Fellow young adult author and friend, Lyndi Allison, has included The Camino Club in their recent discussion on RELATIONSHIPS in YA on their YouTube channel.
Lyndi discussed one of my favourite characters. Bastien is the elderly man my six teen characters stumble into (one of them–Diego–quite literally) on the Camino de Santiago as they make their way from Ponferrada, Spain to Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
I’ve been thrilled by the way readers have embraced Bastien, a character I created to honour a Bastien-like character I myself met on my own pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago.
Listen to Lyndi’s discussion with Cristy Watson on YA relationships at the YouTube like below. You can also check out their books!
THE CAMINO CLUB (Duet Books/Chicago Review Press) – After getting in trouble with the law, six wayward teens are given an ultimatum: serve time in juvenile detention for their crimes, or walk the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route across Spain over the summer holidays with a pair of court-appointed counselor guides. When it becomes clear the long walk isn’t really all that much of an option, they set out on a journey that will either make or break who they are and who they are to become.
On Monday I shared the cover of the upcoming young adult novel from Brien Crothers. Pre-Orders are now active for CAMINO CHILD! I thoroughly enjoyed this book and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to fans of both young adult fiction and stories set on the Camino de Santiago.
Camino Child by Brien Crothers – RELEASE DATE: TUESDAY OCTOBER 4th, 2022!
CAMINO CHILD – Fifteen-year-old SUMMER DARLING and her grandmother have left their home in southern California to fly to the rugged coast of northern Spain, following a crypticnote and pages from a forty-year-old travel diary neither knew existed. The answers to a family mystery, Grandma Pat is now certain, lie along the ancient pilgrimage trail called the Camino de Santiago.
To be honest, Summer isn’t all that interested in the journal. She’s learned the hard way to view family with suspicion and keep outsiders at arm’s length. But Summer will do anything for Grandma Pat, and so she hefts a backpack and sets out for a walk of more than 500 miles.
When tragedy strikes, though, Summer has to make a choice. Can she continue the journey alone, trekking across a country she knows almost nothing about? And will the answers she finds on the journal pages fill the aching, lonely hole in her own heart?
As she explores the sunny beaches of the Camino del Norte and the wide-open spaces of the Camino Francés, Summer will discover friends in the most unexpected places, beauty on the most difficult days, and more than a little “Camino magic.”
Pre-Order today and be among the first to read Camino Child when it releases on Tuesday, October 4th!
From the moment Summer Darling touched down on the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route in Spain, I fell in love with her strong-willed spirit and tenacity. Camino Child was an amazing read, filled with courage, strength, and perseverance against all odds. Summer is such a strong young woman and it was a pure delight to watch her grow into her power in this beautiful story.
I just came across an article I wrote in 2014 for the WCDR Wordweaver. After reading it, I was surprised to see mention of my future novel, THE CAMINO CLUB. I didn’t know I had formed the idea for the novel so early. I mean, part of me did…but this article from June 11th 2014 definitely proves it! Wow. I really did carry that novel with me for a while. It released on October 6th, 2020, but I walked with it in my head in May, 2014 as I walked a portion of the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route across Spain.
The article, as it appeared in the WCDR Wordweaver in 2014. I loved the layout so much!!
Here’s the article:
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The Camino de Santiago – Walk Now, Write Later…
by Kevin Craig
Pilgrims have been walking the Camino de Santiago since medieval times. All the Camino routes lead to the Cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, where the remains of the apostle St. James are said to be buried.
I recently walked the Camino from Ponferrada to Santiago and grossly underestimated its power. Naively, I thought I would be able to write while on my journey. I even contemplated leading others through writing exercises. I strapped a brightly coloured journal to my backpack and planned to fill it with the wonder I was to encounter there.
On day one, prior to that first step, I sat in our hotel lobby and began to write. The entry was filled with the eager anticipation I had of taking those opening footsteps with my fellow peregrinos (pilgrims). The entry took up a quarter of a page. I made it short, as I was enamored with the oversized contraption filled with fresh oranges and colorful gadgetry in my periphery. I quickly learned it made orange juice. A Willy Wonky moment! I was in the Chocolate Factory.
I never opened my journal again.
I always talk about writers writing when they’re not writing. On the Camino, I lived this belief. I struck out on the path as a child, filled with wonder. After a glass of orange juice, made from a magical contraption, I knew immediately I was off to see the Wizard.
I’m now certain the Wizard of Oz is a parable for the Camino. I followed not the yellow brick road, but yellow arrows. I walked not with the lion and the Tin Man, but with my fellow peregrinos. We were all looking for something, and we all had unwavering faith we would find it once we arrived in the mystical city of Oz.
Like Dorothy, I met many people along the way. But I’m a writer. Whether I walked in solitary or in a group, I always clung to that kernel of need; I must write about this. I must share this experience in words.
On the day we walked up a steep mountain pass of jagged rocks and mud, I began to form my 2014 Muskoka Novel Marathon novel idea. While walking I thought, ‘a YA novel about a group of inner-city kids in trouble. They each have to choose—face the serious consequences of their actions or walk the Camino.’ The idea formed as I walked barefoot through mud and pine needles. I was giddy from the splashing, the cushion-y comfort of needles, and the powerful aroma of the eucalyptus forest surrounding me.
As the Camino is wont to do, it later gave me a timely present. Two Irish women walked up and started talking to me about barefoot walking. They had already met my fearless Camino mentor, Sue Kenney. After a few minutes, we got into what they were there for. They had brought a group of teens. They offered numerous insights into how those teens viewed the Camino. Novel research! Practically wrapped in a bow.
I walked some breathtakingly beautiful terrain. Some of it seemed impossible, but the Camino gives you what you need to finish the trip. And in the end, you walk into Oz (Santiago) and you wake up from your dream. You arrive at the Wizard’s castle (the cathedral) and you look around you. All the faces are familiar. They are all old friends from far away. And you stand in the square and you say, “I had a dream!” And you point and say, “You were in it! And you were in it! And you were there, too!”
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The novel I wrote about in the above article, THE CAMINO CLUB, is now available to read!
THE CAMINO CLUB (Duet Books/Chicago Review Press) – After getting in trouble with the law, six wayward teens are given an ultimatum: serve time in juvenile detention for their crimes, or walk the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route across Spain over the summer holidays with a pair of court-appointed counselor guides. When it becomes clear the long walk isn’t really all that much of an option, they set out on a journey that will either make or break who they are and who they are to become.
Almost every single time I talk about my upcoming novel BOOK OF DREAMS on here, I make sure to mention that it is a MASH of genres. I think it’s very important for authors to be upfront about stuff like that, so as not to alienate their readers.
I wouldn’t want someone to think, ‘Oh, HORROR!’ and pick up my novel thinking that’s what they’re going to get.
First and foremost, BOOK OF DREAMS is for the YOUNG ADULT market. Here’s a list of the genres I navigate with BOOK OF DREAMS:
Contemporary
Suspense
Paranormal
Horror
Fantasy
I’ve made this clear from day one. I wrote it this way. Just like I did with Half Dead & Fully Broken several years ago, I wanted to write a CONTEMPORARY with a bit of an edge…I wanted it to slide into other genres while keeping its contemporary feel.
If the reader goes into BOOK OF DREAMS not knowing this, they could be disappointed. So this is yet another PSA regarding the book.
Author Blurb from the amazing Danika Stone!
It’s slated to release on Tuesday September 13th, 2022. If you haven’t pre-ordered it yet, you can do so wherever books are sold! (And if you’re LOCAL to the GTA or Durham Region here in Ontario, please consider picking it up at BLUE HERON BOOKS. Here’s a link to the post I wrote about picking it up at BLUE HERON BOOKS.)
Here’s the synopsis for BOOK OF DREAMS:
Gaige’s curiosity gets the better of him when he discovers a bookstore on an abandoned street where no bookstore should be. He steps inside and is immediately enthralled by its antiquarian sights and smells. But one book in particular calls to him. It isn’t long before he gets a bad feeling about it, but it’s already too late. The store’s aged bookseller gives him no alternative: once he touches the book, it’s his—whether he wants it or not. It’s bought and paid for and there are no returns. The book leads Gaige on a horrific descent into the unknown. As he falls into the depths of its pages, he loses blocks of time, and his friends become trapped inside ancient cellars with seemingly no means of escape. Gaige soon learns that the ancient bookseller is a notorious serial killer from previous century, and fears that he has fallen into a predicament from which he may not escape. When all seems lost, he finds the one person he can turn to for help—Mael, a sweet teen also trapped inside the book who didn’t fall for the bookseller’s tricks. Together, they race against time to protect Gaige from joining a long string of boys who vanished without a trace inside the Book of Dreams.
Some pre-order links AND the Goodreads link so you can add it to your Goodreads shelf!
It’s Pride Month once again. Despite the fact that we are in the middle (nearing the end??) of a pandemic, June is the month set aside for celebrating the liberation of the LGBTQ+ community. The Pride Protest continues…and it is far from over. Though we celebrate how far LGBTQ+ rights have become human rights, we can’t lose sight of the fact that Pride is still more Protest than Celebration.
But…we do celebrate.
One thing to celebrate is how far we have come in a very short time with LGBTQ+ literature. The diversification of this literature is blossoming, driven by the demand and desire for LGBTQ+ peoples to see themselves in the fiction they read.
Here’s some LGBTQ+ literature I have been and will be reading in June…
JUST READ:
Can’t Take That Away by Steven Salvatore:
Carey Parker dreams of being a diva, and bringing the house down with song. They can hit every note of all the top pop and Broadway hits. But despite their talent, emotional scars from an incident with a homophobic classmate and their grandmother’s spiraling dementia make it harder and harder for Carey to find their voice.
Then Carey meets Cris, a singer/guitarist who makes Carey feel seen for the first time in their life. With the rush of a promising new romantic relationship, Carey finds the confidence to audition for the role of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, in the school musical, setting off a chain reaction of prejudice by Carey’s tormentor and others in the school. It’s up to Carey, Cris, and their friends to defend their rights–and they refuse to be silenced.
Told in alternating chapters with identifying pronouns, debut author Steven Salvatore’s Can’t Take That Away conducts a powerful, uplifting anthem, a swoony romance, and an affirmation of self-identity that will ignite the activist in all of us.
This is such a lovely read! I was swoony and teary-eyed half the time I was reading this one. It tackles some tough LGBTQ+ issues around identity and equality in a high school setting. It also balances these issues with a sweet romance. It has genderqueer and bi representation and a high school musical. It’s definitely a summer read one could fall in love with. I can’t say enough about this gorgeous story! I have only heaps of praise.
When You Get the Chance by Tom Ryan and Robin Stevenson:
As kids, Mark and his cousin Talia spent many happy summers together at the family cottage in Ontario, but a fight between their parents put an end to the annual event. Living on opposite coasts—Mark in Halifax and Talia in Victoria—they haven’t seen each other in years. When their grandfather dies unexpectedly, Mark and Talia find themselves reunited at the cottage once again, cleaning it out while the family decides what to do with it.
Mark and Talia are both queer, but they soon realize that’s about all they have in common, other than the fact that they’d both prefer to be in Toronto. Talia is desperate to see her high school sweetheart Erin, who’s barely been in touch since leaving to spend the summer working at a coffee shop in the Gay Village. Mark, on the other hand, is just looking for some fun, and Toronto Pride seems like the perfect place to find it.
When a series of complications throws everything up in the air, Mark and Talia—with Mark’s little sister Paige in tow—decide to hit the road for Toronto. With a bit of luck, and some help from a series of unexpected new friends, they might just make it to the big city and find what they’re looking for. That is, if they can figure out how to start seeing things through each other’s eyes.
I still don’t know where exactly this one is going, but I am obsessively devouring it to find out! I love that it is set in Toronto and Muskoka, here in Ontario. As if the dynamic duo of two wonderful Canadian authors, Tom Ryan and Robin Stevenson, wasn’t enough to make it a must read for my TBR pile, the COVER! I love to see Canadiana represented in fiction. But to see the CN Tower on the cover of a YA book? I couldn’t even imagine it. The second I saw this cover, I knew I had to have it. I’m really loving this story. I’m halfway through and already a little worried I’m going to miss it when it’s over.
At least that’s what everyone keeps telling Liam Cooper after his older brother Ethan is killed suddenly in a hit-and-run.
Feeling more alone and isolated than ever, Liam has to not only learn to face the world without one of the people he loved the most, but also face the fading relationships of his two best friends in the process.
Soon, Liam finds themself spending time with Ethan’s best friend, Marcus, who might just be the only person that seems to know exactly what they’re going through-for better and for worse.
The Ghosts We Keep is an achingly honest portrayal of grief. But it is also about why we live. Why we have to keep moving on, and why we should.
I fell in love with Mason Deaver’s debut novel, I Wish You All the Best. Some authors immediately go on my Must Read list for all future books. Deaver is one of those authors for me. I can’t wait to read this much anticipated story!
Everyone on campus knows Remy Cameron. He’s the out-and-proud, super-likable guy who friends, faculty, and fellow students alike admire for his cheerful confidence. The only person who isn’t entirely sure about Remy Cameron is Remy himself. Under pressure to write an A+ essay defining who he is and who he wants to be, Remy embarks on an emotional journey toward reconciling the outward labels people attach to him with the real Remy Cameron within.
From the author of the bestselling novel Running With Lions, a story about overcoming the labels that try to define our lives
Speaking of authors who immediately go on my Must Read list for all future books, Julian Winters made an incredible announcement this week during the Edelweiss Book Fest! His 2nd novel, How to Be Remy Cameron has an audio book in production! Interlude Press is going AUDIO! I can’t think of a better way to begin that journey than with a Julian Winters book! Watch their Twitter account for more information, but THIS IS HAPPENING!
There are always new LGBTQ titles dropping! So refreshing to see this market growing so rapidly! Here’s a title that is coming out DURING PRIDE MONTH 2021!
L.I.F.E. by Felyx Lawson:
Rider Williams is your typical high school student. He has classes, hangs with friends, plays video games, writes for the school paper, plays guitar, collects comics, and is gay. Okay, so he’s not your typical high school student.
Rider is trying to finish his senior year of high school while struggling to accept himself and hide his secret. It’s difficult and he might have succeeded if not for two challenges in his way. The first, an assignment about the one thing he doesn’t understand and hasn’t experienced: love. The other, Cameron Walker, a transfer student who looks like a stereotypical jock, but seems to be so much more.
Can Rider survive the weight of his secret?
It’s only the start of the school year but Rider already knows L.I.F.E. isn’t as easy as it seems.
Looking forward to this one! It drops on JUNE 25th, but you can pre-order Felyx Lawson‘s debut novel from Deep Hearts YA any time!
Okay, this is where I share my own Pride Reads Books! What?! You knew it was coming.
I just so happen to have 3 Pride books of my own. Now’s as good a time as any to share them! Pick one of them up for Pride Month Pride Reads!
Billions of Beautiful Hearts (Interlude Press/Duet Books) is a young adult story with two nonbinary teens finding love online during the time of Covid Lockdown. The Camino Club (Interlude Press/Duet Books) is a young adult story with six teens walking the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route across Spain as atonement for their crimes back home in Toronto. It features a gay narrator with lesbian rep. Pride Must Be A Place (Muse It Up) is a young adult story with Ezra Caine and his friends coming together to create their small-town high school’s first Gay Straight Alliance. Ezra discovers along the way that he can find happiness, love, and safety in the places he once feared.
It’s Pride Month. Whatever you choose to do with your reading time this month, just consider spending some of that time reading and supporting LGBTQ+ fiction!
Longtime writing friend LYNDI ALLISON has a Young Adult DEBUT novel landing soon! I’m so excited to share the details with you here today! I first met Lyndi through the Writers’ Community of Durham Region (WCDR), where she held various roles on the Board of Directors…including president of the organization. Always a champion for writers everywhere, Lyndi now gets to celebrate her own amazing debut!
Lyndi Allison in her newfound Nirvana! You too can visit Panama and get some writing on. Visit her links to find out how.
Before I share the cover for THE LINES BETWEEN OUR STARS, though, you might want to go back up and click on Lyndi’s highlighted name above to visit her Instagram page. Her bio says it all…I travel. I hike. I write. YA Author, writing facilitator, writing tour and retreat host.
Lyndi did what a lot of us only dream of doing. She packed it all away up here in Ontario a few years ago. She now resides in PANAMA. Not only that, she runs a retreat there for writers.
Isn’t it gorgeous! THE LINES BETWEEN OUR STARS! It’s book one of THE SUMMER TRIANGLE TRILOGY.
RELEASE DATE: MARCH 31, 2021
Here’s the synopsis of Book 1:
When a dragon-snake slithers into the lab where fifteen-year-old Jas volunteers, he and his artsy rival, Gloria, teleport to an exoplanet to rescue the life form’s son. Now, the Interplanetary Space Agency is determined to stop them.
With water scarce and few comforts of home, the teens find themselves up against a formidable foe. They’ll have to overcome obstacles together or be stranded on this dusty planet light-years from Earth.
Now for the all important details! This is dropping soon (March 31st), so now is the perfect time to PREORDER!
Here are some AMAZON preorder links! You know what to do! Please click the links below. Please preorder:
I thought I would share the first chapter of PRIDE MUST BE A PLACE today. As I gear up for the 2019 Muskoka Novel Marathon, which is where I will be writing my next novel…I’m also reflecting on my previous MNM achievements, failures and attempts. PRIDE is MOST DEFINITELY my most commercially successful novel to date. I wrote the first draft mostly at the 2015 Muskoka Novel Marathon. Here you go…the first chapter. I’ll include buy links at the bottom. You know…just in case you wish to read on. (-;
Chapter 1
It’s hard to be yourself. I know, because I’ve been avoiding it for years. But I’ve also been embracing it. It’s hard to explain. You know when you know if you reveal too much of yourself you could be in for a world of trouble? Well, that pretty much sums it up for me. I live in a world where I’m not the same person all the time. I’m getting there. But I’m not ready yet. Not today, anyway. It sucks. I mean, it really sucks. A lot. But I’m not willing to destroy everything in my life just yet.
I think my father hates gays. Or, at least that’s how I see it. I can’t really know for sure what’s in his heart. Or if it will matter if (when) he finds out his oldest son is gay. I just know by the way he sneers when he sees them on TV, or out in the wild on those rare occasions when I’m with him. He looks down his nose at them like they’re some disease-carrying pariahs. It gives me this burning ache in the pit of my belly. Sometimes I think about the way he will eventually turn that scorn and disgust upon me, and I just want to die.
But I don’t think he knows.
I’m not one of those in-your-face gays like Alex Mills. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, so the joke goes. Alex is an awesome guy, sometimes. I love him, mostly. He’s my second best friend, next to Nettie English. But Alex is one of those friends I can’t bring home. Dad would take one look at him and know there’s something wrong with me, something gay with me. You don’t have friends like Alex Mills unless you’re one of them.
My father would love for me to dislike gays as much as he does. He’s such a homophobic bigot. I can’t believe I’m actually telling you this. It’s so humiliating to know something like this about a man you’re supposed to love and respect
Have I done a list lately? I should keep a list of the lists I list. Or is that list the lists I keep?
In a writing slump? Finding it hard to finish that Great Canadian (American, Armenian or otherwise) Novel? Trying to dedicate more time to writing this year because you’re one of those people who makes New Year Resolutions? Follow this list to a tee and you should find yourself back on the writing wagon. If you’re already on the writing wagon and you follow this list, you will find yourself even more connected to your writing. My point? Follow this list and you will write more.
Do not skip items on this list. Follow it closely, or there is no hope for you. If you falter, you might go gently into the night and get lost forever in the vast vacuous land of NOT WRITING. Proceed with caution and a willingness to adapt yourself to the points made on the upcoming list you are about to read…
How to Write When You’re Not Feeling Writerly (OR When You’re Feeling Stabby and Murderous Towards Words, How Do You Embrace Them and Make Them Work in Your Favour…Even Though You Hate Them)
Turn OFF the social media and Click the to OFF. I know it’s impossible to imagine, but these things are distractions…killers of the imagination, even while they are stimulating it. If you follow this first item in this list, you will significantly increase your outflow of words. The increase could quite possibly be tenfold.
See the first item in this list. Quite frankly, if you got this far in the list you aren’t following the steps properly.
ARE YOU STILL HERE. Stop reading this. Turn off the internet and write.
Don’t make me yell at you. SIT. WRITE. Open only one window…whatever program it is you use to write with.
I’m gonna keep this list short and to the point. Only 5 items. Item 5 is CLOSE THIS WINDOW. SIT. WRITE. <<This advice works if you’re a beginner writer, or if you’re someone like that up-and-comer Stephen King…who has a couple books under his belt.
If you’re still here, clearly you’re not heeding my warnings. If you’d rather read than write, click on the image below to get yourself over to GOODREADS to enter to win a paperback copy of my latest novel, BURN BABY BURN BABY. The contest ends JANUARY 11, 2015!
If you’re on INSTAGRAM, follow the steps in the picture below to win a paperback copy of BURN BABY BURN BABY in the INSTAGRAM contest! The easiest way to enter this one would be to go to Instagram and repost this image from my account. Instagram is sometimes tricky with resizing, etc.
Follow the Directions in this image to enter to win a paperback of Burn Baby Burn Baby on Instagram!
Okay…now there is still a chance for you. Turn it all off. SIT. WRITE. That’s it. That’s all you have to do. No magical equation. No tricks or gimmicks. To write more all you need to do is write more. One word in front of the other without the everyday distractions that weigh you down and mess with your creativity and drive. SIT. WRITE.
I like to namedrop. I do, I do. Coming from a punkrock background, I often slip little mentions of gems from my youth into the pages of my young adult fiction. Burn Baby Burn Baby is no exception.
In Chapter 17, I drop a doozy. The two main characters, Trig and Francis, are at odds. Francis drops by Trig’s place to test the waters. Trig pretty much ignores him while loud music throbs from behind the safety of his headphoned-cone-of-silence. When Francis hears the music blaring out of them, he gauges that Trig’s anger must be pretty intense.
‘He’s got those massive headphones of his on and I can hear the music blaring from them. Trig’s aggressive anger management therapy in action. He’s listening to Tool. Not the best sign, but it could be worse.’
After a few minutes of waiting for Trig to show signs of softening, Francis resigns himself to the fact that he may have to be patient.
‘Nothing. Page. Page. Page. His feet are kicking wildly now. The song pounding the crap out of his ears now is a Megadeth ditty. I know the scary clowns are about to enter. This is a sign. He’s actually good at wordless communication.’
But as the music softens, Francis hears TONES ON TAIL rise up out of Trig’s headphones. He knows Trig is coming ’round!
‘I grab a pencil from the top drawer of his desk and start doodling on his desk blotter. After a smoking cat, a gnarled caterpillar on a mushroom, and a pretty pin-up girl who vaguely resembles Rachel, I assess the situation. Tones on Tail are a little less violent. Kind of dance, even, so I think he’s opening up.
“I can’t believe this crap was made before we were even born,” he says. “Can you dig that? Like decades before we were born.”
He’s not looking at me yet, but at least he’s speaking. The fact he’s shouting is kind of funny, but what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. What an idiot.
No point talking back. He wouldn’t be able to hear me with those things on.
“I mean, just listen to this, Francis,” he yells before he takes the headphones off, turns to face me and tosses them in my direction. It’s almost like I can see the thin trail of music floating out behind them, it’s so loud. “Listen to this and tell me it doesn’t sound like it could be on the radio today.”
I plug in and I can immediately feel the music in my belly. Big bass. Totally Bauhaus stuff. I don’t care who they call themselves, the roots are right there in Technicolor. That’s Bauhaus telling me to GO. He’s right, though. It’s awesome. Still.
“Shit, man,” I say. “That’s still great stuff. The one good thing your dad passed down.” I pop the earphones off and toss them back.’
Why do I do this? Because even though I place all my fiction in a present day contemporary setting, I am firmly ensconced in the 80s. The formative years of my musical listening experiences were the 70s and 80s. I like to drop breadcrumbs of the past into the present. Perhaps a reader will search out the crumb and become an appreciator of musical geniuses past. (-:
In this instance, however, I’m just gonna go ahead and share GO by TONES ON TAIL here. For your musical listening pleasure…
Burn Baby Burn Baby is getting some wonderful reviews. You can see a few of them at GOODREADS.
You can click on the book cover below to go to AMAZON, where Burn Baby Burn Baby is available in both paperback and Kindle formats. You can also pick it up as a Nook or Kobo, if you’re so inclined.
My 5th novel, HALF DEAD & FULLY BROKEN hits the street January 19th, 2015. But you can pre-order at AMAZON today! Click on the book cover below to go to Amazon…
When I started writing Burn Baby Burn Baby I knew it would be a difficult journey. Not the writing part. I knew the writing would flow like water. The story had percolated in my head for a couple weeks prior to the Muskoka Novel Marathon, where I wrote the novel over the course of a long weekend. The story had wheels. I would just have to drive it home.
The difficult journey was going to be the revisiting of the whole bully thing. I still flinch when I remember high school. Though it’s decades in my past, I just have to turn my thoughts to it for a second to conjure those sick-in-the-belly feelings. Waking up in the morning and thinking, ‘I can’t do this again.’ I had to be out of my mind to spend an entire weekend inside that bullied mindset in order to write Francis Fripp’s story!
But I did it. I had to. We are living in a world of TELL these days. With social media, we have the dangers of cyber bullying…but we also have the tools to shed light on the bullying, to stop it. SPEAK. In my day that really wasn’t an option. We suffered our bullies in silence. We ate our lunch in the bathroom stalls. We loitered near the office when we had free time, hoping the distance from the principal’s desk created a safe enough bully-free zone.
I know it still exists. I know there are still people suffering at the hands of bullies. Adults and teens alike…thanks to the phenomenon of workplace bullying. But I think it’s getting better. I hope it’s getting better.
When I set out to write Francis’s story, I purposely steered away from the clique situation. I’m too long out of high school for that. Nowadays I see teens of different cliques hanging out together. I no longer understand that social situation. I was a punkrocker in the early eighties. The lines were firmly drawn in the sand. The punks cliqued, the sportos cliqued, the rockers/skids cliqued, the preppies cliqued. If you belonged to one of these cliques, you did not talk to people from other cliques.
For this reason, poor Francis needed to have a visually noticeable reason to attract a bully’s attention. I gave him horrendous scars courtesy of an abusive father. He became a burn victim struggling to fit in in a world where beauty has become a social epidemic. Sadly, those living with scars and handicaps do become victims of bullies. As hard as it is to fathom. Bullies look for weaknesses. Physical ones make their jobs less difficult.
In short, I created a character who was perfectly set up to be bullied. Then I moved in for the kill. I recalled my bullies, I amalgamated them into one horrendous beast with no social graces, and I set him on Francis. Why? Because I wanted to talk about bullying. I wanted to take the reader into the mind of one who is suffering at the hands of his abuser. I certainly didn’t want to beat anyone over the head with a lesson on anti-bullying. I just wanted to tell a story…and I hoped the story would somehow get the point across that the days of bullying are due to end. If we who were bullied speak up against it, we might start a dialogue that will rumble through social media and strike a chord.
Francis Fripp is not alone. I loved writing his story. I also had a very difficult time revisiting those feelings. But it was worth it. I hope I managed to create a likeable character…one that invokes not only your sympathy, but one who conjures a symbol of strength. Because Francis is a victim, but he’s also just a boy…trying to love and be loved, trying to navigate the complicated terrain of high school. He just happens to live with visible scars…but we all carry scars. They don’t need to be visible to be there. We’re all vulnerable and we’re all capable of great acts of heroism. I hope you find something to relate to in Francis’s story. What would I like readers to take away from it besides the obvious BULLYING IS BAD message? That none of us are ONE thing. We are not defined by one aspect of our person. Everybody has a story. What you see when you look at a person is just a tiny glittering spark of sun-caught ice breaking the surface. Most of who we are is under the surface. We are, each of us, icebergs waiting to be discovered.
BUY YOUR COPY TODAY. WHEREVER PAPERBACKS OR EBOOKS ARE SOLD.
ADVANCED PRAISE FOR BURN BABY BURN BABY:
“Kevin Craig’s books just keep getting better & better. A must read.”
“I read this book in one evening, while sitting in my rocking chair, wrapped in a fleecy blanket, chewing on my fingernails (especially during the last seven chapters or so). Actually, I believe this is the ONLY book I’ve read during 2014 (out of 83 books so far), that I have stayed up past my bedtime to finish reading it. It was that good.”
“As you can see, I highly recommend this book for those who love YA books – I’ve been a YA reader for years and, if I don’t like a book, I’m not afraid to say so. This book ranks five stars on my list.”
“Wow! I really loved this book.”
“The characters are perfect this author knows how to write characters that are realistic yet likable! You will quickly fall for Frances the main guy of the story. The entire cast was great! I used Cast cause it played out like a TV show in my head when I read it.”
THE CAMINO CLUB (Duet Books/Chicago Review Press) – After getting in trouble with the law, six wayward teens are given an ultimatum: serve time in juvenile detention for their crimes, or walk the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route across Spain over the summer holidays with a pair of court-appointed counselor guides. When it becomes clear the long walk isn’t really all that much of an option, they set out on a journey that will either make or break who they are and who they are to become.
KEVIN CRAIG 