’s Choice.
What do you do when your world expands, but your choices shrink?
When an orphaned dragon bonds with fourteen-year-old Tad, who never knew his parents, they believe they’ve finally found the family they’d never had. However, there’s more to them than they realize, and that might be the very thing which tears them apart.
Meanwhile, the duke’s daughter, Marian, struggles to avoid an arranged marriage. In trying to escape her fate, the truth is revealed, and she is forced to reconsider everything she thought she knew.
And although the prospective groom’s younger brother, Aldoran, is resigned to being the ‘spare heir’, he’s restless and bored. Drawn into a web of secrecy, he struggles to rise above his father’s expectations and complete his mission.
When these four lives converge, their choices reshape each other—and the world around them—in ways none of them could have predicted.
*****
Jo has shared an extract with us today. We hope you enjoy.
beginning of extract
While the main character of my novel is a newly hatched dragonet who doesn’t even know the names of things—or even how to speak—one of my favorite secondary characters is Tad, the teenager who will become her bondmate.
This excerpt takes place shortly after we meet him and his friends, and learn that he can sense the emotions of others. He’s just jumped into the quarry lake and is still underwater when he glimpses her.
I’ve also used square brackets and italics [like this] to indicate mind-speech throughout the novel. You’ll also notice Tad’s peasant dialect. I wanted this to bleed into the prose slightly, giving the narrative the flavor of his speech without becoming distracting. So you’ll notice the was/were grammatical reversals, along with expressions such as if’n, mayhap, or certain sure woven throughout.
I hope you enjoy their very first encounter!
*****
A flicker of movement caught his eye. His body gently rocked side to side, and he glimpsed a large black form racing below him. Startled, his open senses registered curiosity—and an alien wisp of loneliness—from a thing what certain sure weren’t human.
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Book Extract: Bob & Shirley’s Guide To Murder by Suzy K Quinn
Please join me in welcoming Suzy K Quinn to Novel Kicks and the blog tour for her book, Bob and Shirley’s Guide to Murder.
Bob and Shirley run a lovely country pub. They also solve murders …
A warmly funny, gloriously British cozy crime and murder mystery series that can be read as standalones or part of a series. Set in a village where the pub is the heart of country life and served with warmth, wit and a very good Sunday roast.
“Murder? In our quiet, little English village?
Great Oakley is a place of hanging baskets, tearooms and riverside walks. We’ve won ‘Britain’s safest village’ 10 years running. I keep three pound coins, a box of toffees and a bottle of Pepto-Bismol on my dashboard at all times, and I’ve never needed to lock my car.
Certainly, Bevvy Hogg was disliked. She ran the local Waist Watchers group, yet came to our pub for fish and chips, treacle tart and a bottle of Chardonnay every Friday. But I don’t think she was murdered …”
When Bevvy Hogg is found dead in the Goose and Gander pub garden, with an empty treacle tart plate beside her and several dress sizes slimmer than anyone remembers, Great Oakley’s winning streak as Britain’s safest village comes to an abrupt end.
Suzy has shared an extract with us today. We hope you enjoy.
*****beginning of extract*****
Bob and Shirley run the Goose and Gander pub in the Suffolk village of Great Oakley. When Bevvy Hogg, leader of the local Waist Watchers slimming group, is found dead in their pub garden, several dress sizes smaller than anyone remembers, the pair start investigating.
In this scene, Bob and Shirley go undercover at a Waist Watchers meeting. Bob is a fitness fanatic with absolutely no tact. Shirley is a larger lady who considers weighing scales the enemy of happiness. It goes about as well as you would expect.
Bob
The Waist Watchers meeting was certainly an experience. The logic baffled me. How do people think that sitting around, talking about food, will help them lose weight? It would be far better to spend their evenings having a long walk, which would not only burn off calories but also improve their moods.
Jade welcomed us with a ‘red light’ forbidden food list to stick on our fridge. It looked broadly similar to Shirley’s daily diet: beer, crisps, cider, wine, chips, butter, lard, pies and pastries.
Then we were ushered to a horseshoe of seats, semi-circling a table of weight-loss shakes, soups and chocolate bars.
We were supposed to ‘listen with two ears’ while others talked about their weekly food intake. But I soon cracked and demanded, ‘What’s this obsession with milky, frothy coffees from overpriced coffee shops? Milk is designed to help young animals put on weight. Obviously, it’s not a sensible choice for dieters. Why not just have a nice cup of tea? It’s much better for you, and also less expensive.’
On reflection, I shouldn’t have voiced my opinions so early on. It wasn’t the best way to build group rapport. In fact, Jade asked me to stop talking after I explained that the artificial sweeteners in her Glow Up shakes were scientifically proven to make you crave more sugary food.
by Book Extract: Paper Over It by Ruth Gresty
Please join me in welcoming Ruth Gresty to Novel Kicks and the blog tour for her book, Paper Over It.
Jennifer Jones is in control.
Jen is confident she has complete control over the things that are trying to control her. Until she isn’t. Until she hasn’t. Until she realises she has never been in control at all. She’s been papering over it for years.
It’s the start of the year 2000. A new millennium has arrived. For Jen and her three friends, university life in Manchester is full of possibility and endless fun. Sassiness, spontaneity, marvellous mayhem and youthful optimism reign in the Manchester rain.
But beneath the sometimes brash bravado sometimes even the most resilient, carefree, fun-loving characters who, on the surface look like they are living their best lives, are perilously close to falling apart. Over the course of one unforgettable year, the young women confront their own realities and truths. Some make foolish mistakes and others life changing choices.
Sometimes heartwarming and other times heartbreaking, but always brutally honest. This is a story of friendship, mistakes, self-discovery and acceptance; identity, love and the messy reality of becoming an adult. It’s about the masks we wear, the mistakes and choices we make, and the courage it takes to stop papering over it and face ourselves when everything feels like it’s falling apart.
It’s real, raw, raunchy, sometimes random and frankly rude at times. Just like Jen and her friends.
Ruth has shared an extract from Paper Over It with us all today. Make that drink, find those biscuits, head to that comfortable chair and enjoy.
(Warning: mild language).
*****beginning of extract*****
I have chosen this extract as it hopefully sums up how twenty-one-year-old single mum Jen (the main protagonist of four key characters) is feeling and why she knows she has to somehow evolve and enhance her life. She doesn’t fit into her old one (or her friends) on a day-to-day basis. She is lonely, however much she loves her baby boy. She is also being dragged back into her un-named eating disorder just to try and feel a little control over something.
She has hit a crossroad, on a road in her much-loved Manchester, and knows she needs to make some changes. She just doesn’t really know how yet.
This extract is towards the end of the book and only features one of the four main characters, and I appreciate it gives away the spoiler of Jen having a baby, but hopefully it makes sense why I have chosen this.
End of Chapter 49 – ‘Show me the meaning of feeling lonely’
Joseph is fast asleep, only taking a single suck of his dummy occasionally. She suddenly feels sightly uneasy in her beloved city. Detached in a weird way. She drives south, out of it.
As she crosses the inner ring road and onto the Princess Parkway, a strange cloud descends over her.
by Book Extract: The Obsidian Rig by Earl D. Coobs
It’s a pleasure to welcome Earl D. Coobs to Novel Kicks as we shine a light on his book, The Obsidian Rig.For Garth Heller, owning a gleaming, obsidian-black Peterbilt 359 means freedom. But his dream rig conceals something he could never have anticipated: a malevolent force hidden deep within its engine block, a remnant of an ancient cosmic evil forged from the Spear of Destiny.
The truck’s dark mythological power begins consuming Garth’s mind, turning pride into possession and plunging him into blackouts he cannot explain. Violence follows. So do madness and guilt. With each mile comes another loss of control and another unspeakable crime as Garth’s soul is slowly twisted into a vessel for horror.
But the darkness beneath the hood doesn’t end with Garth. The Peterbilt passes to a new owner, a broken man named Harry Smith, and the nightmare starts all over again.
In The Obsidian Rig, supernatural horror meets occult mythology and cosmic terror in a story where machines can become monsters, and evil can wear the mask of steel.
Earl has kindly shared an extract with us today. We hope you enjoy.
*****beginning of extract*****
Chapter 1
The Promise
The day Garth finally got his Peterbilt was the last good day he could remember. He stood in the Tulsa dealership lot, his boots sinking a little into the fresh gravel, just staring at it. The truck wasn’t just a machine; it was a promise. He’d scraped and saved for ten years to custom-order this rig, and it was perfect. He knew every single detail by heart: a 1972Peterbilt 359, VIN 7201509359C. The deep, obsidian black paint shimmered in the midday sun, a finish so dark it seemed to pull the light into its surface. He’d nicknamed it “Iron Ray,” a nod to his late father and the raw power he saw in its lines. Continue reading
by NK Chats To & Extract: Noah Christopher
Hi Noah, thank you so much for joining me today. Can you tell us about your book, The Confessor?
Absolutely! I’ve always had in the back of my head that it would be fun to write a book one day, and after years of thinking about it “one day” finally became “today” and I just jumped in. My favorite author has always been John Sandford ever since I first read Rules of Prey many years ago. I love the alternating POV chapters between hero and villain, so I knew I wanted to use a similar concept while still making the book my own and something truly unique.
That eventually became The Confessor. The book started when I came up with the concept for the killer, a man who is tired of all the injustice in the world and starts making people confess to their crimes before he kills them. Then, as I wrote on the dedication page, I wanted our hero to feel like a distant cousin of Lucas Davenport from Sandford’s Prey series, with a healthy dose of myself thrown in as well. Those were the building blocks, and everything else fell in around them.
The hero and the killer, oddly enough, start to feel like two sides of the same coin, and the line that divides them starts to blur towards the end. It’s a book that weighs some pretty deep questions of morality and justice…and who gets to make those decisions. My goal is that it’s fun to read and takes you on a wild ride, but then sticks with you a bit after you’ve finished it.
What are the challenges when writing in a series? What are the most important things you need to consider?
The first challenge wasn’t writing a series—it was figuring out how to write a book in the first place! I’ve always been a writer by trade in many different mediums, but I’d never written a full book. The whole thing was a massive learning curve. I just had to learn as I went, and as I wrote, I gradually found the rhythm of the book and became much more confident in what worked.
I also have the first six chapters of Book 2 in the series written, and I may be biased, but I think it’s even better than Book 1. Now the challenge is keeping the continuity straight, advancing the characters and raising the stakes while still making each book satisfying on its own. I’m learning and growing as I go, and that’s half the fun of it.
What is your typical writing day like? Do you have any writing rituals like needing coffee before you begin? Needing silence to write—that sort of thing?
I had to learn and develop this as I went too, but eventually the pattern I fell into, which I really enjoyed, was working in 2-3 hour blocks about two or three times a day. Any longer and I found I needed to clear my head, but any shorter and I found it hard to really get into the zone and hit a creative groove.
I like to go for a run or walk or swim in between, and those are often some of my most creative times. More ideas for this book came to me while out on a run or while swimming than at any other time. I often found I couldn’t put the book down, couldn’t get it out of my head, so while swimming I’d constantly be trying to solve dead ends I had reached, or figure out how to shift the plot in the direction we needed to go in a realistic way.
And yes, I need pure silence to write. I am definitely not one of those background-noise people, and I could never write somewhere like a Starbucks. It’s home in my quiet office for me. My final routine came at the end of the day. After I’d worked on the book, I would put it down, clear my head, go for a walk, eat dinner, do whatever else was going on with the family, and then, after I’d fully reset and cleared my mind, I would read with fresh eyes the new section I’d produced that day before going to bed. That was always a real treat. Then…rinse and repeat the next day until the book was finally finished.
What’s your favourite word and why?
by Book Club
