Welcome to one of Wednesday's blog tour stops for the wonderful Elana Johnson and her fabulous new book, SURRENDER -- companion to POSSESSION. I L-O-V-E-D it!!
Bio:
Elana's work including POSSESSION, REGRET, and SURRENDER is available from Simon & Schuster wherever books are sold. She is the author of From the Query to the Call,
an ebook that every writer needs to read before they query, which can
be downloaded for free on her website. She runs a personal blog on
publishing and is a founding author of the QueryTracker blog. She blogs
regularly at The League of Extraordinary Writers, co-organizes
WriteOnCon, and is a member of SCBWI, ANWA and LDStorymakers.
She
wishes she could experience her first kiss again, tell the mean girl
where to shove it, and have cool superpowers like reading minds and
controlling fire. To fulfill her desires, she writes young adult science
fiction and fantasy.
You can find Elana here:
The Making of a Character:
Raine Hightower
A guest post by Elana Johnson
Dude, hello! It’s SURRENDER’s release week, and since it’s
not a traditional sequel—but more of a companion—I wanted to get some character
information out there right at the beginning of the tour.
I think characters are the heart and soul of any novel, and
I’m always fascinated by how people come up with their narrators. See, I
struggled with this book.
Who’s story was it? Gunner’s? Or Raine’s? I pitched the idea
of a dual-narrated novel to my agent, and even she was leery. So I wrote
consecutive chapters from Raine’s POV, and then Gunn’s, and then alternated
them.
This helped me get to know both Gunner and Raine better.
(You can find out more about Gunner on
Nichole’s blog today—go check
it out.)
Today we’re talking about Raine Hightower. I stole Raine’s
last name from a family in my neighborhood. Ever heard of Chelsie Hightower—the
dancer on Dancing With the Stars? Yeah, her family lives in my neighborhood.
And Hightower is a super-cool name, and it sounded
dystopian. So into the book it went. I can’t remember how/when I came up with
Raine, but I added an E to the end for hipness. It is pronounced “rain” like
the water that falls from the sky. The E just makes it feel futuristic to me…
Raine belongs to a group known as the Insiders. She’s been
in for just over a year, and that was an interesting angle to come at the story
from. I think so many times our characters are thrown into a world that’s
completely foreign to them, and we take them through the plot that way.
But Raine’s already in. She’s the Director’s daughter, so
she’s expected to be perfect and play by the protocol—and she does during the
day. But at night, she does everything she can to unravel her father’s society.
They have an interesting dynamic that twists and explodes throughout the novel,
and that’s something I love. Taking an existing relationship and forcing it to
become something different.
The more I wrote Raine, the more I realized how much of a
history she truly has. She has a best friend you’ll see in SURRENDER. They have
rituals and routines. She has a failed friendship from her childhood. You’ll
see that come to life and impact the plot in SURRENDER. She has a sort of
love/hate relationship with someone on her Insider team. You get to see that
banter in the book, and all of that helps to form Raine into someone who’s real
on the page.
So are you up for a
dual-narrated novel? Ready to dive into Raine Hightower’s life? I hope so!
You can win one of five SPECTACULAR SECOND books this week!
It’s easy peasy lemon squeezy. All you have to do is fill out this rafflecopter
widget with what you’ve done.
Also
today for one day only, you can
enter to win a swag
package of exclusive character art—including Raine Hightower
—and
stickers and bookmarks.
No rafflecopter widget necessary – just leave a
comment!
Detective Carl Hamilton is called out on a homicide case, where the partially decayed body of an unidentified teenage girl is found along a remote highway. . . . Weeks before, Jaci Rivera join her best friends Callie, Sara and Amanda for a night of pizza and shopping. But an evening at the mall turns into a terrifying twist of events that drives Jaci and her friends 2000 miles across the Canadian border.
In this sequel to Heiner's debut novel, PERILOUS, the FBI promises Jacinta Rivera and her friends that they are safe. Jaci wants desperately to believe them but weeks of hiding from their kidnapper, alias "The Hand", have left her wary. Hidden from the public eye in an FBI safe house, Jaci must reconcile both her father's mysterious disappearance and the murder of her best friend.
