Zellie Blake…A Girl Who Shone Brighter than Lightning…

10/06/82~09/05/2010

ZELLIE BLAKE~BE THE ADVENTURE YOU DREAM

For my memorial to Zellie, please click the above link

On September fifth Erica and I lost our partner in crime, amazing website administrator, critique partner extraordinaire–most importantly– all around best friend– Zellie Blake. Zellie was only twenty-seven years old. She died of cancer.

Even as she was sent home with hospice care and told there was nothing more that could be done, Zellie refused to give up. Two days before she died, she sent me an email saying not to worry, that we were still on for a trip we’d planned to Aquatica (a water park Zell really wanted to visit). That was so Zellie. She was just amazing and loyal and so very brave.

She had more heart than anyone I’ve ever met. Enough to take the necessary steps to publish her book through Lulu in the last days of her life. She was determined that the story she’d been working on for years would not get, “thrown into the ocean.” She needed the characters who’d meant so much to her to live on–even if she couldn’t.

Lighting Spliced is Zellie’s legacy–a book she never gave up on, through countless revisions. She’d started writing it in high school and finished the final draft just months ago. Not because she was lazy, just because the book started out as one thing and ended up as something entirely different. Most people would have chucked it and started on something new.  Not Zellie, she kept at it no matter how crazy it sometimes drove her! Zellie had other projects in the works, but Lightning Spliced was her baby, the story she always returned to.

For those of us who loved and admired her, this book is our chance to keep alive a spirit that shone much more brightly than lightning. Writing is something you do alone, but it is also about community of understanding and support, a web of people who truly get why you would struggle to remain alive long enough to see your book in print. Please help us get the word out about our remarkable girl and the story that lives through her.

All the money from the sale of Lightning Spliced goes to the research of cancer.  To learn more about Zellie Blake, you can visit her website or Facebook page.

Author JC Hutchins wrote a wonderful blog about Zell that can be read HERE.

For more about LIGHTNING SPLICED, you can read the cover flap, subscribe to audio chapters as a podcast and/or read the first three chapters for free.

Click HERE to purchase your copy of LIGHTING SPLICED.

Why I Love Harry Potter

I want to go to Harry Potter World! I am desperate to see Hogwarts and the talking portraits and go into Hogsmeade to get my wand and a mug of butterbeer.  Since my daughter first read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone at the age of ten—she’s twenty now—and convinced me I had to read it I’ve been captivated by the books. JK Rowling managed to accomplish something few other authors ever have. Her characters affected the world in ways that people wouldn’t have dreamed possible. Who out there has heard of Wizard Rock? Can you imagine writing a book that inspired a whole genre of music? Or a giant amusement park?

As writers, we all strive to create characters that will have an impact on the world, so when we find a book like Harry Potter, we have to ask ourselves–what is it about those characters that inspire such fervent loyalty?

Harry himself is the reluctant hero—at theme we have seen repeatedly in great stories. He is loyal and brave and—most importantly—just a regular guy who often makes mistakes, despite   his wizard status. He has his gifts, but they aren’t so over the top that we can’t believe in them. He muddles through a lot, sometimes by the skin of his teeth (anyone remember the lake challenge during the tri-wizard tournament?) He needs his friends to survive-and his loyalty to them is his strongest quality.

Hermione and Ron are the perfect sidekicks, one smart, one funny, and both as fiercely loyal as Harry. Voldemort is an excellent villain who has a believable agenda. We have a smaller villain as well though, so the YA story isn’t overwhelmed by Voldemort. Malfoy is the perfect foil to Harry–and a character anyone who has ever attended school can relate to. Even the characters without as much page time, such as Luna Lovegood, Fred and George, Dobby, the horrible Dursleys— are all SO alive and layered.

The fantastic setting of the story plays a huge role as well. What child since hasn’t secretly hoped for his Hogwarts letter? Who among us Potterphiles has not wished for an invisibility cloak or longed to go have tea in Hagrid’s hut and see his latest monsters?

So, my challenge to all of you out there is this–Using the HP books or other books you’ve loved– pick out the traits that make a character impossible to walk away from.  Tell us about a world you are so immersed in that it becomes a real place to you.  Give us the aspects of a great story that draw you in and keep you reading. IE: Harry Potter–The underdog vs. the evil overlord and how he triumphs.

In other words, what are your favorite books –but, more importantly, why?