Showing posts with label young adult. Show all posts
Showing posts with label young adult. Show all posts

if we were a movie

if we were a movie
If We Were a Movie by Kelly Oram (Power of the Matchmaker #3)
Music meets Movies in this sweet college romance from the bestselling author of Cinder  and Ella.
NYU freshman Nate Anderson is a triplet who is desperate to escape his wild and crazy brothers. After they screw things up for him one too many times, Nate flees his housing situation and takes the first available room for rent as far from his brothers as he can get.
Enter his new roommate Jordan–a quirky LA girl who believes that everything in life has already been done in the movies. In this heartfelt tale of love, friendship and family, Nate learns how to deal with his new adult life using Hollywood films as a guide.
* Content – Please note this is a New Adult title – I consider this book to be clean but there is implied content (not on the pages of the book but sex is implied), mild innuendo and mild language.

amazonhttp://tinyurl.com/gsw4ypb



What readers are saying about If We Were a Movie:

"WOW! This book is great! The concept is so inventive, and the writing is brilliant."

"I thought Cinder & Ella jerked with my emotions too much but this one might have
it beat."

"I finished reading If We Were a Movie yesterday. I loved it! I fell hard for Nate. Jordan was amazing! And Pearl's timing was perfect! "

"Amazing concept with movies as chapters, and fantastic storyline." 

"I loved this story and was humming along to the songs from the book whilst reading. I can see this book becoming the movie it was written to be."

"If We Were a Movie made me want to binge watch movies, listen to old playlists, and re-read it all at once."

Kelly Oram picture
Displaying Kelly Oram.jpgDisplaying Kelly Oram.jpgDisplaying Kelly Oram.jpgAbout Kelly  
Kelly Oram wrote her first novel at age fifteen—a fan fiction about her favorite music group, The Backstreet Boys, for which her family and friends still tease her. She's obsessed with reading, talks way too much, and likes to eat frosting by the spoonful. She lives outside of Phoenix, Arizona with her husband, four children, and her cat, Mr. Darcy.


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Making of a Book Cover: Extracted

This is the book that took 25ish years to write. It's gone through several incarnations. It began as a short story after I read Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation and became fascinated with WWII. My story was about an old war veteran who had a heart attack, traveled through the tunnel of light but was ripped out of it, his soul snatched and put into the body of a dead soldier to keep fighting in an alien world's war. I titled it Do Not Resuscitate.

I loved the concept so years later I once again resurrected the story, but this time twisted it into a teen guy displaced on an alien world. I could never quite get the plot settled comfortably in my head so let it sit while I worked on other projects. It was when I was talking about it with YA author Mari Mancusi and she said, "Why don't you make the hero into a heroine?" and something finally clicked.

So no more alien world, just good old fashioned soul snatching in a scientific way right here on planet earth.

Oh but the cover...how to bring this concept into a cover... I searched long and hard until finally I found the perfect model, mainly because she was asleep and has such an innocent quality about her.

Here's the original picture I purchased from Dreamstime.com.  Actually the original picture had a green background which I had to erase, but somewhere when my laptop died and I switched over to a new one I lost the original.

Next I enlarged and off-centered it and added words. There isn't much contrast in this cover with the white on white words, but I was going for a clean and sterile "lab" type look. Also since I was still writing the book when I found this picture I was able to base Kat's look on this model, so she is an exact look for the character. 





Pretty simple and easy. Then I really started having fun. I thought it would be cool to have her eyes open on the back cover, a kind of awakening to her situation like what happens in the book.

So I bought another stock art from Dreamstime with the same cover model.
What I did next was overlay this picture on top of the other and then erase all of it except for one eye. With a bit of enlarging and tilting I got it overlaid over the closed eye and then did a little tweaking like clone-stamping her skin tone over the dark lashes beneath her closed eye and little touches like that.
Extracted back cover

I'm actually quite impressed with myself at this point. 
Next I flipped the picture so it will be a mirror image when the book jacket is folded over and viola!!!

Paperback cover of Extracted

Available at Amazon

WIP Blog Hopping


I was tagged by my good friend and fellow chapter mate from North Texas Romance Writers of America chapter, Jerrie Alexander. She’s funny and generous and a wonderful writer. I’ve been anxiously waiting for the arrival of her first book The Green Eyed Doll.

What is your working title of your book?  Reaped

Where did the idea come from for the book?  I was reading Tom Brokaw’s book The Greatest Generation and the thought of what it would be like to randomly be plunked into the middle of another world’s war in another person’s body must be like. I know, that premise has nothing to do anything about WWII, but that’s how my bizarre brain works.

What genre does your book fall under? Young Adult Fantasy.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition? I would want actors that aren’t well-known because when I write I don’t imagine any real person’s face so I wouldn’t want my character forever slapped with a really famous actor’s persona like that.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book? She died on that lonely country road when their truck flipped, but woke up in a sterile facility with scientists calling her a different name, and in some other girl’s body.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? After six years of being with a traditional publisher, I have fallen in love with everything about self-publishing. Guess I like the freedom and control of it all.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript? This book idea so far has been the one-that’s-gotten-away. I had the idea for it at least ten years ago and have written the first chapter many times and then tossed it. It’s gone through several transformations, from a an old man plunked into a young man’s body in a battle similar to WWII, and now it’s completely different about a teenage girl whose soul is scientifically “reaped” and placed into a test-tube grown body. Trouble is, she wasn’t supposed to retain her memories, but does.

This is one of the reasons why I decided to do National Novel Writing Month to push myself into actually writing this thing and finally get it out of my head and onto paper where it belongs. So, long answer to your question: In a month, I hope to have the first draft completed in a month.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre? I’d have to say James Patterson’s Maximum Ride series due to the mad scientist experimenting on kids aspect.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest? 
Just the whole identity factor. How much of who we are comes down to who we are physically verses who we are inside. Then take those both away, bodies and memories, and who are we then? Would we have the same values or even personalities deep down or does that all filter away?

I have tagged Gina Lee NelsonLee Thompson, and Jesse Kimmel-Freeman  to learn more about what they are working on. So go on over and see what they're writing. 


Making of a Cover: Death & Kisses

This was a fun cover to play around with. Much more difficult than usual. This is my first published Young Adult book so just finding the picture took a long time. Since the story is about a girl who no longer fits in with her crowd at high school and also has some dark elements dealing with death and ghosts and revenge, I thought this first picture fit the bill, with this bright flower floating in dark water.

Then I group emailed my siblings. Oh man, I opened a can of opinions. More than 100 emails between us all later, and after one sister pointed out that with the title and the flower, it looked more like a "self-help book to aid people in saying their final goodbyes to loved ones"--Yikes--I scrapped this cover design completely.

The title itself brought even more controversy, but I figured that was good since I wanted something edgy that would make potential readers do a double-take. It has been titled Outcast for about 3 years while it found a literary agent and she tried to place it, that it was hard to let go of that title. If there weren't already so many books and albums with that title I would have gladly kept it. Death and Kisses though. Controversial. I'm pleased. We'll see how it goes.

Back to finding just the right cover picture. It took a while, but this picture finally felt perfect.
I love the dress, I love how we can't see the girl's face. I love the rose. However, since a haunted pond plays a big part in the story, I wanted water. This is where Smart Photo Editor comes in to change up the background.

We added water to the bottom of the background, but the lighting didn't mesh in the two color versions of both background pictures so we made the background black & white and kept the girl in color and the lighting blended perfectly. It also gave the book a surreal quality, which totally fits the vibe of the story. In keeping with the ghost and death theme, we also painted the rose black.

I wanted the bottom of her dress to be darker so it looks like water is seeping into it so we played around with that on Photoshop.

Next step is playing around with the fonts and colors and word placement. I could do that for hours. Then a coworker of my husband's had a brilliant idea to make the flower's stem pop out from behind the letter "S". Honestly, that is my favorite feature and so easy to do once my husband (the Photoshop, Sagelight, Smart Photo Editor genius--yes, he uses all those programs and more for different effects on one cover) showed me how.

At this point I thought it was done. I loved it as is, but no. You know how creative people can't stop dinking  around? A writer will always find something to edit in her book, even after it's published. Well, my artist husband is the same way, so he threw these at me:

Dang it. Now I love both this first one and the black and white background. I honestly could not decide so I took it to Facebook and had my friends choose between them. I paid close attention to my younger fb friends since this book is really for them, and nearly 90% choose the black and white background. I was surprised, thinking for sure teens would choose the color. Just goes to show you, you can't second-guess kids.

The next challenge was to make a version with a spine and back flap for the paperback version. Usually I pick pictures that have a width to already accommodate the extra for the back, like this, but this picture didn't have any, so we either had to find a picture to go with it or simply go with a black back. I found a forest that kind of goes with the original forest so we used that after darkening the trees a bit and converting it into black and white. I also had to redo the title words to make them fit, which meant redoing the flower between the two "S's" this time, but like I said before, that was easy and kind of fun to do, so no biggie.


                        For your Kindle            For your Nook          Coming Thanksgiving in Paperback

If you have any questions I can help you with for your own covers, just ask me, well, okay, I'll probably have to ask my husband, but he loves talking art...so...just ask.



Reading Clean



Announcing the Reading Clean Giveaway Hop
September 6th - 12th

Featuring Clean Reads!  Books free from sex, language and gratuitous violence.
Book you can share with anyone without hesitation be it your mother, daughter or bishop's wife. 

I'm giving away my paperback copy of at face value by Emily Franklin, a cute modernized retelling of Cyrano de Bergerac. (My review of it here).  I just ask that you "follow this blog" cuz I'm collecting followers like gumdrops (yeah, yeah, I know it's totally just an ego numbers thing, but, hey... I'm not above that) oh, and leave a comment telling me you followed. That's it. 

Thanks so much everyone who participated and became an official Gumdrop!
And the winner is: (cue drum roll)
Jennifer Hoyt

Rosemary Clement-Moore






Rosemary Clement-Moore is one of my RWA chapter mates and is also one of the sweetest people you'll meet. She helped me out with the first interview I did for Examiner.com but I wanted to leave a longer version of it here. She is also the 2009 Romance Writers of America’s Rita Heart winner in the Young Adult Category.

A lot of exciting things are happening for you recently. Hell Week took this year’s RWA RITA for YA and you also have a new book The Splendor Falls coming out this week. Tell us a little bit about Hell Week.

In Hell Week, aspiring investigative journalist Maggie Quinn gets around her colleges rule against freshman on the newspaper staff, by writing a story only a freshman can--she goes undercover during Sorority rush. She’s stunned to get a bid from the most exclusive, successful house on campus--but there’s more to the Sigma Alpha Xi’s than fraternity mixers and study parties. There’s something supernatural going on, and while Maggie’s targeting them with her girl detective mojo, something truly fiendish just might be targeting her.

I once saw a mother have to prod and practically pull her daughter over to speak with you because the 13-year-old was completely star-struck. You were so sweet to her. Is that a typical reaction from your fans?

I get reactions across the board. Some girls are flustered, some talk a mile a minute. I have to admit, whenever I hear a squeal of excitement, I always turn around to see who’s standing behind me. I suspect some of the shyness isn’t just star-struck-ness, but also that I’m a grown up, and they may think I don’t have time to talk to them. The secret is, I don’t feel much like a grown up, and I love to talk to readers, especially teens. One of the things I love best is when a girl tells me she feels like she’s found a friend in my character, or that she identifies with Maggie because she loves books, or because she’s a bit of a nerd, but still very happy with who she is. That’s the more rewarding than anything.

The Splendor Falls has been described as a modern gothic romance. Can you tell us more?

In the classic gothic novel, there are elements of horror and suspense in a gloomy old castle or ruin full of buried secrets and lurking dangers. The Splendor Falls follows the traditions of Daphne du Maurier and Mary Stewart, but with a thoroughly modern heroine. Sylvie is grieving the end of her dance career when she’s shuttled off to stay with her late father’s cousin in Alabama, in a ramshackle antebellum mansion where the past is a little too alive. When she starts seeing things that aren’t there--a girl in the woods, a watcher at a window--are these really ghosts, or is she losing her mind along with everything else?

You've been the driving force to get a Young Adult chapter of RWA established. What kind of benefits will this specialty chapter offer to authors?

The Romance Writers of America has a lot of practical advice and resources for published and unpublished writers of all sort of fiction--not just of what you think of as a Romance Novel (i.e., the clichéd couple in a clinch on the cover). A romantic subplot, after all, is hardly limited to one section of the bookstore, and the principles of writing apply across genres.

The purpose behind the YA chapter is to share information that’s more specific to authors of books aimed at the teens and young adults, considerations both in craft and in marketing. The YA genre is extremely strong right now, not just with teens, but adults, too.


Anything else you'd like to add?

If you’ve never read anything from the teen or YA shelves in the bookstore, you might be surprised by what’s there. It’s not all teen vampire romances. (Not that there’s anything wrong with those!) But “Grown ups” often dismiss something because it has “teen” on the spine. A young protagonist doesn’t mean it’s a “kid’s book.” The best novels are those that offer something to readers of every background and age. I got a letter recently from a woman who said she, her mother and her daughter all loved my books. What’s more awesome than three generations of fans!

Thank you so much, Rosemary. Rosemary can be found on Sept. 18th-20th at FenCon VI in Dallas.
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