Happy Thanksgiving – Thanks List, Contests, and Upcoming Promotion

Just wanted to say Thank You and to go through some of my Thank You Lists:

THANK YOU READERS AND FANS!

I wanted to wish everyone who has stuck with me and supported me for my first year in YA Fantasy Paranormal.  I am truly thankful to all my readers who have made this year FAN-tastic!!

I love getting to know some of you, and hopefully can get to know all of you.  You are the best readers/fans an author can have! And I enjoy “Keeping it Real” with you – it’s really me, conversing with you on Facebook, on Twitter, and on my Blog. Not a hired publicist or assistant.  As it is with my heavy schedule (I have between 1 to 2 books being published at any given time a month or so. To give you an idea of how heavy this schedule is, it is typical for most career author to publish one per year), it may not always be possible for me to get to you early, but I’ll try!

THANK YOU BLOGGERS!

Thank you bloggers – I try to read every review you post and comment as well!  Thank you for being so supportive to this UNDERDOG AUTHOR.   Although I’ve been published for nearly 10 years, I’m still new in YA Paranormal, as it is known today. The kinds of YA Paranormal books I’m used to, and many readers are used to, until the last 2 years, have been series books under the length of 250 pages – Gossip Girls, Pretty Little Liars, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  It has only been recent that YA books have gotten past 250 pages and are as thick as telephone directories, right when we have shifted to a more Earth-friendly environment. Ironic, isn’t it?

Actor Ian Somerhalder from Vampire Diaries and an environmental advocate would be proud that I’m trying to keep my YA novels from adding to the environmental paper dumping situation.  My novels are now available through all kinds of electronic readers, especially Kindle, and they are deliberately planned to be serialized and of the book length typical of the Gossip Girls-type of books, which means less paper, and easy-to-carry paperback size books. Thank you bloggers and readers for helping me and the rest of the YA Community know it’s alright to be environmentally conscious and to accept a book of shorter length than the gigantic ya novels today.

THANK YOU MY PUBLISHER, EDITORS, ART DIRECTOR, MARKETING, AND TEAM!

Every book is the end results of months of hard work, sweat, creativity, lack of sleep, and teamwork.  A lot of thought and care have gone into the making of a book, especially of a series the magnitude of The Frost Series, PULSE, The Stoker Sisters, The Wordwick Games, Wicked Woods, and my other series.  These books are not just books, but stories and concepts that are and will be brought out not only in book format, but as film, television, and video games.  So, you see, these stories…these books are bigger than me, the story of hope and individual aspirations are more universal than I am. I am but the vehicle of delivery, for which I am very grateful to be part of.

THANK YOU FAMILY AND FRIENDS!

For your unlimited support and unconditional love. Everyone close to me know how much time and devotion I have dedicated to writing books with strong girl/young women characters so that girls and young women can have positive role models in their fiction as well as in their real life. As a mother of a girl, an aunt of several nieces, an educator, and someone who has worked with young women in crisis, my hope is to help provide an additional form of YA literature that would help girls see themselves as strong and capable. Perhaps soon, we will be able to see a woman as President, and hopefully, gender won’t be an issue when it comes to leadership and capability.

 

AS A THANK YOU, PLEASE ENTER THE ONGOING CONTESTS AND UPCOMING CONTESTS/PROMOTIONS!

Wicked Woods Release Contest – Ends November 26, 2010!

Merry Frost-y Xmas Contest!

Available Now

 

Releasing December 22, 2010

Releasing February 2011

 

Releasing 2011

Happy Thanksgiving!!

Upcoming Promotion – This Black Friday, I’m offering a Great Promotion.  Don’t Forget to Visit my Blog for the Promotion!

Taking Time to Breathe…When Life Gets Too Hectic

Hi Everyone,

This is probably one of my more personal posts, but I think it’s time for me to be more personal and heartfelt about this.  I’ve recently come across the sad news of some bloggers, whom I’ve become close to, having to either discontinue their blogs or a part of their blogs due to too much happening in life.  I hold a lot of admiration for these bloggers because they have taken the time to keep their blogs going and to provide their readership with constant news.

But it’s understandable when life gets too busy to blog. It’s understandable when things take precedence over others.

Personally, I’ve had my delays in life, delays in opportunities. For instance, when I found out my mother had cancer…3 types of cancer, life became very stressful, and I delayed my young adult fictions that you see published today, especially Bitter Frost and Forever Frost from the Frost Series.  On top of that, not long after I had my baby girl, she was diagnosed with severe speech delay…which when she turned two, became a diagnosis of ASD.

I could not write, not under these life circumstances…yet I did because it was a way to cope by giving…it was a way for me to help people see others (who had differences, who had extraordinary circumstances in their lives) find hope and strength to rise above these circumstances.  That’s why I write about strong characters, mainly the strength from within, as well as from physical strength.

The delay in writing these YA fiction books took years, almost 4 years. While they have been planned and outlined years ago, they were published recently.

The timing couldn’t have been more right, despite the delay to publication. Four years ago, the YA paranormal craze would have been at its infancy.  I wrote my first paranormal series nearly 10 years ago, mainly about angels, and although this was a bestselling series, paranormal series were still new.

Now YA has gained so much more legitimacy and audience that bookstores have set aside special YA-only sections.

Personally, the timing couldn’t be more perfect. My mother recently was told she was cancer-free. And my daughter who was diagnosed as being on the Autism Spectrum, is now one of the most talkative child in her class, with an advance vocabulary and the ability to read at the second grade level. She’s four and a half. Her circumstance is miraculous, and again, this is another story.

So…to all my friends and bloggers whom I know are taking time off from your blogging because of life, please know that everything has its own timing. Yet in the end…everything will work out better because of it 🙂

Raising a Reader

For Halloween, my little preschooler dressed up as Cinderella last year and ended up at her favorite place toward the end of the night…the bookstore.

She loves to read, as I did growing up and as I still do.  Now I write books.  Of course the first step in becoming a writer is to be an avid reader.  To encourage a lifelong passion for reading and books, it’s important to model being a reader for your child.  Children pick up a lot of habits from parents, and reading is one of them…so, if you want to raise a reader, you have to be a reader, too.  Happy Halloween!

Stoker Sisters Book 1: Daughters of Dracula is Now Available! Read the Forward Here.

After months and months of writing, revising, producing a short, and everything else that goes into a book, the Stoker Sisters Series’ first book, Daughters of Dracula is finally out for the public to read!

This book originated about 20 years ago, as most of my book series stem from something personal, when I visited Dracula’s Castle in Transylvania, Romania as a teen journalist.  It was an amazing experience which have given me an insight into a man, whom everyone in the world, except those who were close to him, thought of as a monster.  Although The Stoker Sisters is about two vampire sisters who find themselves as vampires in a modern world with choices (for women, especially, and even for vampires) after being raised prim and proper in Jane Austen’s time, this series is not about Dracula, but on these two descendants of Dracula.

To give you a sense of what Stoker Sisters is, I’ve included the forward I have written in the book here so you get a sense what happened when I visited Romania and was told the truth about Vlad Dracula from his people…

———————————————————————————————————————-

Forward

 

Almost 20 years ago, I visited Dracula’s Castle in Transylvania. I was nineteen and a young journalist. I was familiar with the story of Dracula, made famous by Bram Stoker, but I was also curious about the Dracula who ruled this land. The people of Transylvania took me in for a short stay and showed me a side of Dracula, quite unlike the one portrayed by Stoker. He was a Dracula who loved deeply, especially of humanity. He loved his wife and family deeply, but most importantly, he loved his country above all else.

They specifically mentioned he was not a “Strigoi”, which in Romanian folklore was an evil undead. The people saw him not as a monster, but as a ruler, a brilliant military strategist, and a man with great passion.  They told me he was not the monster Bram Stoker depicted in the novel Dracula, but a great man, whose military feats were legendary.

The Stoker Sisters, in the vein of Bram Stoker’s Victorian world, is a fictionalized series incorporating the world of Jane Austen, the true view of Dracula by the Romanians, and popular contemporary vampire mythology.

The world of The Stoker Sisters is not black and white, but one where vampires, like humans, are faced with choices and allegiances. They have a choice to be good or bad, saintly or evil. Last of all, vampires may be monsters, but they may also be the most humane of all creatures.

Enjoy,

Kailin Gow

———————————————————————————————————————-

The Stoker Sisters: Daughters of Dracula is now available on Amazon.com, BN.com, and where books are sold.