Crossroads Blog Tour: Joy Preble & Leanna Renee Hieber

Meet us at the CROSSROADS...

From small to big-gun presses, debut novels to bestsellers, we’re offering unprecedented (and free!) access to amazing YA authors. This October, thirteen paranormal writers will embark on an exciting blog tour that will hook readers up with great reads and cool SWAG. Today we're featuring Joy Preble and Leanna Renee Hieber.

JOY PREBLE is a powerhouse of paranormal fiction, with four books under her literary belt all within a few short years. From Russian mythology to reluctant angels, a Preble tale is one you want to read.

    Describe Anastasia Forever in a 140-character tweet.

Secrets within secrets. Truth within lies.Will Anne and Ethan end up together? History never tells you everything. And magic has a price.

You've been granted your 15 minutes of fame. How will you spend it?

Truth: I’d probably end up wasting it agonizing over how I should spend it. I am such a dork.

Wild rumpus's, huh? What's your wildest rumpus to date?

Salsa dancing in a club above a restaurant when I was in LA for the SCBWI conference. My agent, Jen Rofe, is this amazing salsa dancer. So she took a few of us with her after the Saturday night party. That’s all I’m saying.

What's next for Anastasia - or if book 3 is the last, what can your readers look forward to next?

Book 3 is probably it for the ANASTASIA series. I think the story has come to its proper and sufficient conclusion, although as one reviewer did say, there is a door left open. But I don’t see me walking through it. Right now I’m focused on next year’s paranormal mystery, THE SWEET DEAD LIFE, which comes out in May 2013 from Soho Press. It’s set here in Texas and its funny and bittersweet and a little scary and I adored writing it.

Thanks for joining us again this year, Joy! Want more? Of course you do, follow Joy on Twitter and her blog.

Leanna Renne Hieber offers spellbinding paranormal / historical / just plain cool stories you WON'T want to miss!

Strangely beautiful fiction - love this! What does it mean to you and how does it apply to your writing? 

My greatest strength as a writer is merging the beautiful with the strange or terrifying. I write Gothic novels, so beauty and terror are always entwined. My first saga of books I published is the Strangely Beautiful saga, which will be re-issued in 2014, with crossover characters appearing in my other sagas.

It's the month of ghosts and ghouls. What monster would you like to dance with at The Bash?

Oh, Lestat, please. Nothing better than the old-school vampires, frightening and powerful as they are meant to be.

How does playwriting differ from fiction? Do you prefer one style over another?

Playwriting is so much more concise, and it isn’t my preferred medium. Because I started my professional career as an actress, my connections to publish plays were easier to navigate than publishing fiction, but I’ve been writing novels since I was around 11, so it’s second nature to me. I like the more expansive world that I can create verbally in a novel than the constraints of the theatre. Although I am currently adapting my first novel, The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker, into a musical, with Broadway talent on board on the production team, and so that’s a fascinating fusion of my fiction and playwrighting skills. More at http://strangelybeautifulthemusical.com

Who is the protagonist in The Eterna Files? Tell us 5 quirky, need-to-know things about him/her.

I have four main protagonists, the tale is a parallel narrative between them, two in England, two in America, set in 1882. Harold Spire is a gifted English policeman assigned to head a paranormal secret branch that he’s utterly skeptical about, his right hand woman Rose Everhart is a gifted clerk, researcher and intuitive analyst and the operation would fall apart without her. 

In New York Leigh Templeton created the idea of the “Eterna” compound, a substance that could prolong life to make sure political leaders would stay in office after the assassination of President Lincoln, she’s an incredibly gifted woman with a sense of her past lives and psychic gifts, her partner Franklin Fordham is a gentle giant of a man with the ability to touch objects and see their past. 

These two London and New York offices become embroiled in a paranormal arms race for immortality, and the quirky characters that surround them all might drive them all mad as they try to find the cure for death.

Wonderful to have you with us, Leanna! Want more? Of course you do. Follow Leanna on Twitter and her blog.