DIANNE SALERNI GUIEST POST AND THE INQUISITOR'S MARK GIVEAWAY

 Happy Monday Everyone! Hope you're having a great start to your week.

FOLLOWER NEWS

Jaimie Ayres new YA paranormal, 18 DAYS, releases on January 27th. To celebrate her publisher,Curiosity Quills is running a contest where they post a thought daily from the book cover and ask people to share on social media. Then you can enter their contest for a $50 Amazon Gift Card. Here's a link to the contest:
https://curiosityquills.com/news/18-days-18-thoughts/

And I have a winner to announce.

The winner of CITY OF SAVAGES is Maisha at Books Equal Awareness.

Congrats! E-mail me your address so I can have your book sent to you. Please e-mail me by the end of Wednesday or I'll have to pick another winner.

Today I'm thrilled to have blogger friend and follower Dianne Salerni here with a guest post on how to write a sequel under contract. Whenever I think of having to do this, I get scared, so I found her advice very helpful. Hope you do too.

And there's a giveaway of THE INQUISITOR'S MARK which releases January 27th. This is a fantastic story. Dianne shares just enough backstory at the start of the book to remind us of things we may have forgotten without making it feel like an info dump. And I liked that we get to see Jax in a new setting with new characters. This is a real page turner. Details of the giveaway will be at the end of the post.

Here's a plot summary of THE INQUISITOR'S MARK from Amazon:

After the all-out Eighth Day war in Mexico, Jax, Riley, and Evangeline have gone into hiding. There are still rogue Transitioners and evil Kin lords who want to use Riley, a descendant of King Arthur, and Evangeline, a powerful wizard with bloodlines to Merlin, to get control over the Eighth Day.

So when Finn Ambrose, a mysterious stranger, contacts Jax claiming to be his uncle, Jax’s defenses go up—especially when Finn tells Jax that he’s holding Jax’s best friend, Billy, hostage. To rescue Billy and keep Riley and Evangeline out of the fray, Jax sneaks off to New York City on his own. But once there, he discovers a surprising truth: Finn is his uncle and Jax is closely related to the Dulacs—a notoriously corrupt and dangerous Transitioner clan who want Riley dead and Evangeline as their prisoner. And family or not, these people will stop at nothing to get what they want.

Now Here's Dianne.

Writing a Sequel Under Contract

In December of 2012, having recently signed a 3-book contract with HarperCollins for my manuscript,

The Eighth Day, I sat down at my computer to attempt – for the first time – writing a book that had been contracted and paid for, sight unseen.

A sequel.

People often ask me: Did I have other stories planned for this series when I wrote Book 1? The answer is yes, sort of, but because of the way this book deal went down, I discarded most of them. Originally, I wrote The Eighth Day as a YA urban fantasy, with my protagonist Jax Aubrey 15-years-old. However, when I submitted the story to my agent, she felt very strongly that the premise and story would work better for MG readers. And as soon as she said it, I knew it was true. I think, in my heart, I knew all along.
So, in a quick round of revisions, I reduced Jax’s age to 13, adjusted his voice, removed darker elements that weren’t appropriate for MG, and before I had to time to recover from that, HarperCollins bought the book in a pre-empt deal and wanted to talk about revisions to Book 1 and sequels!

I was a little nervous taking my first phone call with the head editor at Harper Childrens, but she quickly put me at ease. One of my biggest worries – did I have to change the age of the other two main characters, Riley and Evangeline – was immediately laid to rest. Riley, Jax’s guardian, would remain 18, and Evangeline, the mysterious girl next door, would remain 16. The editor called them “aspirational characters,” and I do believe she was right. Feedback from MG readers of The Eighth Day suggests that kids really like Jax, but they want to be Riley.

However, the editor also encouraged me to shift the focus in later books toward the MG characters. Not that Riley and Evangeline couldn’t be in the books (they are!), but the MG characters needed a more active role. This meant throwing out some of my earlier ideas in favor of making sure the main plot-movers were Jax, his friend Billy Ramirez, Tegan and Thomas Donovan, and Evangeline’s younger sister (whose whereabouts are currently unknown). I couldn’t rely on the older teens to lead all the action.

Staring at the blank first page for Book 2, I considered my options. I knew who the villains of this book would be: the corrupt and deadly Dulacs who were mentioned in The Eighth Day but never made an appearance in that book. But what would the story be?

It was another brainstorming session by telephone that pushed me in the right direction – a conference call between me, my editor, and her assistant. Her assistant was the one who casually mentioned, “I’d love to learn more about Jax’s deceased father. He’s a bit of a mystery.”

And there it was. I already knew the villains. Suddenly I knew how they were connected to Jax. From that point, the plot outline practically wrote itself. There were a few changes along the way; my first drafts always divert from my outlines and some of the best parts of The Inquisitor’s Mark were never part of the original plan. But it all came down to this:

Family ties can be deadly.

You can find Dianne at her Website, her Blog, and on Twitter.

Dianne generously offered an ARC of THE INQUISITOR'S MARK for a giveaway.  To enter, all you need to do is be a follower (just click the follow button if you’re not a follower) and leave a comment through January 31st. I’ll announce the winner on February 2nd. If your e-mail is not on your Google Profile, please leave it in the comments.

If you mention this contest on Twitter, Facebook, or your blog, mention this in the comments and I'll give you an extra entry.This is for for US and Canada.

Marvelous Middle Grade Monday was started by Shannon Messenger. To find all the other bloggers Blog.

today, go to her

Here's what's coming up:

On Monday I have an interview with follower and blogger friend David Powers King and his co-author Michael Jensen and a giveaway of their fantastic YA fantasy WOVEN.

Next Friday I'll be participating in the Favorites Giveaway Hop. I'll have a lot of your and my favorite books to choose from and will also offer an Amazon Gift Card if you don't see a book you want.

The next Monday I'll have an interview with debut author MarcyKate Connolly and a giveaway of her MG fairy tale story MONSTROUS.

And the following Monday I'll have an interview with debut author Laurie McKay and a giveaway of her MG fantasy THE LAST DRAGON CHARMER.

Hope to see you on Monday!