Evolution Release Day!

Evolution, the second book in the E series, is now available! Get Evolution and E for only 99¢ each during release week, November 12th-19th, 2014.

 
Outpost Three is still standing… barely. But the deadliest threat it has ever faced is on its way-- a violent force that will annihilate every man, woman, and child.

With the Sentries under his control and Grey’s army defeated, Matt is more powerful than ever. Eden is little more than his prisoner, but that line is blurring as her affection for him grows. Now, as the Outpost faces total destruction, Matt must sacrifice the possibility of attaining Eden’s love in the vague hope that her past might hold the key to saving them all.

Eden’s journey will begin to unravel the mysteries of her previous life, reveal dangerous new questions, and change not only the future of Outpost Three, but shape the course of history.

This eagerly anticipated sequel to Kate Wrath’s E begins an epic quest into the dark, dystopian landscape of Eden’s world.
Get both books in the E series, E and Evolution, for 99¢ each on Kindle for a limited time only: November 12th- 19th, 2014.
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Join Kate for the Evolution Release Day Facebook Party:

You're invited! Come hang out November 12th from 8-12 pm Eastern and celebrate the release of Evolution. Woohoo!

An excerpt from Evolution:

We run down the narrow alley and take the first turn, then another. We keep running, moving. I don't even notice my surroundings until, at last, we slow to a stop. The smell hits me first—the stench of piss, of something rotten, all condensed into a small space. Breathing hard, we stand in the street and look around us. We're in a main thoroughfare now, judging from the traffic, but it’s still narrow. I feel squashed, smothered. On all sides, a crowd throngs around us. Most of them are dressed in rags. Hollow faces huddle three or four bodies deep against both edges of the road, dirty, hopeless, and lost. Many of them are children.


I'm scanning their faces frantically before I even realize what I'm doing. "Oscar," I hear myself whisper. It hits me, and I break off before I can call out his name. Before I can start running again, sifting through the masses of them.


Apollon's hand clamps onto mine, but he says nothing. He and Jonas are focused on Jacob, who is shaking violently. Tears are pouring from widened eyes down his face. I want to help him, but all I can do is stand here trying not to break down, myself.

"We need to find somewhere to regroup," Jonas says quietly. "Get out of this mess."
I cast around for somewhere to go, but as far as I can see, it's piles upon piles. People, and people, and buildings looming over them. There's no breathing room. No space. I have to force my breath to steadiness. It's too much.
There is a commotion on the street ahead, maybe a block away. The ragged masses push away from the center, squashing and trampling each other in the process. We're caught in a wave of motion and carried backward, but still we try to look. Where the commotion started, there's a group of figures, similarly dressed in black with blue bandanas. They're moving down the street toward us.


The wave of people suddenly backlashes from the other direction, and we're pushed the opposite way from before. We manage to finally see why. On our opposite side, there's another group of people. These are dressed primarily in white. One of them, clearly a leader, wears a purple doo rag and carries what might be the biggest gun I've ever seen. He raises it toward us.

   

Ashamed of Reading YA?

Despite the fact that it’s Friday and I should be providing a little teaser for Chasing Freedom, I have decided to go a different direction today.

I have decided to give my own response to this article http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2014/06/against_ya_adults_should_be_embarrassed_to_read_children_s_books.html  posted online yesterday. It created quite a stir in the writing/literary community. It spurred a trending hashtag on Twitter #PromoteaYAInstead and numerous angry comments and discussions.

As both a writer and a reader of YA books I have been thinking about it a lot since I first read it, and so I have decided to get my thoughts out there.

For anyone who hasn’t read the article it basically suggests that adults (and I’m not sure what the author of the article considers adult – just turned 19? Or some other arbitrary number?) who read YA books should be ashamed of their reading habits.

The most telling quote is this one: ‘Fellow grown-ups, at the risk of sounding snobbish and joyless and old, we are better than this. I know, I know: Live and let read. Far be it from me to disrupt the “everyone should just read/watch/listen to whatever they like” ethos of our era. There’s room for pleasure, escapism, juicy plots, and satisfying endings on the shelves of the serious reader. And if people are reading Eleanor & Park instead of watching Nashville or reading detective novels, so be it, I suppose. But if they are substituting maudlin teen dramas for the complexity of great adult literature, then they are missing something.’

To be honest, I take offense. Because what she suggests throughout the article is that YA books are simplistic and that ‘adult’ books are not.

Firstly, I would argue that there is a large chunk of adult literature that is far more guilty of simplicity than YA books. Who could argue that 50 Shades is complex and ambiguous in its ending? Dan Brown? Danielle Steele? Sophie Kinsella? Stephen King? I am not saying by any means that these books/writers are bad, but I would argue that their novels are no more complex than many YA books. The very things this writer says makes YA books simplistic, the endings for example, could be found in 90% of adult books.

On the other side of the coin, there are YA books that are incredibly complex and thought-provoking in the message they provide if you are willing to look at them as more than just ‘a book for kids’.

Let’s take the most popular ‘children’s book’ and admittedly one of my favourites. Harry Potter. Whilst it’s easy to say that it is pure magical escapism (and on the surface it is) does that mean that there is nothing that adults can take from it? Politics, philosophy, the nature of life and death, all these things are there.  Admittedly, they are all tied up quite neatly in lovely bundle of escapism and a certain amount of whimsy.

But that aside, I don’t think I have ever read a YA book that doesn’t have some depth to it. Books that deal with bullying, loneliness, fitting in, choosing the right path in life, tolerance, acceptance, illness and death. Do these things suddenly become irrelevant the moment we become an adult? I hardly think so. I know that I, at 30, still deal with every single one of those issues on a daily basis.  What is simplistic about those issues?

On a personal note (and this is my blog, so if I can’t talk about my books here, where can I?) I don’t believe the books I write are simplistic. The overlying plots may be magical in nature, escapist and hopefully enjoyable, but at their heart I like to think they are all a little more than that.

In The Last Knight, Cara Page may discover she has a magical heritage, but she also deals with a mother who suffers from mental illness and doesn’t even recognise her, bullying, loneliness and isolation.

In Chasing Freedom, the most obvious plot may be about a boy becoming a werewolf, but underneath that is a book about a boy accepting who he is, learning that life doesn’t always work out the way we plan, and learning that growing up sometimes means taking responsibility.

As adults are these things in anyway irrelevant to us? I know I relate to them – that’s why I write about them. And I believe that the people who read my books can relate to them too.

Why must escapism and complexity be mutually exclusive? We take from a book exactly what we want to take from it.

Now don’t get me wrong. I do not, by any means, claim to write great literature. I write fun, entertaining books (I hope), but that doesn’t make them any less worthy. That doesn’t make them books you should be ashamed of reading.

So I am going to end with two final thoughts.

Firstly, why should a book that is not deemed ‘worthy’ of adult consumption, be considered OK for young adults to read? Aren’t they as deserving of quality as we are? IF YA books are indeed simplistic then teenagers should be embarrassed to read them too. In fact, I would suggest that books for children and teenagers need to be of a far higher standard than books for adults. They should be better, not worse.

And secondly, isn’t the greatest joy of art (and writing is art) that it is entirely subjective? That the books I think are great literature, might not be the same as what you consider great literature? Back in their day both Austen and Dickens were considered writers of ‘trashy’ novels – they wrote for the masses and were looked down on by the educated elite. They are now considered the writers of classics. The books I consider overwritten and pretentious might be the books you love. And the books I love you might consider escapist nonsense. But at no point does that make either book less worthy.

Like love being in the eye of the beholder, great literature is in the eye of the reader.

So, no, I will not be ashamed of reading and writing YA books, just like I will not be ashamed of reading Pride and Prejudice for the 100^th time.

Read everything, read anything. Just read.

Post-Publication Blues

All right. So I admit it. After all the stress and craziness over getting The Last Knight published I got kind of lazy. I had put so much time and energy into getting the book ready to go, and doing the blog tour and all the rest of it that when it was over I was a little lost. I honestly didn’t really know what to do with myself.

And this blog suffered as a result. I don’t think I could face trying to put down in words exactly what it was like to finally have my book out there.

I’m still not sure that I can find the words. It’s been a rollercoaster of a ride but it’s been worth it.

So what’s happening with the book now? Well, it’s not been an overnight bestseller (like that was going to happen anywhere but in my dreams) but it has been better than I expected. I honestly just expected my family and friends to buy it. That hasn’t been the case. It’s not sold a huge number of copies, but it is steady progress.

And most importantly people are enjoying it. A current 4.5 star rating on goodreads.com. Positive, encouraging reviews. And people I know reading it and telling me that they can’t put it down. What better comment is there than that?

But the question that’s been plaguing me for the past couple of weeks is ‘what now’? Where do I go from here?

Well the first big news is that I am going to be releasing The Last Knight as a paperback. E-readers are great, but not everyone has one and I want to make the book as available as I can. Plus there is the pure vanity side of it that I just really want to hold a copy in my hands. It’s a longer, slightly more involved process than the e-book publishing was, but I am still hoping to have it on sale by the end of the summer.

The second news is that I am knuckling down and working on the sequel. I’d always half planned on writing a second book – I love Lance and Cara too much not to tell more of their story. Plus anyone who’s read the book knows the ending isn’t exactly a happily-ever-after. I don’t have an exact publication date just yet – but the hope is to have it out sometime around Christmas, or the new year.

I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who has helped or supported me over the last few months. I couldn’t have done it without you. I’d like to say that I’ll stop talking about the book so much now – but you know that’s not going to happen.

For now, Lance and Cara are waiting, I have their next story to tell.