Bye For Now!

Hello, everyone! I'm sure most of you have noticed the silence on my end and I apologize for that. Especially to those who come to my blog and don't see a post up (only book blitz). And as much it kills me to say this......I'm not going to be on again until at least January or earlier, hopefully. For those of you that are wondering why, read on......

Apart from having college finals, my parents have decided its time to move (talk sbout stressful) and they've found a good place but moving isn't easy, especially on the busiest month of the year. 

(Basically my room except I also have soooooo many toys and clothes, that I apparently just shoved in my closet.)

On a side note, for some reason I remember as a kid thinking of moving as an adventure, now not so much. Especially, when you come to realize that you're a hoarder and you can't possibly take everything that you have. So, now you see my dilemma....

(This is just one bag...didn't want to show the rest, its a mess. My books are all over the place and it would hurt everyone's book lover heart.)

Now I'm sure most of you are wondering as to the sudden move, well it's been something my parents always wanted but never went through with. But with recent events they realized we didn't have much of a choice, I know I'm being vague but I'm sure most of you have gone through rough patches as well. And I don't mind the move but moving my books is my biggest problem yet. I basically hauled my books rather than clothes!

And as of right now the move isn't what's making me feel like the world is ending, what is making me feel that is.....I will be without WiFi for two or three weeks because we have to settle in first and then set up the WiFi. I know I know I'm being a tad bit dramatic but just I don't even... I can't....see my brain is already combusting! I'm gonna go mad if I can't go online or watch my Asian shows or Twitter. No Twitter! The horror! *faints*

Anyways, with all that aside, I really am gonna miss my blog and you guys! Sorry for going all mushy all of a sudden, I suppose it does give me an incentive to read all those unread books. 

Bye for now! *virtual hugs to everyone*

The Quirky Tale of April Hale by Kathy Octo ~ Blog Tour: Spotlight & Giveaway

About the Book:

Title: The Quirky Take of April Hale
Author: Cathy Octo

Publication Date: October 27th, 2015

Publisher: Blvnp Publishing Incorporated

Genre: YA Contemporary Romance

Tall, dark, and mysterious—Ryder Black is everything a girl wants. The catch? He’s trouble. Naturally, he’s irresistibly charming. Surprisingly, he’s impressively academic, too. But it’s his knack for getting into fights that makes him notorious.

Dorky, clumsy, and just plain odd—April Hale talks like Yoda, eats her food based on the day of the week, and prefers binge watching TV shows to partying. She has also spent the past few years eavesdropping on the Blacks’ morning fights. It was her daily routine. Until that one morning that Ryder catches her looking into his bedroom window… and she becomes all but anonymous in his eyes. Hell-bent on making contact, Ryder gets a sneak peek into the quirky world of April when she stuffs all of her fingers in her mouth and faints the first time he talks to her. She’s unusual. He’s captivated. In this delightfully wacky and fun story, we discover that sometimes what makes us outcasts from the world are the very things that make us special. Join April and Ryder in their journey to discovering more about life… and about each other. It will give you butterflies in the stomach, tickle your funny bones, and pull at your heartstrings until the very last page.  

Amazon | Goodreads

  About the Author:

Part writer, part illustrator. Cathy’s life has always been filled with imagination and stories that will keep her up all night. For years, Cathy had read and written lots of stories, stemming from a deep love for flawed characterizations and interesting relationship dynamics. Finally, she started posting on Wattpad before getting discovered by BLVNP. Aside from writing, Cathy draws quite a bit and also plays a ridiculous amount of Dota 2.

Goodreads  

Excerpt

"Ryder 'Heart-Stopping' Black at two o clock, approaching us in alarming velocity!" Corinne was panicking.

"Oh my God, he looks so cute." Since Corrine and Marcy were mostly associated with books and the whiteboard, the closest thing that they could count as contact with the male was when they were dissecting frogs.

They didn't know how to react around boys, especially the confident ones. Marcy would  resort on twiddling endlessly at her sweaters and sputtering random Tumblr quotes. Corinne, on the other hand, would go to a total frozen state, and was only capable of talking in Science lingo.

As for me, Quentin often had his hormone-crazed, rambunctious friends over so I could manage boys better than them. But Ryder Black was different. The closest I'd ever been from him was ten meters, and anything closer than that?

I went into a Yoda-mode.

"Stars, my darned." Said I.

"Hey." Ryder's voice was now behind me.

The total lack of commotion that my friends emitted confirmed me that both of them had already spiraled into temporary brain deaths.

I stared at the wall. Ryder didn't say my name, so there was still possibilities that he was trying to talk with someone else. Maybe someone a little more normal. Maybe someone who hadn't just witnessed the way he and his family bickered earlier this morning.

"Hey." He tried again.

Closer, this time, and I could practically feel his breath fanned my back.

"Neighbor."

"Idon'tknowanyneighborsIwon'ttellanyonewhatIsaw, don't kill me, please!" I was shaking all over due to fear that blossomed uncontrollably fast.

There was no record of Ryder hitting women, but everyone was talking about how good he was at transforming people's faces into unrecognizable pulps. My face quality certainly wasn't as good as Emma Watson, but I didn't want my face to turn into a blob of pulp.

"What the hell are you talking about?" Ryder put a hand on my shoulder and spun me around, so that I was facing him.

He wrinkled his nose a bit, when he saw that all ten of my fingers were inside my mouth in a sad attempt to control the quivering of my mouth.

"You can.. You can take out all of your fingers, Neighbor. I'm not going to bite." He said, mildly amused and mildly disgusted at the same time.

I took out all of my fingers, slowly.

"Now, we need to talk." He said again, slower this time, as if he was trying to communicate with a starfish.

And boy, I did feel like a starfish at this very moment.

"Oh-uh." I shook my head.

"No. Please? Scared I am. Talk we never." I hated myself for letting my Yoda-mode take over me like that.

"It's about this morning." He took a glance at my friends, both were gaping at him and in the verge of drooling.

"Can I kidnap your friend for five minutes? It's kinda important." Neither Marcy or Corinne looked like they were capable of answering.

"Cool." Ryder said, before then, he once again shocked me to the oblivion by grabbing my elbow, and dragging me with him.

It was even worse than I imagined. I thought that we were going to talk in the corner, but he went deeper than that. When I thought we were going to have audience for our talking at the stairs, he went even deeper than that.

A few minutes, lots of tugging, and three near-death-experiences by heart failure later, the word 'Janitor' was approximately one meter above my head, and I stared at the door with aghast horror.

We were going to talk in the Janitor's closet. As the realization was sinking in, I felt every hair on my body falling out. This place was legendary, not because of the smell, but because of the history that it preserved. This was where a lot of relationship was made. This was where a lot of innocence was lost. This was where women turned insane, and men showed their demons.

And Ryder wanted me to talk with him here. 

"Let's talk here." Ryder said. "We'll have privacy."

My whole existence wasn't built for this.

In my whole seventeen years of living, I hadn't spent even one second preparing myself for this kind of experience. Talking with boys was a chore. Talking with bad boys was a torture. Talking with bad boys in a very secluded, very historical area, was... Well, it was pandemonium.

And so my defense-mechanism took over, and I did something I never thought I would.

I fell into Ryder's arms, and the moment my head crashed against his chest, I lost consciousness.

So much for talking to the Bad Boy for the first time.

 The Giveaway: 

 (5) ecopies of The Quirky Take of April Hale by Cathy Octo   a Rafflecopter giveaway

The Casquette Girls by Alys Arden ~ Blog Tour: Spotlight & Giveaway!

About the Book:

Title: The Casquette Girls
Author: Alys Arden
Publication Date: November 17th, 2015
Published by: Skyscape
Genre: YA Paranormal/Fantasy
   
Seven girls tied by time. Five powers that bind. One curse to lock the horror away. One attic to keep the monsters at bay. ** After the storm of the century rips apart New Orleans, sixteen-year-old Adele Le Moyne wants nothing more than her now silent city to return to normal. But with home resembling a war zone, a parish-wide curfew, and mysterious new faces lurking in the abandoned French Quarter, normalneeds a new definition. As the city murder rate soars, Adele finds herself tangled in a web of magic that weaves back to her own ancestors. Caught in a hurricane of myths and monsters, who can she trust when everyone has a secret and keeping them can mean life or death? Unless . . . you’re immortal.  

 Goodreads | Website | Amazon 

 Find out more about signed copies HERE!  

About the Author:

Alys Arden was raised by the street performers, tea leaf-readers, and glittering drag queens of the New Orleans, French Quarter. She cut her teeth on the streets of New York and has worked all around the world since. She either talks too much or not at all. She obsessively documents things. Her hair ranges from eggplant to cotton-candy-colored. One dreary day in London, while dreaming of running away with the circus, she started writing The Casquette Girls. Her debut novel garnered over one million reads online before being acquired by Skyscape in a two book deal. Rep’d by ICM.

Website | @alysarden | Facebook | Blog

Excerpt

The warm air lingered, and dampness wrapped around my skin as if we had entered a gym locker room. I flicked the light switch just to be certain. Nothing. We both reached for our phones. That feeling of peculiarity versus familiarity swept over me once again.

The total silence had crept into the house with us, but after sixteen years of hearing the pendulum swings of the old grandfather clock in the foyer, an impression of the sound was left burned in my mind. The phantom ticks became louder in my head as we crept through the foyer and into the living room. My father walked a few feet ahead of me with his makeshift flashlight thrust forward and his right arm extended over me in a protective stance. There had been countless reports of people breaking into homes and squatting in the less-flooded neighborhoods.

By the glow of our phones, nothing appeared to be out of place – not that either of us could remember exactly how we had left it.

No signs of water or mold. My father exhaled loudly.

“I’m going to get the hurricane box,” I said, already halfway through the dormant dining room when he yelled my name in protest. The thick, old walls muffled his voice.

Despite the long journey, I felt incredibly alert – my eyes darted back and forth like an animal’s as I surveyed each room – and, now that I was alone, I became very aware of the beating of my own heart. The deeper I moved into the house, the harder it pounded, until the beating reverberated in my ears.

When I entered the kitchen, I couldn't shake the feeling that something was very wrong. And yet everything seemed okay… My hair lifted from my shoulders, sending waves of shivers down my back. A delicate touch brushed my neck.

“Who’s there?” My body twisted around, and I ducked away.

A slow creak answered.

I spun towards the noise, dropping my phone in the process. I bent to find it on the tile floor, and when I rose, my head collided with something soft but solid, nearly knocking me back down.

“What the—?”

My hair yanked backwards.

“Who’s there?” I yelled, thrashing my head.

I screamed in pain when something small and sharp pierced the skin at the base of my neck and clawed all the way up to my cheekbone.

High-pitched screams assaulted me. Blood smeared from my neck to my face as I covered my ears, screaming back. I continued to flail wildly in the dark – the intruder’s wings flapped frantically in my face.

“Adele!”

“Dad! Kitchen!” My head jerked backwards again as my hair became entangled with the bird’s talons and ripped from my scalp. “Get away!”

Each time its feathers touched my skin, a wave of shudders went down my spine, making my feet dance. My arms got scratched up shielding my face. I fell to my knees, ripping the last of my tangled hair free from the bird’s claws. Tears poured.

 “Adele! Where are you?”

 I crouched in a ball next to a cabinet as glassware began to fall from the counter and smash onto the tile floor around me.

“Down here!”

“What the hell?” he yelled over the ruckus, sliding onto the floor.
“Are you okay?” He pulled me close.

His heart raced against his chest. In the illumination of his phone, I saw the crow’s giant black wings open and close, breaking everything they came into contact with.

He helped me up, then swiftly grabbed a broom from behind the refrigerator and shooed the trespasser out the kitchen door. I followed and slammed the door shut.

“Are you hurt?” He held the light of his phone up to my face. My hand and arm covered the wound, but his eyes still bulged, causing me to look down. Red covered most of my right shoulder. I wiped more blood off my face with the back of my other hand.

 “It looks worse than it is,” I lied, my throat raw from screaming. The wound throbbed, but I kept it covered so he would calm down. “All of this over a bird?” I tried to joke, fighting the tears.

He still clutched the broom in one hand and his lit phone in the other. I don't know if it was the anxiety, the weariness, or just how ridiculous we both must have looked, but I started laughing, and soon he did too.

He put the broom down and wrapped his arms around me. “Home sweet home.”

“Never a dull moment.” My voice was muffled into his shoulder. I squirmed trying not to get blood on his shirt. “Wait a second.” I raised my head. “That door must have been open.”

“What?”

“The kitchen door… I never opened it for the crow to fly out.”

He held his phone up to shine the light on the old brass doorknob. Someone had definitely smashed the lock to force the door open. He tapped the keypad on his phone three times and brought it to his ear.

“Dammit! No service.” They had warned everyone not to come home yet…

He gave up on the call, went to the pantry, and lifted out a large cardboard box onto the kitchen counter. I didn’t need my phone light to know it was appropriately labeled “Hurricane Box” in my six-year-old scribble. On the side, written in a range of green Crayola to Sharpie, was a list of every hurricane it had been used in, along with the date. We were pretty diligent about keeping it fully stocked because we weren't the type who evacuated every time bad weather brewed in the Atlantic.

He pulled out a robust first-aid kit.

I nervously removed my sticky fingers from the wound.

“Dammit, Adele!”
“What?”

“I’m taking you to the hospital.”

“Dad, there aren’t any hospitals.”

“Dammit.” He hesitated for a second before he managed his manly-dad-poker-face.

“Dad!” The tears began to well again.

“I’m sorry, baby, it’s not that bad. I didn’t mean to scare you,” he lied. “It’s just a lot of blood.”

He pressed the gauze against my face. “Damn bird.”

When the bleeding subsided, he spun the lid off the bottle of rubbing alcohol. My face scrunched at the chemical smell. “It’s gonna burn,” he said gently and poured a generous stream of the clear liquid down my face and neck.

My limbs twisted into each other. I tried not to yelp as the solvent spidered into the wound, burning like fire. He covered the clean wound with new gauze and pressed my hand over it.

 “Stay here, and I’ll check out the rest of the house.”

“No, I want to see!”

“Okay, but just stay put for two minutes. Keep applying pressure. I’ll be right back. I promise.”

Something about his exit made me suspicious. I attached the gauze to my skin with some medical tape and dug through the remaining contents of the supply box: a transistor radio, an assortment of nonperishable food items, various kinds of batteries. Voilà. Two flashlights. I flicked them on and off to test the batteries.

When he returned, the beams of light revealed a small black object in his hand. I did a double-take. “What is that?” I exclaimed in a loud whisper. “You own a gun? Do you even know how to use that thing?”

“Calm down, sweetheart. It was Grandpa’s, and it’s always been locked up in the safe.” He seemed oddly at ease holding the weapon, as if it was something he used on a daily basis. Who is this guy? I gently placed the second flashlight into his free hand. And what else had Grandpa locked up?

Let’s go,” I said and filed behind him.

He led the way back down the hall and into his bedroom, waving his light around to check out the state of his things. I continued to the rear of the room and opened the large pocket doors that separated his bedroom from his studio.

My brain refused to register what I saw in front of me. I hastily moved my flashlight from one thing to the next.

No.

No.

No.

“I'm so sorry, Dad.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
He rushed over, slid the wooden doors completely open, and stepped into the workspace.

 “Stay here.”

Most of my father's life work was in total disarray, strewn about the large, open room. I focused my light on the rear wall and gasped. My flashlight was shining straight into the back courtyard – a humungous Greek-revival-style column from a neighboring house had smashed through the exterior brick wall and created a gaping hole at least seven feet tall and ten feet wide. Does it still constitute as a hole if a giant could walk through it? Wind, rain, and Lord knows what else had poured in. I thought of the crow as I slowly approached the gap, and wondered if there were any other animals lurking in the house.

 “Adele, stay back. There might be structural damage.”

Backing away from the hole, I picked up two unstretched canvases and tried to separate them, but they had fused upon drying. I put them down to avoid any further damage.

“Come on, Dad, there isn't much we can do tonight.” My hand rested on his shoulder as I pulled him away from the acetylene tank he was examining. “We'll get a better look in the morning.”

We did a quick run-through of the rest of the house and ended back in the kitchen. To our relief, everything else appeared unscathed.

“No crows, squatters, gaping holes or pools of standing water,” my father said, dodging broken glass on the floor as he brought a chair to the kitchen door. He jammed it under the broken knob, securing the door for the evening. “Anything else can wait until the morning as far as I am concerned. Can you get through the night without electricity? I can set up the generator in the morning.”

I nodded with a jet-lag-induced yawn. “Definitely.” It was only 8:30 p.m. (3:30 a.m. Paris time), but I was so tired I could have slept through another hurricane.

 I agreed to sleep in the living room to appease my father’s fear that the back of the house might have structural damage, although I'm not sure it would have made a difference where we slept if the house did cave in. I didn’t mind, though – after the crow incident, I was still kind of spooked. Not that I would have admitted it.

By the time I got back from a bottled-water toothbrushing, my father was snoring on the love seat. I sniffed an old afghan; when the smell didn't make me scowl, I pulled it over him.

Lying in a heap of blankets and cushions on the floor, I felt better than I had in weeks. Just being home brought on a small smile. Although it quickly faded when I thought about Dad's studio. His schedule was erratic because of the bar, so it was hard for him to meet people outside of the nightlife, who he tried to avoid since he was solely responsible for me. The only thing that truly seemed to make him happy was his art.

Why couldn’t that column have fallen into any other room in the house? Even my own bedroom would have been better. I wondered if any of his paintings or charcoals had survived. A sinking feeling inside told me, unlikely. At least his main medium was metal…

I pulled out my phone and hoped a quick text to Brooke would go through.

Adele 8:57 p.m Made it home. Able to sleep in the house. Full report tomorrow. xo.

I was out cold before she had a chance to respond.  

  The Book Trailer:

  The Giveaway 2 physical copies open US only. a Rafflecopter giveaway