horror – Among the Authors

Waiting on Wednesday: The Cabin at the End of the World

Waiting on Wednesdays spotlights highly anticipated upcoming releases, and was originally hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine. Since Jill is no longer hosting, I’m now joining up with Can’t Wait Wednesday at Wishful Endings. Check it out, and leave a link to your “can’t wait” book of the week!

I read Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts last year and walked around for days afterward with the ultimate book hangover. It was incredibly suspenseful, twisted, and I just couldn’t stop talking about it to everyone I knew (or to total strangers). Seriously, if you haven’t read it yet, GET ON IT. You won’t be disappointed. Tremblay has a delightfully dark writing style that I’m hoping will also be present in his June release, The Cabin at the End of the World.

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RELEASE DATE: June 26, 2018

Summary (via Goodreads)

The Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts adds an inventive twist to the home invasion horror story in a heart-palpitating novel of psychological suspense that recalls Stephen King’s Misery, Ruth Ware’s In a Dark, Dark Wood, and Jack Ketchum’s cult hit The Girl Next Door.

Seven-year-old Wen and her parents, Eric and Andrew, are vacationing at a remote cabin on a quiet New Hampshire lake. Their closest neighbors are more than two miles in either direction along a rutted dirt road.

One afternoon, as Wen catches grasshoppers in the front yard, a stranger unexpectedly appears in the driveway. Leonard is the largest man Wen has ever seen but he is young, friendly, and he wins her over almost instantly. Leonard and Wen talk and play until Leonard abruptly apologizes and tells Wen, “None of what’s going to happen is your fault”. Three more strangers then arrive at the cabin carrying unidentifiable, menacing objects. As Wen sprints inside to warn her parents, Leonard calls out: “Your dads won’t want to let us in, Wen. But they have to. We need your help to save the world.”

Why I’m Waiting

Tremblay has a habit of taking the played out horror tropes and reinventing them in new and creative ways. In A Head Full of Ghosts he took the idea of possession and combined it with the scary world of reality television. Now, in The Cabin at the End of the World, he pulls the suspense from a home invasion story and ups the tension by making it also a story of an apocalypse. I am really looking forward to seeing how those stories meld together in The Cabin at the End of the World. If it’s half as good as A Head Full of Ghosts, I can already picture myself reading Tremblay’s entire collection of work.

Click Here to add The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay to your To Be Read Shelf on Goodreads.

Waiting on Wednesday #8

I’m currently working my way through several ARCs that are due out around September and October, all of which share a common theme – being super creepy! I’m sure the release date timing has something to do with getting readers in the mood for Halloween, but I’m the type of person who loves a good thriller or horror story any time of year. Even in the bright sunshine of summer, I crave stories that are dark and haunting, which makes me even more excited that I don’t have much longer to wait for this week’s Waiting on Wednesday selection:

The-Telling-cover

The Telling

By Alexandra Sirowy

Publication Date: August 2, 2016

Summary (via Goodreads)

Lana used to know what was real.

That was before when her life was small and quiet.
Her golden step-brother, Ben, was alive, she could only dream about bonfiring with the populars, their wooded island home was idyllic, she could tell the truth from lies, and Ben’s childhood stories were firmly in her imagination.

Then came after.

After has Lana boldly kissing her crush, jumping into the water from too high up, and living with nerve and mischief. But after also has horrors, deaths that only make sense in fairy tales, and terrors from a past Lana thought long forgotten: Love, blood, and murder.

Why I’m Waiting

First of all, check out that gorgeous cover! It’s the first thing that drew me to this book. It’s mysterious, haunting, and somewhat similar to some other covers that take up residence on my shelves. I’m a major fan of horror/thrillers within the YA genre, and I can’t wait to add this one to my collection.
Alexandra Sirowy is one of those authors I keep meaning to read, and this time, I’m determined to check her out. Her first book, The Creeping, has an incredibly gruesome premise (check it out on Goodreads), and I’ve heard great reviews from other readers.
I’m looking for hair-raising twists, chilling characters that will live on in my nightmares, and enough mystery to keep me guessing till the last pages. The Telling sounds like it will certainly fit that bill.

Add The Telling to your To Be Read Shelf on Goodreads

Preorder The Telling via Amazon

Preorder The Telling via Barnes & Noble

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Breaking the Spine that spotlights highly anticipated upcoming releases.

A Wicked Signing

I’m a bit behind in making this post, but it has taken me quite awhile to put into words how I feel about the signing. In short, I am still in awe. On October 14th, the Wicked Wordsmiths had their first ever book signing for Wicked Words. A local bookstore hosted the event, and it was a success, to say the least.

I won’t lie, in the days leading up to the signing, I started having my doubts about how many people would show up. It was entirely possible that it could only be our mothers, fathers, and significant others. We’re just a small, local writing group… we shouldn’t expect a crowd, should we? As it turns out, the supporters showed up in droves. For an hour and a half, there was a constant line of readers making their way along the table to visit with each author. Of course, the mothers, fathers, and significant others were there. In fact, my father was the first person in line (adorable). But on top of that, there were people that showed up that didn’t have any prior connections to any of the W3 group, and THAT was what truly shocked us. It’s amazing to know that we managed to write this anthology, jumped headfirst into publishing it despite our nervousness, and that there are people out there that want to share in what we created. AMAZING. We can’t thank everyone enough for their support.

I am beyond proud of this group. Wicked Words was definitely a learning experience for us all, and I think it has given us the drive to continue doing bigger and better things, including our own individual WIPs and more anthologies for the group. I know that personally, I now want to strive even harder to finish the book that’s been running wild in my mind and bring it to fruition by seeking publication. Publishing the anthology has done wonders for proving to me that I CAN do this, and I certainly won’t be losing that motivation any time soon. Especially not since we continue to receive promotion from the press. There have been several local news articles published regarding the anthology, and next week, a few of us will also be interviewed on a cable access show that reaches about 37,000 homes daily. Pretty sweet stuff, if you ask me.

We’ve also been invited back for another signing in participation with Small Business Saturday, which is extremely exciting, especially when you factor in that some big names like Craig Johnson and Marie Manilla are also in talks of attending. With November less than a week away, we Wicked Wordsmiths have had to shift our focus to our participation in NaNoWriMo, but we will continue to be grateful for all the opportunities and learning experiences that Wicked Words has given to us. This also certainly won’t be our last anthology.

Oh, and for anyone wondering, why yes… I did end up signing my own book. Sometimes, you just need to give yourself a reminder.

Wicked Words – OUT NOW!

I’m a little late to the party, but WICKED WORDS is finally out! Actually, to be honest, we were able to release the anthology a few days before our official release date of October 1^st, but the insanity that followed kept me from posting the update here. Pretty exciting though, yes?

I had ordered my copy the moment it was available, then sat in agony at work the next day after receiving the text alert that my book was at my local postal carrier, but wouldn’t be delivered for another 24 hours. If there’s one thing I have zero patience for, it’s waiting. On my lunch, I drove to the post office and begged and pleaded until the exceptionally kind postal worker searched through the packages in back just to find mine. There was a long period of time where I just sat in the car holding the unopened package, nervous to look inside. Finally, shaking all over, I held in my hands my very first venture into publishing.

Sure, I’m still critical of my own work…there’s a giant glaring grammatical error in my story, but DAGNABBIT! It’s PUBLISHED! It happened! I can search my name on Amazon, and something I’ve written comes up! It’s real, and there are actually people out there in the world buying our book. That’s an amazing feeling to me, something I don’t have adequate words to describe, but that I won’t soon forget.

Want to get your own copy of this spooky collaborative effort from Wicked Wordsmiths of the West? You can buy the paperback copy HERE and the Kindle edition HERE.

I can’t express just how grateful we are to all of our readers! Thank you all so, so very much.

Wicked Words

While writing my bio for the Wicked Wordsmith anthology, I realized two things:
#1 – I need a more professional twitter account with less “colorful” language than my personal account. Thus, you can now find me @JulianneTillis
#2 – If I’m going to list my blog in my bio, I might want to actually start posting on a more regular basis. So, here we are!

I started a writing group about three years ago after my first NaNoWriMo experience. The Huntington region at the time did not have a ML, and so I unofficially took over and found a core group of local writers to participate in the write ins during November. At the end of NaNoWriMo that year, we’d all enjoyed the camaraderie so much that we wanted to make our meet-ups a regular occurrence. Wicked Wordsmiths of the West was born, and have met every month for the past three years to discuss all aspects of our craft and participate in creative prompts and activities. At the beginning of this year, we had the wild idea to start working on an anthology. A loose goal of a collection of creepy stories in time for Halloween was set, and we began drafting all varieties of horror. It has definitely come down to crunch time, but I think we’ve just about got it! Our cover release happened just the other day, and I’m pretty excited about it:

The cover for our first anthology - due out October 1st! — The cover for our first anthology – due out October 1st!

The photo in the bottom left corner happens to relate to my short story, “Flesh and Blood”, which you can read when Wicked Words is released October 1st. It will be available in both paperback and kindle format through Amazon, and I will be sure to post the link as soon as it’s available. For anyone who happens to be in the Huntington, WV area though, we will be having an in-person signing and release party October 14th at Empire Books and News in the Pullman Plaza. Hope to see you there!

Oh, and don’t forget to like the Wicked Wordsmiths of the West page on Facebook to keep up with all of our updates!