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).
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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.
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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.
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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 Extract: Heartless By Brian Fitzgerald
I’m happy to be welcoming Brian Fitzgerald to Novel Kicks as we shine a light on his book, Heartless.
Ten years of frustration and heartbreak caring for his son John, born with a catastrophic heart defect, have convinced Rick Morrow that the world is stacked against his family. And on what should be the best day of their life — the day when John will finally get a new heart – an even worse nightmare begins, when the helicopter carrying the heart crashes, destroying the heart and the hopes of the Morrow family.
Rick’s heartbreak turns to rage as he begins to suspect that the accident was no accident at all. His pursuit of the truth puts him on a collision course with the giant Cera Corporation and the powerful family that runs it, who have an agenda of their own and will stop at nothing to make it come true. The escalating conflict threatens Rick’s reputation, his safety and even his marriage. It reaches its gut-wrenching climax with Rick and his wife Mary facing and even more terrible question; will they sacrifice all they believe in to save their own son, at a cost almost too high to imagine?
Brian has shared an extract with us today. We hope you enjoy.
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One
The white lines crawled across the green displays of the monitors, in rhythm with the steady sigh of the ventilator. The name ‘Matthew Richardson’ was written in black Sharpie on a piece of tape running at an odd angle below the squares of glass. The tape had been stuck to the machine in haste six months ago in the frenzy of the emergency room ten floors below. It had been put there during a desperate attempt to save the life of the young boy at the end of the tangle of the wires and tubes hanging between the machines and the bed. No one had seen any point in straightening it ever since.
by Book Extract: The Knife Maker of Venice By David Gilman
I’m excited to be inviting David Gilman to Novel Kicks and the blog tour for his book, The Knife Maker of Venice.
A young Englishman captured by slavers must survive the snakepit that is seventeenth-century Venice.
1604. As pirates seeking slaves to sell in the markets of North Africa terrorise the coasts of Europe, headstrong Richard Sheriff and his sister Elizabeth are torn from their Devonshire home and thrust into a waking nightmare.
Richard’s skills as a blacksmith see him fetch a high price, but the pirate captain has other plans for Elizabeth and once they are separated, Richard has no idea of his sister’s fate. They must both learn to survive on a deadly voyage into the unknown.
Sold into servitude in Venice: glittering, vicious city of secrets, he is apprenticed to a knife maker. Richard’s talents soon win him renown… but haunted by his sister’s absence, he vows never to stop looking for her, knowing she would do the same for him.
First he must survive that city of ghosts. Will the siblings live to see each other again, or will they join the myriads lost to Venice, where life is cheap, profit is all, and escape nigh-on impossible?
A powerful historical adventure perfect for fans of Kate Mosse, Ken Follett and Robert Harris.
David has kindly shared an extract with us today. Enjoy.
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by Book Club
